Bush's Beans taps American Cornhole League in fan-focused sponsorship push

Bush’s Beans is betting that cornhole sells best when it feels less like a niche sport and more like a shared ritual. The company’s new partnership with the American Cornhole League is being positioned around fan-friendly, gameday activations, with Bush’s calling ACL a “backyard dream team” and saying it wants to share “the flavor and the excitement all season long.”

That language says plenty about where cornhole sits now. The deal is not being framed as a simple logo placement on a board or a one-off tournament tie-in. Instead, Bush’s is treating ACL as an extension of the settings where the sport already lives: tailgates, cookouts, festivals and casual competition in the yard. For a family-owned brand that says it has been around since 1908 and is based in Chestnut Hill, Tennessee, that fit is obvious. Bush’s also markets 81 varieties of beans, a breadth that reinforces its place as an everyday food brand built for big gatherings as much as weeknight dinners.

The sponsorship also reflects how far the American Cornhole League has come since Stacey Moore founded it in 2015. ACL describes itself as the premier league for professional and recreational cornhole in the United States, and its visibility now stretches well beyond local leagues and backyard play. ESPN currently carries ACL programming across ESPN+, ESPNU and ESPN2, including 2026 tournament coverage such as the ACL Fort Worth Signature Open 2026. That broadcast footprint gives sponsors a much larger stage than cornhole once offered, while preserving the game’s casual, social identity.

Bush’s is not entering a vacuum. ACL sponsorship history has already included brands such as Corn Nuts and Seagram’s 7 Crown, a sign that marketers see cornhole as a lifestyle and hospitality platform, not only a competitive circuit. The appeal is clear: cornhole is one of the rare sports that can move from a grass lot at a tailgate to a televised final without losing its core audience.

That blend of accessibility and reach is exactly what makes the Bush’s deal notable. It shows a mainstream consumer brand leaning into a sport whose commercial identity is still being defined by the spaces around it, the backyard, the cookout, and the game day crowd.