Honeycrisp vs. Gala vs. Fuji vs. Granny Smith: Fiber, Sugar, Price Per Pound and Storage Life

Here is the whole comparison on one screen. Every nutrient figure is for a 140-gram apple, which is the standard serving size the FDA uses for fresh fruit. Every price is an average of advertised grocery prices from July 10 through September 25, 2026.

*Golden Delicious uses an older USDA nutrient record (2019), and its prices rest on far fewer ads than the others. The details are in the method section below.

A few patterns jump out right away. Granny Smith and Golden Delicious lead on fiber and sit lowest on sugar. Honeycrisp is the most expensive apple in both formats and has the least fiber. Gala's price nearly halves when you buy the bag instead of loose fruit. And Fuji, the sweetest apple on the list, is also the one USDA rates as the longest keeper in plain cold storage.

How to read the cost-per-gram column

The cost-per-gram-of-fiber number folds price and nutrition into one figure. Here is the worksheet for Granny Smith bought loose:

• Fiber per pound: 2.5 g per 100 g × 4.536 (hundred-gram portions in a pound) = 11.3 g
• Price per pound: $1.74
• Cost per gram of fiber: $1.74 ÷ 11.3 g = about $0.15

Run the same math on Honeycrisp and you get $2.34 ÷ 7.7 g, or about $0.30. That is the whole story of this article in two lines.

The fiber figures come from USDA's FoodData Central. It is the government's nutrient database, and in 2020 it added new "Foundation" records for five apple varieties, each built from eight separately purchased and lab-analyzed samples. The FoodData Central record for Granny Smith shows 2.5 grams of total dietary fiber per 100 grams, with skin. That is the highest of the five.

Here is how the five Foundation apples line up per 100 grams, with the range across the eight samples in parentheses:

• Granny Smith: 2.5 g (2.2 to 3.1)
• Gala: 2.1 g (1.8 to 2.7)
• Fuji: 2.1 g (1.9 to 2.3)
• Red Delicious: 2.0 g (1.4 to 2.3)
• Honeycrisp: 1.7 g (1.5 to 2.0)

The Honeycrisp range is worth a second look. Its highest-fiber sample, at 2.0 grams, came in below Granny Smith's lowest at 2.2 grams. The sample sizes are small, but the two ranges don't even touch. Golden Delicious isn't in the 2020 set, because USDA's newer records added Honeycrisp and dropped it. Its older record puts it at 2.4 grams, close to Granny Smith.

Keeping the gap in perspective

It would be easy to make too much of this, so let's size it honestly. Per 140-gram apple, the gap between Granny Smith (3.5 g) and Honeycrisp (2.4 g) is about 1.1 grams of fiber. The FDA's Daily Value for dietary fiber is 28 grams, so that gap works out to roughly 4% of the Daily Value per apple.

That is a real difference, and over a season of lunchbox apples it adds up. But it is a small one. Every apple on this list is a whole fruit eaten with its skin on, and the variety matters less than whether the apple gets eaten.

For how apples compare with another breakfast staple on the same fiber-per-dollar yardstick, see 20 "Healthy" Cereals Ranked by Fiber Per Dollar — and Sugar Per Bowl.

Sweetness is the thing most people notice first, so it's a surprise how close the varieties really are. USDA's Foundation records give total sugars per 100 grams as follows: Fuji 13.3 g, Honeycrisp 12.4 g, Red Delicious 12.2 g, Gala 11.8 g and Granny Smith 10.6 g. Golden Delicious comes in at 10.0 g on its older record.

Per 140-gram apple, that is a range of about 14 to 19 grams. Fuji sits at the top with 18.6 grams, and Granny Smith and Golden Delicious sit at the bottom with 14.8 and 14.0. These are the sugars that come naturally in whole fruit, not added sugars. Apples don't count toward the FDA's 50-gram Daily Value for added sugars at all, and there is no Daily Value for total sugars.

Why does Granny Smith taste so much more sour than a 4-gram sugar gap would suggest? Sugar is only part of how sweet an apple tastes. Acidity plays a big role too, which is why a Granny Smith with a moderate amount of sugar can still taste sharp.

One ratio that captures both

One simple way to hold fiber and sugar together is to divide one by the other. For every gram of fiber, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith each bring about 4.2 grams of sugar. Gala brings 5.6 grams, Red Delicious 6.1 and Fuji 6.3, while Honeycrisp brings 7.3.

Honeycrisp ends up with the most sugar per gram of fiber of the six, because it pairs a middling sugar level with the lowest fiber. This is a description of the fruit, not a health verdict. Every one of these apples is a whole, unprocessed food.

If you're weighing whole apples against blended fruit, What's Better for You: Smoothies or Whole Fruits? covers that comparison.

For prices, we turned to the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. Every week it publishes a national survey of produce prices advertised by major grocery chains. The AMS National Retail Report for specialty crops describes its figures as prices "advertised by major grocery retailers to consumers through circulars and digital promotions." In other words, these are sale and feature prices, not the everyday price on the shelf tag.

We collected 12 consecutive weekly reports, covering ads from early July through late September 2026. For each variety we weighted each week's average by the number of ads it rested on. Honeycrisp was by far the most advertised apple, with more than 38,000 loose-price ads over the period. Gala and Granny Smith each had between 8,000 and 14,000.

For conventional apples sold loose, the 12-week averages came to $2.34 a pound for Honeycrisp, $1.79 for Fuji, $1.74 for Granny Smith, $1.64 for Gala and $1.43 for Red Delicious. Golden Delicious averaged $1.35, though on thin data. That puts loose Honeycrisp at 43% more per pound than loose Gala.

Loose vs. the 3-pound bag

The bag changes the picture more than any variety does. Gala in 3-pound bags averaged $3.00 a bag over the 12 weeks, which is $1.00 a pound. That is about 39% less than loose Gala, and it rests on more than 15,000 ads, so it isn't a fluke of one sale.

Worked out per pound, 3-pound bags ran $1.00 for Gala, $1.08 for Golden Delicious (again on thin data), $1.32 for Red Delicious, $1.47 for both Fuji and Granny Smith, and $1.78 for Honeycrisp.

Bagged Honeycrisp carries an even bigger premium over bagged Gala, about 78%, because Gala bags get discounted so much harder than Honeycrisp bags. If you tend to buy by the bag, that gap is the one that shows up at checkout.

The Honeycrisp slide at harvest

Timing matters too. In July and August, loose Honeycrisp advertised at roughly $2.50 to $2.70 a pound. By the report for the week of September 25, as new-crop fruit reached stores, it had dropped to $1.88. Gala dropped as well, to $1.34, so the Honeycrisp premium only narrowed to about 40%. In our window, late September was the cheapest point for Honeycrisp, but it was still the priciest apple in the bin.

Why there's no long-run price line

You might expect the government to track apple prices by the pound over decades. It used to. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' only per-variety apple price series, Red Delicious apples per pound, stopped after October 2017, when it stood at about $1.30. BLS still tracks apples as a consumer price index, but only as an index, not a price per pound. That index rose about 14% between January and August 2026, so this year's apples really do cost more than they did last winter.

Put price and fiber together, and the ranking comes into focus. Here is what each apple costs per gram of fiber, loose and bagged:

*Thin price data; see the method section.

Two apples earn the title, depending on how you shop. Among loose fruit from the well-sampled varieties, Granny Smith gives the most fiber per dollar, because it has the most fiber and a mid-pack price. Among bags, Gala wins. Its fiber is ordinary, but at $1.00 a pound it is so cheap that it gets more fiber into your cart per dollar than anything but the thinly sampled Golden Delicious.

Honeycrisp comes last either way. Per gram of fiber, loose Honeycrisp costs about twice as much as loose Granny Smith.

There is also a simpler way to see it, per apple. At the loose averages, one 140-gram apple costs about $0.72 for Honeycrisp, $0.55 for Fuji, $0.54 for Granny Smith, $0.51 for Gala and $0.44 for Red Delicious. Bought in a 3-pound bag, a Gala works out to about $0.31 an apple.

For a wider view of fiber across whole foods, see The Best Fiber Per Calorie: 50 Foods Ranked.

A cheap bag of apples is only a bargain if you eat the whole bag. That makes storage life the fourth axis, and it is the one where the varieties differ most.

The best data here comes from USDA's Agriculture Handbook 66, the reference guide for commercial produce storage. Its apple chapter, written by postharvest scientists from Cornell and Washington State, lists how long each variety can be held. The Handbook 66 storage table gives these potential storage times at 32°F in regular air, followed by controlled-atmosphere storage, the low-oxygen warehouse rooms growers use:

• Fuji: 4 months in air; 12 in controlled atmosphere
• Granny Smith: 3 to 4 months; 10 to 11
• Golden Delicious: 3 to 4 months; 8 to 10 (notes: "susceptible to skin shrivel")
• Red Delicious: 3 months; 12
• Gala: 2 to 3 months; 5 to 6 (notes: "loses flavor during storage")

Those are warehouse numbers, reached at 30 to 39°F and 90 to 95% humidity with careful handling. The handbook also notes that the acceptable length of air storage "has become shorter over the last several years as quality standards in the market have increased."

What that means in your fridge

Your refrigerator isn't a warehouse, and home conditions are much harder to control. That's why the home numbers are measured in weeks, not months.

The Food Keeper guide from Cornell University's food science department, the Food Marketing Institute and USDA's Meat and Poultry Hotline puts apples at about 3 weeks in the pantry and 4 to 6 weeks in the refrigerator. It adds that these are "useful guidelines," not hard rules. That figure isn't broken out by variety.

For the variety differences, Clemson University's home and garden extension service is helpful. It notes that Fuji and Pink Lady "can last five months or more when conditions are right," while "softer skinned varieties like Gala and Golden Delicious may only last a few weeks even in the best environment." Clemson's apple storage guide recommends storage at or just above 32°F with high humidity, such as a plastic bag with a few holes in the refrigerator.

Put the two sources together and the order is clear. Fuji and Granny Smith are the long keepers. Red Delicious sits in the middle. Gala and Golden Delicious fade fastest. That is the one real catch to the Gala bargain: a 3-pound bag is a better deal when it gets eaten within a few weeks.

Why Honeycrisp is the odd one out

Honeycrisp doesn't appear in the Handbook 66 storage table at all. The handbook's 2016 edition simply doesn't list it, even though Honeycrisp was the most advertised apple in USDA's grocery ad survey this summer.

The research literature explains why Honeycrisp needs its own rules. It is sensitive to cold. A Washington State University study published in HortScience notes that Honeycrisp "is also susceptible to chilling injury," which growers prevent by first holding the fruit at about 50°F for close to a week before cooling it to around 37°F. Stored that way, the study's fruit was held for four months.

So Honeycrisp can keep well, but it gets there by a different road than Fuji or Granny Smith. Because no USDA storage table covers it, we have left its storage cell marked "not listed" rather than guess.

Here is how the four axes settle, with the reasoning behind each call.

Best fiber per dollar, bought loose: Granny Smith. It has the most fiber and the least sugar of the five apples in USDA's newest records. At $1.74 a pound, it delivers fiber for about $0.15 a gram. It also keeps for three to four months in commercial cold storage.

Best fiber per dollar, bought by the bag: Gala. At about $1.00 a pound in 3-pound bags, Gala put more fiber in the cart per dollar than any well-sampled apple. The trade-off is keeping time. It is among the shortest keepers, so the bag is best matched to a household that will finish it within a few weeks.

Longest keeper: Fuji. USDA lists Fuji at four months in air storage, the longest of the six, and Clemson's extension service puts it among the varieties that can last five months or more. It is also the sweetest apple here, at 18.6 grams of sugar per apple, and mid-pack on price.

The quiet contender: Golden Delicious. It nearly matches Granny Smith on fiber and advertised for the lowest prices of all. However, it rests on an older nutrient record and on only 570 loose-price ads, so we are flagging it rather than crowning it.

What the Honeycrisp premium buys

This is the question behind the whole comparison, and the numbers give a clear answer. The Honeycrisp premium doesn't buy nutrients. It has the lowest fiber of the five Foundation apples, a middling sugar level, and it costs about twice as much per gram of fiber as Granny Smith.

What it does buy is the eating experience that made Honeycrisp famous, and that is a perfectly good thing to pay for. Taste and texture are personal, and they aren't something a nutrient database can score. If a Honeycrisp is the apple that actually gets eaten in your house, that may be worth more than any per-gram figure. The math simply makes the trade visible: roughly 50 to 80 cents more per pound, depending on the week and the package, for an apple that brings a little less fiber along with it.

Timing can soften the trade. Honeycrisp ad prices hit their lowest point of our 12-week window in the last week of September, as the new crop arrived.

Grocery ads are full of newer, trademarked varieties that USDA's nutrient database doesn't cover. Because they have no laboratory nutrient record, we can't score them on fiber or sugar, and we haven't tried. Here is what the same 12 weeks of ads show on price:

Envy and Cosmic Crisp advertise close to Honeycrisp prices, while Pink Lady prices sit closer to Granny Smith and Gala. On storage, Clemson's extension service groups Pink Lady with Fuji as a variety that can last five months or more under the right conditions.

For how apple prices move across the calendar compared with other produce, see In-Season vs. Off-Season Produce: 15 Fruits and Vegetables Priced Month by Month.

We want you to be able to check every number, so here is exactly how the table was built.

Nutrients. Fiber, total sugars and calories come from USDA FoodData Central. Honeycrisp, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith and Red Delicious use the 2020 Foundation records, each built from eight retail samples bought in Maryland and Virginia in the spring of 2020. Golden Delicious uses the older SR Legacy record, because no Foundation record exists for it. The record IDs are listed in the FAQ.

Serving size. We scored every apple at 140 grams, the FDA's reference amount for fresh fruit under 21 CFR 101.12. That is also the only serving the Foundation apple records list. USDA's older records give "medium apple" weights that range from 167 grams (Granny Smith) to 212 grams (Red Delicious), and there is no medium weight at all for Honeycrisp. Comparing medium apples would mostly compare apple sizes, so a fixed weight keeps the comparison fair.

Prices. Prices come from 12 consecutive weekly USDA AMS National Retail Reports (reports dated July 10 through September 25, 2026). We used the national conventional summary, weighting each week's average by its number of ads. The earlier weekly reports were retrieved from a public archive of the USDA report files because the USDA archive wasn't reachable during our research.

Storage. Commercial storage times come from USDA Agriculture Handbook 66, Table 2. Home storage guidance comes from The Food Keeper and Clemson Cooperative Extension. We only converted to home expectations where those sources did.

The limits, stated plainly:

• The variety set is small because USDA only analyzes a handful of apples. Popular varieties like McIntosh, Cosmic Crisp and Envy have no record.
• Advertised prices are feature prices, not everyday shelf prices, and they cover summer and early fall, when much of the fruit is from last year's stored crop.
• Golden Delicious prices rest on far fewer ads than the others, and its nutrient record is older.
• Eight samples per variety is a small number, and individual apples vary with orchard, season and storage time.
• The nutrient differences between varieties are real but modest, at roughly 1 gram of fiber per apple between the best and the worst.

If you'd like to see how the fiber in a few apples fits into a full day, How Much Fiber You Actually Get vs. What Your Age Needs walks through the numbers.