Introduction

Have you ever been at the grocery store, and been perplexed by the vastness of options in front of you? I mean, there are roughly 1,800 different kinds of cheese across the world. Who would be able to discern which cheese would be best for them?

Fortunately for us, there are people out there who are gracious enough to go out and try all of these different kinds of foods and report back their findings. In this specific instance, one Brian Frange went and tested out a whole variety of apples. While he did not test EVERY kind of apple, he has collected reviews on 65 different kinds, ranking on them on a scale he calls the “Frange 100 Point Scale”, in which apples are based on a scale based upon the following factors, from 1-100, which can be found on his website applerankings.com;

TASTE

Regardless of flavor profile (sweetness, tartness, intensity) – delicious apples receive top points with special consideration for every day use as well as versatility in varying circumstances. Points deducted for tasting like shit and/or trash.

CRISPNESS

Top points awarded for producing a satisfying snap and/or crunch with each bite throughout the life of the apple. Soft, gummy apples deserve no accolade.

SKIN

Points awarded for unobtrusive skins that break apart easily. Thick skins that linger in your throat or create a choking hazard are condemnable.

FLESH

The flesh of an apple ought to be smooth, relatively firm, and maintain integrity throughout a meal. Points deducted for early oxidation rates which turns the flesh brown. And above all, a mealy apple is a disgrace.

JUICINESS

The higher the liquid content and succulent nature of the apple the better. Bone dry, ashy nonsense can be thrown in the compost heap.

DENSITY

Top points for having a sturdy construction without being too hard or heavy. Apples which cause gum or tooth pain as well as apples which can be used as a weapon face massive deductions.

BEAUTY

Beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The most subjective of all the categories, an aesthetically pleasing apple that begs to be eaten receives top points.

BRANDING / CONSISTENCY

Top points are assigned to apples with names, logos, and packaging that match the personality of the breed while creating a unique, evocative aura about the fruit. Points deducted for names that scream quiet desperation or elicit feelings of confusion. Above all, maintaining the integrity and reputation of the breed through dependable and unvarying quality is paramount.

COST / AVAILABILITY

The perfect apple is available year-round and is affordable on a modest budget. Points deducted for exorbitant and inaccessible apples.

He then has 3 categories seperate called the flavor profiles; sweetness, tartness, and intensity, ranked on a scale of 1-5.

I have decided to do a dive into Brian Frange’s extensive research, and see what we can find out about his top 20 best ranked apples.

The Data

To start, let’s just look at the scores of the top 20 apples.

##           Apple score
## 1     SweeTango    97
## 2    Honeycrisp    95
## 3         Kanzi    93
## 4    SnapDragon    87
## 5          Envy    86
## 6     Pink Lady    86
## 7      Lucy Glo    85
## 8          Opal    82
## 9    Wild Twist    81
## 10     SugarBee    80
## 11         Rave    79
## 12     GoldRush    76
## 13    Ludacrisp    75
## 14 Cosmic Crisp    74
## 15     Braeburn    73
## 16   King David    72
## 17     Ambrosia    70
## 18    EverCrisp    70
## 19         Gala    70
## 20  Candy Crisp    69

Just a general list to show you the scores of the apples we will be looking into.

More Data

Let’s now look at crispness, flesh, and skin, and see how the average of these scores relates to the overall score.

##         Apple Crispness Skin Flesh score total_avg
## 1   SweeTango       100  100   100    97 100.00000
## 2  Honeycrisp       100  100   100    95 100.00000
## 3       Kanzi       100   80   100    93  93.33333
## 4  SnapDragon       100  100   100    87 100.00000
## 5        Envy        80   30   100    86  70.00000
## 6   Pink Lady        90   60    90    86  80.00000
## 7    Lucy Glo        80   60   100    85  80.00000
## 8        Opal        70   70    90    82  76.66667
## 9  Wild Twist        90   60    90    81  80.00000
## 10   SugarBee        90   40    80    80  70.00000

It would appear that these 3 items are pretty similair to the overall score. This could mean that they are all related to each other, and that would make sense; The crispness, flesh and skin are pretty related in the experience of biting into an apple.

Crispness and Tartness

Lets now look into the correlation between crispness and tartness.

Well, it would certainly appear that there is a correlation between tartness and crispness, with Kanzi being the most crisp and most tart, and gala being the least crisp and the least tart. Those two points alone would be enough, but the line of best fit also shows that there’s a decent correlation between the two factors.

Taste

Now let’s look at taste. Since it’s weighted double, we would expect that the higher the taste rating, the higher the score.

Well, look at that. With SweeTango leading the charge with both the highest taste AND the highest score rating, we can see that taste plays a huge part in an apples score. Which makes sense; you want your apples to taste good first, before you worry about the other factors!

Flavor Profile

Next, we will take a look at the amount of ranges for each flavor profile and their relation to score. The flavor profile criteria are Sweetness, Tartness, and Intensity.

This is very interesting. Looking at sweetness first, it looks like the score of sweetness is pretty evenly spread out among the scores. There are multiple 4s and 5s in the lower range of the scores, and a few 2s and 3s in the higher ranges.

For tartness, it seems Brain likes it like Goldilocks. With 4 of the 20 apples coming it with a tartness score of 0, and being in the 65-72 overall score range, and only 2 apples with a tartness range of 3 coming into the higher 93-100 range, it would appear that there is an acceptable range of tartness, where it is not too tart but also just tart enough.

Intensity seems to be all over the place. There are quite a few 4s and 5s that land all over the score range, so it appears that most apples tend to have a good flavor intensity. There are a few 1s and 2s that do land in the lower score ranges, too, so apples with low intensity are not as favored as those with good intensity.

Apple Descriptions

Next, lets look at some interesting data on the descriptions of every apple.

For every apple, Brian leaves a description of his experience while eating the apple, as well as his general thoughts on it. He can use some pretty colorful language, and he is a comedian by trade, so his descriptions are full of fun words to look into. We are going to be using the Bing lexicon of negative and positive words in order to do out analysis.

But first, lets look at the most common words used to describe apples.

Looks like the words sweet, delicious, and crisp are among Brian’s favorites to use when talking about an apple. Lets see which apples have these words occur the most often.

##         Apple score      word
## 1  Honeycrisp    95 delicious
## 2    Braeburn    73 delicious
## 3    Braeburn    73 delicious
## 4  King David    72 delicious
## 5        Gala    70 delicious
## 6        Gala    70 delicious
## 7 Candy Crisp    69 delicious
##         Apple score  word
## 1   SweeTango    97 sweet
## 2   SweeTango    97 sweet
## 3  Honeycrisp    95 sweet
## 4   Pink Lady    86 sweet
## 5        Opal    82 sweet
## 6        Rave    79 sweet
## 7    GoldRush    76 sweet
## 8    Braeburn    73 sweet
## 9    Ambrosia    70 sweet
## 10  EverCrisp    70 sweet
## 11  EverCrisp    70 sweet
##          Apple score  word
## 1   SnapDragon    87 crisp
## 2         Envy    86 crisp
## 3 Cosmic Crisp    74 crisp
## 4 Cosmic Crisp    74 crisp
## 5 Cosmic Crisp    74 crisp
## 6 Cosmic Crisp    74 crisp
## 7    EverCrisp    70 crisp
## 8  Candy Crisp    69 crisp
## 9  Candy Crisp    69 crisp

With Honeycrisp and Sweetango occurring a lot with the sweet and delicious descriptors, and having the 2 highest scores of all the apples, these words are important to Brian when talking about apples. Crisp, it would seem, are good description words but are not held very high in Brian’s vocabulary.

Positivity and Negativity Scores

Let’s next look at the positivity and negativity scores for the highest scoring apples, ranged 86 and above.

## # A tibble: 1 × 2
##   word      n
##   <chr> <int>
## 1 sweet     4
## # A tibble: 1 × 2
##   word        n
##   <chr>   <int>
## 1 complex     3

As we would expect, seeing that sweet is used for the highest scoring of apples, it occurs the most in the the higher range. Interestingly, the word ‘complex’ occurs quite a bit for lower scoring apples. We can perhaps make the assumption that a simpler taste for an apple means it is better. If there is too much going on, it might not be an improvement on a simpler tasting apple.

Wrap up

We looked at the top 20 rated apples from Brain Frange’s apple rankings. We found some interesting data, looking at the flavor profiles, scoring for flavor profiles, and some descritive word information.

So, next time you are grocery shopping, consider looking up applerates.com and scrolling to find your next apple purchase. And who knows; you might find yourself comparing apples to apples like I have.