The emergence of genome editing has unlocked new pathways for precisely enhancing traits in various types of crops, including horticultural and industrial varieties. Particularly, CRISPR-based genome editing systems, having bacterial origins have rapidly gained widespread adoption among research groups worldwide. These systems offer superior precision, enhanced efficiency, minimized unwanted effects, and greater user-friendliness compared to previous tools like TALENs and ZFNs. CRISPR technologies have been successfully deployed in numerous industrial crops to improve ripening of fruit, bolster stress tolerance, alter plant structure, regulate flowering time, and boost the production of valuable metabolites, along with other significant attributes of commercial importance. As editing methodologies progress, the capacity to develop better crop varieties with no transgenic manipulations advances as well. In various cases, direct editing without transgenes have already been accomplished, while in others, T-DNAs have effectively been circumvented through breeding. Besides the potential for generating non-transgenic crops, which could avoid regulatory hurdles, targeted gene editing holds the promise of expediting trait enhancement, particularly in crops with prolonged juvenile phases, thereby streamlining the path to market introduction. Despite the remaining challenges in optimizing genome editing for industrial crops, the continuous exploration of several nuclease enzymes with specialized functions for engineering purposes may pave the way for various crop-specific editing approaches.