Where did Honeycrisp apples come from?

Got to admit - the Honeycrisp apple is spectacularly great. Crisp and sweet and juicy, and frequently BIG.

But I only started noticing it at the produce market 3? years ago. So where did it come from?

Esquire helps provide the answer:

The Honeycrisp price explained

Short notes:

- It was created 20 years ago.

- It only recently (5 or 6 years ago) started getting a lot of notice.

But this doesn't say how it was hybridized. A bit more digging... finds Wikipedia, of course.

Honeycrisp 

"U.S. Plant Patent 7197 and Report 225-1992 (AD-MR-5877-B) from the Horticultural Research Center indicated that the Honeycrisp was a hybrid of the apple cultivars Macoun and Honeygold. However, genetic fingerprinting conducted by a group of researchers in 2004, which included those who were later attributed on the patent, determined that neither of these cultivars is a parent of the Honeycrisp, but that the Keepsake (another apple developed by the same University of Minnesota crossbreeding program) is one of the parents. The other parent has not been identified, but it might be a numbered selection that could have been discarded since."

So that's where it came from. This article has an interesting unexplained statement, which is that the Honeycrisp was "once slated to be discarded". So I checked reference 1, which is a patent application...

... but that doesn't say it was slated to be discarded. On to reference 2...

Yes, it's in there.

Honeycrisp (Minnesota Harvest dot net) 

"In the case of Honeycrisp, the original tree had been scheduled for removal, I hear, before U of Minnesota breeder David Bedford saved the variety from extinction. He’s the one who gets credit for bringing Honeycrisp the rest of the way to its introduction, too. But, because that tree had been there since Dave was a little kid (obviously not working for the University yet), he would have had to wonder why others had passed it by. Whoever it was who ate the one in 1967 was gone or hadn’t seen fit to hold a spot for it. So Dave would have been inclined to be very sure it lived up to his standards. That would take a while."

The rest of the story is in the article. It's a pretty good story, worth reading and marveling at. Simply put, having Honeycrisp apples now is almost a miracle.