“The uniqueness of one apple versus another.” Exploring producer perspectives of hard cider in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic United States

Abstract

Hard cider is growing in popularity throughout the United States (US). Though many scholars have investigated quality and trends in the expanding US cider industry, still little is known about cider producers' opinions of the products that they make. How do American cider producers value and emplace value onto cider as the industry grows and competes with the broader alcoholic beverage market? This study explored producer perceptions of American hard cider by employing 21 semi-structured interviews with cider-makers throughout Virginia, Vermont, and New Yorkthree leading cider producing states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic US. Interview sessions were subject to reflexive thematic analysis for themes related to preference, consumption, and cidermaking. Results suggest that cider producers broadly prefer complex flavors and cider made with cider-specific apples. Yet, cider producers ascribe to a diverse spectrum of values related to the cider-making process, agriculture, and business goals, which influence their preferences and the experiences that they create for other consumers. This research also identifies a chasm in how American "cider" is being constructed and valued, offering broad implications for the domestic cider and apple agriculture industries as well as a template for bridging the divide between producer-and consumer-based food studies.

Contextualizing hard cider flavor language and market position

“…However, both experiments are grounded in robust previous research in sensory science that is both quantitative and qualitative in nature. This allowed us to create realistic "shelf-talkers" in the first experiment (Calvert et al, 2023c(Calvert et al, , 2023dCole et al, 2023). In addition, the experimental design in the second experiment is meant to be more realistic than a normal choice experiment as noted by Neill and Lahne (2022).…”

“…Consequently, consumers lack the shared knowledge about prototypical flavors and their relation to ingredients and processing that is more common for beer and wine consumers (Calvert et al, 2023c). Production information analogous to that for beer and wine-whether a cider is made from Honeycrisp or Harrison apples or whether it is made from apples grown in Virginia or Vermont-does not currently carry analogous information about how that cider will taste to a potential purchaser or consumer (Calvert et al, 2023d;Fabien-Ouellet and Conner, 2018). Thus, cider makers see the current plateau in the growth of the cider industry as exacerbated or even caused by this lack of identity: consumers may be perfectly happy to try a cider once, but without the ability to tie the sensory quality of a cider to its type, consumers are not forming attachments to brands or habits of consuming "types" of cider.…”

“…Thus, cider makers see the current plateau in the growth of the cider industry as exacerbated or even caused by this lack of identity: consumers may be perfectly happy to try a cider once, but without the ability to tie the sensory quality of a cider to its type, consumers are not forming attachments to brands or habits of consuming "types" of cider. In some sense, this is because these "types, " which would be like "Cabernet Sauvignon" or "IPA, " are still not well-defined or understood (Calvert et al, 2023d). Consequently, producers are employing a set of diverse and often discordant attempts to communicate how their ciders taste and how the sensory characteristics are related to production characteristics (Calvert et al 2023b;Calvert et al, 2023a).…”

“…Thus, it is apparent that there are distinct and potentially consistent variations across cider sensory characteristics and profiles in the United States. However, it is not clear that these sensory profiles are well understood by consumers or well explained and communicated by producers (Calvert et al, 2023a(Calvert et al, , 2023c(Calvert et al, , 2023dFabien-Ouellet and Conner, 2018).…”

“…As noted in the growing literature on hard cider, preferences are known to be heterogeneous, yet there is little formal economic analysis to define these consumer profiles (Tozer et al (2015) is the main study cited for economic work in this space). Moreover, only more recent research has addressed the issue of extensively describing flavor attributes in cider via sensory science methods (Calvert et al, 2023a(Calvert et al, , 2023c(Calvert et al, , 2023dFabien-Ouellet and Conner, 2018). Applying the newer knowledge of flavor language about hard cider to traditional choice experiments allows for an understanding of the value consumers place on such attributes.…”