When Life Gives You Apples...

If her family hadn’t been involved in ranching and farming, Kristen Needham says she may not have believed she could plant an orchard or make cider, thus becoming a trailblazer in British Columbia’s cider renaissance.

The founder and owner of Vancouver Island’s Sea Cider Farm & Ciderhouse muses about how a circuitous career path led her from international development work to launching a cidery back when B.C.’s cider industry was in its fledgling stages. Needham is full of advice she’d give to her younger self, and to other young entrepreneurs, based on her own somewhat unlikely life trajectory.  

A Circuitous Path to Saanich
 

Born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Needham left as a teenager after receiving a scholarship to study in Wales. There, she was introduced to cider, a traditional local drink.

“As a 17-year-old, I wasn’t paying much attention to what that drink was about, but I was immersed in a whole different food and drink culture,” she recalls.“It wasn’t about the flavour of the food—we ate a lot of fried foods and grey, cold broccoli—but we really socialized at the table. For a kid from the Prairies, it was eye-opening [to have] a food and beverage experience that was tied to a location and a history.”

While in Wales, Needham experienced another life change in the unexpected death of her father. With his passing, an orchard on Shuswap Lake that he had purchased in the 1970s passed on to Needham and her brother. At the time, as a teen traveling on her own, she didn’t want anything to do with farming or orcharding; she wanted to see the world. She and her brother held on to the property anyway, which was planted with culinary (not cider) apples, but didn’t maintain it. 

Needham went on to study economics at McGill University, then spent three years in Addis Ababa, working for a Canadian nonprofit organization helping to bring food security and clean water to remote Ethiopian villages. After graduate studies at Yale University, Needham relocated to Vancouver Island as a consultant in international environmental management. She continued to travel, working on projects from South Africa to Ukraine. 

A Cidery was Born
 

After her daughter and son were born, though, Needham says she wanted a more locally-focused career. A visit to her long-neglected Shuswap orchard—and thoughts of her family’s farming heritage—sparked the idea of making cider. Still, it took five more years of planning before she acquired property in Saanich and planted 1,000 cider apple trees.

“Before we opened our doors (in 2007)…we wrote a poem to encapsulate our vision for the business. We envisioned a social place for breaking bread with friends and family. A family-friendly, slow-food kind of experience.”

“I know it sounds corny,” Needham continues. “It goes back to that whole experience in Wales.”

But it’s a long journey from a vision poem to a functioning cidery. In retrospect, she concedes that she should have sought help sooner, particularly with the business side of the operation. Needham acknowledges that she was unprepared for many aspects of the business, from growing cider apples to figuring out distribution to planning and forecasting. And of course, “how to make cider that’s going to be appealing to a lot of people, not just what your friends and family are willing to drink,” particularly when craft cider was largely unknown in B.C.

Not only was opening a cider business new territory for Needham, but so was being a woman in the male-dominated cider industry. She didn’t have many role models. “The women in my family were strong, courageous women,” she explains, but on the farm, their jobs were managing the books and feeding people, not making business decisions.