Emily Ritchie, executive director of the Northwest Cider Association, was not born into a farming family, but her interest in food’s origins emerged early on.

A Portland-area native, she said that in high school she was “appalled” by the quality of school lunches, prompting a food activism that has informed her career choices for nearly 20 years.

Earlier this year at the national CiderCon in Portland, the American Cider Association handed Ritchie a Cider Excellence Award for her “significant impact on the industry.”

“I’m really honored and humbled. It’s great to get the recognition,” she said, adding kudos to the Northwest’s cider industry. “It’s made up of passionate, kind, and innovative people. We’re still a young industry, still working together,” she said.

Cider’s success is no accident. Because of collective marketing, the Northwest drinks more cider than anywhere else in the country, Ritchie said.

The award caps Ritchie’s passion for local, quality food, which followed her from Sunset High School in Beaverton to Occidental College in California. There, she fell in love with cooking and gardening, joining the Farm to School movement, connecting local farms and fisheries with school food programs, and educating students about food sources.

During and after college, she was involved in the AmeriCorps Food Corps program, sponsored by the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

But it was a return trip to her father’s home country, England, that inspired Ritchie’s interest in cider. In 2014, before her marriage to Nick Morse or the birth of their daughter, Fiona, now 7 months old, she visited family in London and began her love affair with cider.

She took cider tours in Herefordshire and immersed herself in information about growing cider apples and made contacts with cidermakers, some of whom were interested in the fledgling cideries in the Northwest.

“I saw a pathway somehow in cider,” she said. When she returned home to Oregon, she worked for short stints at Wandering Aengus Ciderworks and Truitt Family Foods before landing at the NW Cider Association in 2015.

And the rest is history, sort of. As program manager for a year and executive director for the last nine, Ritchie has written more than $3 million in specialty crop grants, which support cidermaking, marketing, education and research efforts for the association’s members in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia.

With her board of directors, she manages a full-time staff of two, and eight contractors, more than 300 cider professionals including about 100 cider maker members, as well as dozens of additional apple growers, processors and affiliated industry members — the largest organization of its kind in the Northwest.

Organizing the Northwest Cider Cup, an international cider competition coming up on its 11th year, has been at the center of her goals … “to organize our whole cider community in a way that gets us all on the same page, toward a shared strategic vision to increase demand for high quality cider made right here in the PNW.”

The Cup helps people better describe tastes and preferences for cider’s many varieties. Last year, more than 100 judges described professional cider entries ranged in flavors from jalapeno to roses. “The cider-curious locally get an annual list of the very best ciders made here so they can select top quality ciders to taste,” she said.

Ritchie was also instrumental in finding new cider sales channels, including the Northwest Cider Club. This year, cideries are exploring the export potential to Japan.

In the past 10 years, Ritchie said the association has been changing social norms around cider. Already, she said, people have begun asking questions about cider that reflect an expanded interest in apple varieties, cider production and expanding flavor preferences.

The public interest bodes well for the future of the young industry, she said.

“A majority of people have changed ideas about cider, but it takes education and a lot of cider samples in people’s mouths,” she said.

For more information about the association’s events and members, visit the website, nwcider.com.