How Fruit Is Getting Sweeter

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It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm David First, filling in for Brian today. And we end the show today on a sweet note, a very sweet note. From sumo citrus to cotton candy grapes, you may have noticed that fruit in most grocery stores has been selectively bred to taste more like candy these days than fruit.
And it's mainly a response to consumer demand has pushed sweetness up and acidity out of the produce aisle. Our next guest took a deep dive into why this is happening, why produce may not taste the way you remember it. And she gets into bigger questions about industrial agriculture, consumer choice, and what maybe is lost when food is optimized for marketability.
Ellen Cushing is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering food and culture. And her latest for The Atlantic is called Fruit is Too Sweet.

**Ellen Cushing** (1:27)
There you have it.

**David First** (1:28)
There you have it. End discussion. Ellen, welcome to WNYC.

**Ellen Cushing** (1:32)
I'm so happy to be here.

**David First** (1:34)
And we totally want you to join this discussion. Have you noticed your favorite fruit tasting different, maybe sweeter, maybe less complex than it used to? Call in and tell us which fruit and what changed. The number, 212-433-9692.
That's 212-433-WNYC. You can call or text. And this seems to be like the perfect thing to obsess over. How did this happen for you?

**Ellen Cushing** (2:04)
I just kept noticing in the grocery store, these fruits that had these trademarked names that sounded like a candy bar, you know, like cotton candy, grapes.
You know, you have like the pink glow pineapple, you have sweetest batch berries. You know, fruit is being marketed as sweet, and it's being bred to be sweeter. And it was just one of those things where as soon as you start noticing it, you notice it all the time. And I had to figure out why.

**David First** (2:37)
Well, you write that today's fruit can reach a Bricks Sweetness level. That is the measure of sugar content. That is nearly double that of a standard Mandarin.
How did you put this together? How did you first start scientifically sorting out that this was not just in your head?

**Ellen Cushing** (2:56)
It was really interesting because, you know, while there are many, many, many people who have devoted their lives to fruit breeding and industrial agriculture, there is not, there are not a lot of people who are studying this in the long term just because fruit is ultimately quite variable, you know? It's not super standardized. It's much more standardized than it used to be, but it's not something that you can, you can't like take every apple in America in 2025 and see how sweet it is and average it out.
But the more I talk to both, you know, chefs, like people who have been cooking with fruit for decades and people who are in the industry, the more it became clear that, you know, two things are happening in concert. Like, there are these name brand sort of celebrity fruits like the Sumo Citrus. There's a new kiwi fruit that is very sweet and has been bred to not have so much fur on its skin.

**David First** (3:54)
What's that one called, do you remember?

**Ellen Cushing** (3:55)
I think it's called Honey Glow.

**David First** (3:57)
I've seen, yes, okay.

**Ellen Cushing** (3:58)
But I may be wrong about that.
They're sweetest batch berries. These are sort of like name brand trademarked fruits. But then even regular grocery store fruit is also getting sweeter because that's what people want and the technology has gotten better. And so it's kind of a rising tide lifts all boats thing.

**David First** (4:18)
Well, let's talk about the technology. We have a text here, someone writing in to say, is that sweeter fruit GMO? Is it genetically modified?

**Ellen Cushing** (4:28)
Not usually. Some of them are, there's a fresh Del Monte has a pineapple called the pink glow that is pink. And it has been genetically modified to be pink. But for the most part, this is just breeding. This is cross breeding. This is the people at Driscoll's taking two of their sweetest berries and smushing them together in the way that people have been cross breeding fruit for centuries.