One delicious Red apple – the top of the crop, the go-to apple. Well, no more. The most popular variety of apple is no longer the Red Delicious. It’s now the Gala apple.

U.S. growers in 2018 will produce 52.4 million boxes of Gala apples, up 5.8 percent from last year, and 51.7 million of Red Delicious, down 11 percent, the U.S. Apple Association said recently. A box weighs 42 pounds. Red Delicious has been the nation’s top apple for at least five decades, the group said, writes  Alan Bjerga in Bloomberg News.

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Fuji apples have been secure in third place, but that’s also changing as Granny Smith moves into that spot. Each have about half the production of Red Delicious.   The Honeycrisp apple is expected to surpass the Golden Delicious variety to enter the top five for the first time this year. Apples are increasingly consumed fresh, and consumers are seeking out more and sweeter-tasting varieties, the association said.

“The rise in production of newer varieties of apples aimed at the fresh consumption domestic market has caused demand for Red Delicious to decline,” Mark Seetin, the association’s regulatory director, said in the statement.

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