Day 414 of AppleCiderVinegar.com

On July 1, 2025, AppleCiderVinegar.com began in earnest.

I didn’t enter the apple cider vinegar industry because I grew up making vinegar or inherited a family recipe. I discovered the opportunity after selling and testing my way through roughly 15,000 different products on PopularItems.com. Most products came and went. Fairchild’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar was different.

Customers kept buying it, so I kept ordering more. Eventually, I purchased enough that Roger Fairchild himself called me. He wanted to thank me—and find out who I was and what exactly was going on.

That call started everything.

I began purchasing Fairchild’s wholesale and having it shipped to Fort Worth, Texas. Then I moved more than 1,500 miles to the Nampa, Idaho area to get closer to the source. I kept my expenses low by living in sober housing while packaging hundreds of bottles from a storage unit each week.

It wasn’t glamorous. It was heavy boxes, leaking vinegar, shipping labels, customer emails and long days trying to solve problems I had never encountered before.

Eventually, I outsourced fulfillment to Nutragem. In my experience, its operation was not properly prepared to ship heavy glass bottles, and roughly 10–15% of some shipments arrived damaged. That mistake cost money, damaged customer trust and taught me something I should have accepted much earlier: fulfillment is not my strength.

But somewhere inside all that chaos, I discovered something much bigger than another product to sell.

I began learning the history behind Fairchild’s, Roger’s role in the apple cider vinegar industry and how surprisingly little of that history had ever been properly documented. I started to understand that the stories, knowledge and structure of the ACV market could ultimately be more valuable than any single day of sales.

Today, Fairchild’s helps fulfill many of my orders because, frankly, they are much better at making and handling apple cider vinegar than I am. My job is different.

My job is to study this industry, document what I learn, ask better questions and build AppleCiderVinegar.com into the most useful independent apple cider vinegar resource in the world.

This journal is that story—from my perspective, in my own words, including the breakthroughs, mistakes, conflicts and lessons that happen along the way.

Nobody else has to agree with every conclusion I reach. But no one else can tell this part of the story for me.