What Ever Happened To Grapples?
Photo by Doug McCaughan/Creative Commons
I’ve never been much of a fruit person. I like the occasional grapefruit or blackberry or even banana, but fruit has never been my go-to snack. The one exception was a glorious period in the mid-2000s when one could find “Grapples” (pronounced grape-puls) in the produce section of some grocery stores. I, like many, assumed that this fruit was some sort of grape-apple hybrid, a miracle made manifest by science.
The fruit certainly looked like an apple, but it tasted like Welch’s grape juice, with an unmistakably grape-y, almost candy-like flavor to it. I thought it was delicious. My mom would pack Grapples in my school lunch box, and I would eat them in the cafeteria with a verve never elicited by a “normal” apple or bag of grapes alone.
But it’s been years since my tongue has touched the sweet flesh of a Grapple. I honestly just forgot about them for a while, but recently, I’ve found myself wondering where they’ve gone and why I haven’t seen them in grocery stores. I decided to do some digging.