Made in Calgary: How Wild Folk is Redefining the Non-Alcoholic Cocktail

The idea for Wild Folk was first born in 2017, inspired by Dalia Kohen’s time running local restaurant The Coup. She often saw how drinking shaped the tone of a night out for both staff and guests, and noticed an increasing demand for non-alcoholic drink options beyond juices and sodas.

“I saw firsthand how alcohol overconsumption was affecting people,” Kohen says. “I just wanted to help people get their balance back and have options for people that met them where they were at.”

For Kohen, balance meant giving people an option to slow down their consumption without feeling left out. As a vegetarian chef and someone interested in foraging and gardening, Kohen also uses her culinary knowledge to shape how those zero-proof drinks could taste.

“I love playing with flavours and seeing how they develop on your palate,” Kohen says.

Kohen focuses on flavour in layers when creating Wild Folk’s botanical, canned non-alcoholic cocktails, often surprising people who expect plant-based ingredients to be bland. She thinks about how a drink looks and smells, how it hits your tongue on the first sip, what flavour it leaves behind and how flavour affects the body and the palate.

Wild Folk combinations layer Western Canadian ingredients with globally sourced herbs and spices and emphasize whole ingredients. Persian sun-dried lime, alder-smoked salt and Sichuan peppercorn appear alongside local ingredients like rosehip, rhubarb and wildflower honey.

Each drink starts with a familiar cocktail, like a margarita or a spritz, before being reworked into Wild Folk’s own blends built with botanical ingredients and herbs, like the Wild Folk Vermouth Spritz or Mezcal Margarita.

The first Wild Folk drinks landed on menus and shelves in November 2021, and can now be found at multiple retailers across Canada and the U.S.

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