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Canada Has a New Apple. Its Story Is Bananas

The Sunpunch features tropical notes and twenty-five years of research and testing

Canada Has a New Apple. Its Story Is Bananas

The Sunpunch features tropical notes and twenty-five years of research and testing

PHOTOS BY MARINA BLACK

Published 6:30, OCTOBER 7, 2026

There’s nothing humble about the apple. Pears come in 3,000 varieties but get two nameplates in the grocery store and a guarantee they’ll start to disintegrate somewhere between the shelf and your basket. Grapes? Red. Green. Tossed in piles to mask the mold. While other strange and beautiful fruits decay in outer-shelf purgatory alongside the organic kiwi and packaged golden berries, apples double-park in the centre of the produce aisle, tidy rows of speckled and bicoloured gems with cool names: Spartan. Northern Spy. Pink Lady. Ambrosia. Fuji. Or, if you’re the deep-cuts type: Bloody Ploughman. American Mother. Nonnetit Bastard.

Apples can last up to ten months in cold storage and are the overachiever of the fruit basket. And we enable it, endlessly pursuing the next best thing, funnelling millions of dollars into better apples. In 2024, the Canadian and Ontario governments jointly invested $4.4 million in fruit-sector innovation, part of which went to helping apple growers replant more than ninety-four acres to meet changing consumer demands and transition to heartier, more pest-resistant, and higher-yield varieties. It’s the most valuable fruit crop in Canada, generating $310 million for Canadian farmers in 2024 and accounting for around 40 percent of total fruit production.

Still, we’re a niche player on the world stage. We only export about $60 million worth of apples and contribute less than half a percent to the global market. We’re a net importer of apples, with around 80 percent of our fresh apple imports coming from the United States. That reliance carries economic weight. Surplus inventories in the US in 2023 and 2024 drove apple prices down both stateside and at home. Canadian apple growers are grappling with inflation, increased production costs, and reduced consumption (around thirty-five fewer apples a year per person than a decade ago).

We need a hit, some great contribution to the apple canon. Some in the Canadian apple industry are betting on the latest innovation—the Sunpunch. Developed by the federally run, century-old apple-breeding program at the Summerland Research and Development Centre in British Columbia, the tricoloured apple, skin transitioning from gold to orange to red, is marketed as bright and crisp with a hint of tropical fruit “offering endless summer vibes.” Debuting in Ontario and Quebec grocery stores this fall, researchers spent twenty-five years getting the Sunpunch just right. And they’re already trying to figure out how to create the next hit faster.

Amritpal Singh was raised by his professor father and librarian mother at an agricultural university research farm in India, surrounded by horticultural research. In 2012, he pursued a PhD in tree breeding at the University of Guelph, landing a research role after graduation at the Summerland centre where he now leads the breeding program.

Singh is humble, repeatedly reminding me that the Sunpunch isn’t his discovery. “Breeding is a very long-term activity,” he says. “All of the varieties that I release over the next fifteen or so years will actually be bred and developed by my predecessors.”

In the case of the Sunpunch, that predecessor was Cheryl Hampson. To get a new cultivar, scientists transfer pollen from one variety (the father) to the flower of another variety (the mother). Hampson started with the cross-pollination and selection of the........

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