OUR STORY:
INSPIRED BY NATURE
EVERYTHING STARTED THERE, UNDER THE APPLE TREES…
Everything started there, under the apple trees…
We were harvesting apples with my Father in our orchard in the early 2000s. It was a nice fall afternoon. I noticed a green pattern on the skin of a red apple with clean cut contours, that looked just like the leaf which covered the spot from sunlight.
I was looking at it for a little while and an idea hit me. I started to look for similar apples and, to my greatest surprise, there was quite a number of them. I took a closer look at them. If the leaf was really close to the apple, it left a clean line, if it was a bit further away, the lines were a bit blurred, but in both cases, there was a print on the surface of the apple.
My head has always been full of ideas and dreams. I started to wonder what if the print reflected not only the shape of the leaf? How could I “write” on the apple? What if I cut the leaves into shapes and glued them on the apples somehow?
This made us laugh with my Dad. Time went by, but the idea already nested in my head.
THE FIRST ATTEMPTS
Life can be strange sometimes. It was during these weeks that I heard a radio program about curiosities in the world. A reporter spoke about how people had developed a method that could make it possible to write on the surface of the apple… My heart skipped a beat and I immediately contacted a graphic designer friend of mine to start working on the idea. The experimentation was slow a bit because you get only one shot a year. If it does not work out, you need to wait another year. We had been experimenting for three years when we could finally figure out the right materials and techniques that could get Mother Nature to collaborate.
THE FIRST CUSTOMER
A friend of mine was working at the Hungarian Motorola company at that time and was on good terms with the marketing people. It started out as a joke, but we made an apple with Motorola logo and showed it to them. I will never forget those stunned faces! They were immediately in, and as long as Motorola was active in Hungary, we delivered them apples for the company team building ice skating party in December every year.
WHERE WE ARE TODAY…
Tens of thousands of apples have found the meaning of their lives since the first mintaZalma apple was sold. They brought a smile to every face that saw them. And the first thought behind the smile is: how on earth did the writing get on the apple?…
WHO IS THE TEAM OF MINTAZALMA?
The developer and owner of mintaZalma is Imre Kádár, and the company is run as a family business since 1995.
I SHINE FOR YOU
There could be no MintaZalma without the help of the life giving sunshine. MintaZalma apples are grown in the orchards of the South-Transdanubia region, where the number of sunny hours is the highest in a year in Hungary. The sun and the regional dirt grow the excellent apples that make the region famous.
GRAPHIC DESIGN WITH THE SUN
We take advantage of the natural ripening process when printing the pattern on an apple. The goal is to print the pattern on the skin of the apple only with the help of the sun through a natural process.
The apples turn red during this process, while the pattern stays green, or a shade somewhere between red and green.