Apple farmer tosses edible treat into rivalry

SEATTLE – A Yakima Valley farmer is tempting Apple Cup fans with apples embossed with the Husky and Cougar logos, hoping fans who live and breathe the rivalry will eat it up, too.

Randy Valicoff, who has ripened the likenesses of the team mascots into his apples, plans to start selling them in time for the annual cross-state football showdown between the University of Washington and Washington State University on Nov. 20.

“I was sitting there watching the Apple Cup in 2002, and it came to me in a flash,” Valicoff said. “I’ve messed around with putting images on apples before, doing Halloween witches and such for my kids, but the idea made perfect sense for the Apple Cup.”

Branding fruit has been done before, but it’s new to state football fans.

“I had never seen anything like it before,” said Doug Bommersbach, a member of a Yakima Valley Kiwanis Club that plans to auction the apples to UW and WSU alumni to finance charity work. “When people see the apples, they always want to touch them to see if it is a decal.”

Valicoff won’t reveal his favorite team in the Apple Cup matchup, but he freely describes the six-week process of developing an image on the apple’s skin.

The third-generation farmer uses carefully applied logo stickers to block the sun’s rays. As the apple matures, the logo appears where the sticker kept the skin from ripening.

The result: fruit bearing brilliant yellow Cougar and Husky logos.

The delicate process wouldn’t work on other fruit, Valicoff said. And the Pink Lady apple provides the clearest image.

“It is labor-intensive and expensive, and we lost about 30 percent of the apples we tried it on,” he said.

The fruit will be sold at premium prices.