Our study is the first report that exogenous chlorogenic acid(CA) can inhibit russet formation in ‘Golden Delicious’ apples whenapplied at early stage of fruit development. The inspiration for usto test the effect was originated from our finding that much moreendogenous CA was present in peels of a non-russeting cultivar‘Feng Shuai’ (Yang et al., 2012) than the russeted ‘Golden Deli-cious’ at the early stage of fruit development (Fig. 1B). Coincidently,the fruit russeting also occurred at the same stage (Simons, 1960;Faust and Shear, 1972; Xia and Zhou, 1988). Thus, it was reason-able to hypothesize that the differences in fruit russeting between cultivars were associated to the level of endogenous CA and there-fore the application of exogenous CA might be an effective approach to inhibit the russet formation.