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We know how important industry statistics are to you and the rest of the cider community. We’ve been busy working to bring you the highest potential possible from our partnership with Nielsen. We’re excited to have several updates for our members about this partnership:

1. Nielsen is extending a special packaging design offer to our active members with a multi-pack product (4- or 6-packs). This is an opt-in model-group study and thus costs 90% less than an independent study. On top of that savings, as an active member, you will receive a $300 discount to take part. Contact Nielsen by APRIL 12 to sign up. Want to learn how this audit will help launch your brand to next level? Read more here. To ensure that these benefits are reaching the industry members paying for their appropriate membership type, we will only be offering the Nielsen opt-in study to our active cidery-level members. If you are a member at the Home-Cider Maker or Cidery-in-planning levels and wish to participate in the discounted audit, please contact us to update your membership.
2. On April 26, Nielsen is offering an encore webinar on the 2017 market trends. This will be like the CiderCon encore webinar offered last year except with current data. The webinar link will go out to our members with active, paid-up accounts.
3. We will have the first annual report of on- and off-premise trends available to members shortly. This exclusive benefit includes an executive summary and in-depth spreadsheets from Nielsen containing on- and off-premise data for 2017. The data is broken down by aggregate national and regional brands as well as by total US market and regional markets. We will be sharing an option for subscribing to quarterly reports at the time of this first report’s release. Stay tuned!

These benefits are exclusively for our members. We deeply appreciate the critical support members like you provide us. Together, we can grow our voice and our resources to aggressively and strategically promote our innovative, apple-centered industry–a booming industry at that, with 30% growth of regional cider brands in 2017. American Cider Association is doggedly pursuing benefits like these to help our members succeed. Expect more to come.

Please log in to your account to make sure that your membership for John Doe is up to date. This will allow you to take advantage of these benefits. If you are an employee at John Doe, make sure you are linked to their account–the membership bundle admin at your company can log in and add you for free. If you need any assistance updating your membership, contact Ellen.

By Bruce Nissen, Board President, bruce@ldbbeverage.com

American Cider Association gained non-profit status in 2014. Right at the get-go, we adopted a structure to support the diversity of our membership:

(1) Tiered membership levels based on annual production.

(2) Board seats carved out for geographical regions and for large producers.

Our board functions with 11 seats: five are regional chairs, three are at-large, and three are set aside for large producers. These carved-out seats simultaneously provide for the inclusion of large producers and keep their influence in balance. Until now, the large producer benchmark has been a half million gallons a year. 500,000 gallons of cider was a lot for even our most widely-distributed members in 2014.

Today, our industry has changed. You are expanding distribution, adding production lines, and entering new markets. It’s great news for the cider industry. To reflect this phenomenal growth, we are updating our benchmark for large producers. Moving forward, the three large producer board seats will be for cideries making more than a million gallons a year.

The diversity of American Cider Association’s membership is our greatest strength. We have cideries of all shapes and sizes, and we work hard to make sure our programming supports all your needs. For example, we will have an entire track for orchard-based heritage cider producers at CiderCon 2018.

It pleases us to need to respond to your growth. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions, and thank you for growing with us!

By the way, if you are producing 500,000-999,999 gallons a year, your membership fee will be lower as a result of this change. Good news for you!