The Guelph food nerds who decided vinegar deserved to be treated like wine — and built a 3,000-store pantry brand around it

The brewery corner that tested 500 vinegars

The founding story of Acid League is unusual for a CPG brand because it starts in a research environment rather than a kitchen. Cole Pearsall and Allan Mai both came out of the University of Guelph food science program, one of the strongest applied food programs in Canada. Scott Friedmann joined on the business side, and Rae Drake as creative director. The four of them approached the first product the way a lab team approaches a problem: by running iterations. The Guelph brewery whose corner they borrowed in 2019 became, in effect, an experimental vinegar lab. The team has publicly described the period as a 500-plus prototype process, the kind of disciplined formulation work that is common in beverage and wine but rare in pantry CPG. In 2022 the company moved into its own south-end Guelph facility.

What they were trying to fix was a real problem hiding in plain sight. Most consumers buy vinegar once or twice a year, use it to clean a kettle or boil eggs, and forget it exists. That is a fine outcome for a 99-cent commodity product but a strange one for an ingredient that, in serious cooking, sits next to oil and salt as a primary flavour lever. The Acid League hypothesis was that there was an audience for vinegars made with the same intention as small-batch wine — slow-fermented from real fruit, minimally filtered, complex enough to dress a salad and finish a sauce. The 500 iterations were the work of figuring out what that actually tasted like.

The first commercial line — Living Vinegars — launched into specialty retail and DTC in 2020. By the time Strategy magazine covered the brand in 2022, the product had moved into mainstream grocery and the founding team was already working on the next category extension.

Forbes 30 Under 30, two Series A rounds, and a Wine Proxies spinout

Acid League raised a $4.8 million Series A and then a $6.2 million USD Series A II in 2022, both led by InvestEco Capital and BrandProject, two firms with deep CPG operating experience in Canada. The rounds funded a deliberate expansion past vinegar into adjacent pantry categories: hot sauces, salad dressings, shrub syrups, broth concentrates, and the non-alcoholic Wine Proxies line, built from verjus, tea, fruit juice, vinegar, and botanicals. The Wine Proxies line landed in the middle of the sober-curious wave and earned editorial coverage in Bon Appetit, Eater, and the New York Times. In 2022 the team carved Proxies out as its own sister company with its own brand identity, DTC subscription, warehouse flow, and retail relationships. Acid League and Proxies still share lineage and a Guelph zip code, but they are separate operating companies. The cocktail proxies, including the Spicy Margarita six-pack, sit on the Proxies side at drinkproxies.com.

In December 2023, co-founder Cole Pearsall was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Food and Drink category, citing the brand's category reinvention work and rapid US distribution growth. The University of Guelph published its own news feature on the recognition the same month. The Forbes selection is the kind of third-party signal that converts retail buyers and accelerates placement conversations — and in the year that followed, Acid League expanded into Costco Canada, Walmart Canada, and additional Loblaw banners.

By 2026 the brand reports 3,000-plus stores across Canada and the United States. The Canadian retail mix is the one most other early- stage CPG brands would design if they could: Loblaws and Whole Foods anchor specialty positioning, Costco Canada drives velocity at large pack sizes, Walmart Canada provides national reach, and Instacart Canada threads through all of it for same-day delivery.

What is actually in the lineup

The current Acid League lineup at acidleague.com/collections/all covers Living Vinegars (the originating SKU family, with rotating flavours such as Meyer Lemon Honey, Strawberry Rosé, Mango Jalapeño, Garden Heat, Cabernet Port, Apple Cider Maple, and Smoked Malt), Salad Dressings, Hot Sauces and Condiments (including a Spicy Maple Sambal and a Garlic Confit), Shrub Syrups, Broth Concentrates, and Lil Croutons. Several of these lines are co-formulated, since the same fruit and fermentation work that produces a vinegar feeds the shrub or dressing on the next shelf.

The Rose Vinegar 375 ml SKU is the flagship for Canadian retail. It is listed on Instacart Canada through 84 retailer locations in the Toronto market area alone, including Loblaws, Whole Foods, Costco Canada, Metro, and Walmart Canada. The product itself is pink, floral, lightly fermented, and built to be used finely: a few spoonfuls in a vinaigrette, a marinade for fish, a deglaze on a sauté pan. It is the kind of SKU that does not need a sales pitch once it is on a serious cook's shelf, which is the entire theory of the brand condensed into a 375 ml bottle.

Wine Proxies, the line that originally demonstrated the broader insight, no longer lives under the Acid League roof. Since 2022, Proxies has been operated as a separate sister company at drinkproxies.com, with its own ready-to-drink cocktail packs (Spicy Margarita, Mai Tai, Gin & Tonic six-packs) and its own retail relationships. The category move from vinegar to non-alcoholic wine still demonstrates the Acid League playbook: both are about fermented or partially fermented juice products built for the dinner table. The brand and its spinout sit in the same world the same way a finishing vinegar and a non-alcoholic wine sit on the same dinner table.

How Acid League stacks up in the pantry aisle

The competitive picture for Acid League touches both vinegars and non-alcoholic beverages. Here is how the options line up in Canadian retail:

Formats and sizes reflect each brand's standard flagship SKU per publicly available product listings. Retailer availability reflects Canadian market presence as of May 2026.

What this table makes clear is that the Acid League ecosystem, counting Proxies, is the only Canadian-based pair of brands with meaningful national distribution across both the vinegar and the non-alcoholic categories. Bragg is the commodity reference point, strong velocity, no premium pricing power, no story. Maille is the legacy European import. Sobrii (covered in our Brand Breakdown series) is the Canadian non-alcoholic spirit equivalent. RISE Kombucha is the closest live-culture analogue on the beverage side. Acid League and its spinout Proxies sit across two columns at once, anchored by national Canadian retail and a shared Guelph production base.

The founders as the proof of concept

The four Acid League founders have stayed operational throughout the scale-up, which is unusual at this stage. Cole Pearsall is publicly associated with the brand's positioning and product development. Allan Mai leads the food science and formulation work. Scott Friedmann runs the business side. Rae Drake is the creative director. The University of Guelph success story page on the brand and the BrandProject investment memo confirm the same operational continuity. Founder-led at Series A is common. Founder-led at 3,000 stores across two countries, with a separate sister company in non-alcoholic beverages, is not.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 selection is the externally legible signal of what the brand has accomplished. Lists like this matter less for consumer attention than for retail buyer credibility — a brand that is in Forbes is a brand that buyers feel comfortable putting on a shelf in a category they previously thought of as commodity. That single credential has done meaningful work in compressing the time from pitch to placement for Acid League over the last two years.

Sources

Acid League's primary social presence is on Instagram at @acidleague. The brand uses the account for product education, recipe inspiration, and behind-the-scenes content from the south-end Guelph facility. The visual language is editorial rather than promotional, which fits the audience the brand has built: home cooks who treat the pantry as a place where the food gets interesting rather than just stocked.

What the press has said

Acid League has been profiled across both Canadian trade media and US consumer outlets since the Forbes selection. Here are the primary placements worth reading:

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes directly to an Acid League product page or a retail listing — not the homepage — so you can find it without hunting:

For the full store list and product range, visit acidleague.com.

Bottom line

The category most consumers ignore is exactly the one Acid League decided to take seriously, and the payoff has been two Series A rounds, a Forbes 30 Under 30, and 3,000-plus stores across two countries within six years of starting in a borrowed brewery corner. The genuinely interesting move was not the first vinegar. It was the bet that the same approach that worked for vinegar would work for the non-alcoholic wine category and the rest of the pantry, and the discipline to carve the wine bet out as its own sister company once it had momentum. The Acid League playbook is now visible across the pantry lineup and across the separate Proxies beverage range, and both brands are still founder-led. If you are in Canada, the Rose Vinegar on Instacart Canada is the fastest way to understand what they have built.