Life Cider

Before Life Cider, Jon Pierre Francia wrote recipes for a burrito chain. He created almost every rub and marinade at Sweeto Burrito, he told KSL. He sold the chain in 2020. The Holladay resident later turned the same skills on a harder customer: a daily dose of apple cider vinegar with what KSL called an awful taste.

The vinegar started as a health fix. Francia told KSL he had two bouts of pneumonia, in 2008 and 2010, along with severe acid reflux. In 2015, after his grandparents died at 96 and 98, he decided he could live that long only by changing course, and he began drinking apple cider vinegar. The company's own telling credits his grandmother with pointing him to it.

So he treated the vinegar like a menu item. He spent about three years adding flavors until his family would not leave the batch alone, KSL reported. Fox 13 put it more plainly: his family started stealing his stash. Once his wife and kids were drinking it, he added vitamins. At the end of 2018 he turned the recipe into Life Cider.

Each can holds one full tablespoon of organic apple cider vinegar, according to the company, with 15 calories and 4 grams of sugar. Life Cider says the original line is certified USDA Organic and that each can carries 500 percent of the daily value of B12. A second line, Life Cider X, pairs the same vinegar with paraxanthine, which the company calls a cleaner form of caffeine.

Even before its big pitch, the cans were leaving the state. KSL reported that Francia was distributing Life Cider to grocery stores and hotels in Arizona through Peddler's Son, a produce company. He was also launching it at an Equinox club in Beverly Hills.

The turning point came in June 2023 at BevNet's New Beverage Showdown in New York. Life Cider was one of 12 new brands invited to pitch and finished in the top six. Len Hunter, a senior vice president at United Natural Foods, told Francia, "I think this may be the biggest single product I've ever had in my 35 years of food and beverage distribution."

Francia said at the time that he wanted Utah first. "The best way to build a brand is to build roots deep and then let the branches go out," he told KSL. ABC4 has listed the cans at Harmons and Walmart, among other stores. For a company built on apples, the tree line was sitting right there.