Picking Apples

Have you ever gone apple picking?

I’ve been going fairly regularly since my teens.

There’s an orchard about 30 minutes from my house that offers a wide variety of apples – and I started going there with my friends in High School, then my future wife, then after we got married, then after we had kids, and now without the grown-up kids. It’s a nice place to spend a crisp, fall afternoon.

But like most things that now revolve around Autumn/Halloween it’s gotten a bit commercialized. It used to be you would grab a bag, go out into the fields, pick apples, eat a few, and pay for what you picked. Now it’s a controlled event; everyone is funneled to a small building where you pay before you pick the apples, and when you’re done you come back the same way.

I guess they don’t want people smuggling apples out of the orchard.

Another big difference is “back in the day” they used to offer for rent these apple picking poles. Basically, it was a little tin can with six splines on it attached to a ten-foot pole. You could easily reach up to the top of the trees, slide the splines around the apple give a little pull, and the apple would break free from the stem and fall into the can. Simple and effective.

I don’t know why they disappeared – maybe they became too dangerous, maybe there weren’t enough and it caused incidents – who knows – but the end result was that all the low hanging fruit was picked, and since climbing the trees was frowned upon (we did it all the time in the 70’s and 80’s) the apples at the top were left to rot. Sad.

This “picking of the low hanging fruit” is also a metaphor for doing what’s easiest first. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Years ago, I wrote an article about saving energy in pharma facilities, and the first recommendation was to go around and fix the easiest problems first; turning off lights, computers, etc. or picking the low hanging fruit first, then moving on to more complex remedies.

Today, in the pharma industry, it seems all the “easy” products to develop have been picked. Pharma companies are now looking at products that were once shelved to bring into production. Shelved products usually suffer from one or more development problems but usually the biggest problem is solubility. The API is too hard to properly dissolve in the body and bioavailability suffers.

Pharma companies, CDMOs, and ingredient suppliers all recognize the problems they face with these products and are developing processes and raw materials to enhance bioavailability and make these products available to consumers. It’s not easy, but to get to the ripe apples at the top of the tree, sometimes you need to reach just a little more.