1 Hemp’s First Billion-Dollar Segment: Food
Mankind’s most useful but also most misunderstood plant, Hemp is low-THC Cannabis Sativa. Whatever you think you know about it is wrong, and what “they” don’t want you to know is kept hidden.
From the Holy Bible to the world’s oldest cookbook, from the Birdman of Alcatraz to the War of 1812, from George Washington to Buddha, hemp is the “Forrest Gump“ of plants, there at every crucial turn in history.
One of the oldest cultivated crops in the world and even before, for tens of thousands of years this plant has co-evolved with humanity providing essential food and fiber, its sacred seeds buried with our ancestors. Still eaten as a snack by millions of Chinese just like they have for millennia, where hempseed pre-dates both soya and rice as food.
While today “hemp” is defined as “Cannabis having a low drug (THC) content,” typically <0.3%, in most of human history it meant any Cannabis plant and even a few bast plants which were not even that genus at all!
While you may have known all that, did you know that there has long existed a billion-dollar hemp industry in North America proving sustainability and profitability of the business model, and driving the most acres?
Since 2004 it has had millions of consumers, thousands of retailers, hundreds of companies, and the most hemp sales, profits, and acres. A segment so important, USDA has tracked prices for years, the first in hemp.
It’s an existing, proven, validated, stable, 100% legal ready market worth hundreds of millions annually currently supplied by foreign companies, patiently waiting for domestic suppliers.
That’s where YOU come in. With 25,000 possible products from hemp, which should you do first? CBD products require expensive extraction and packaging equipment and have regulatory issues, technically illegal to FDA; and it’s hard to compete with low China prices. Products using the world’s most expensive and controlled fiber crop (hemp) need big investment in infrastructure for a costly product not yet approved for commercial building, which can be made from agricultural waste or kenaf anyway. Textiles require a massive investment, the biggest of all. Producing fuel from hempseed uses more energy than it provides, is very expensive and reduces food crops. Farming is hard, and more farmers have failed at hemp than have succeeded in the last few years.
So then, what’s a safe and easy way to enter the hemp industry? Hemp’s first billion-dollar segment, for years 90% of Canadian hemp: Food.
It’s hemp’s first proven stable market success in the modern era driving the most acres, and the one with the greatest sales volume over the last twenty years; over a billion dollars of hemp food sold, including secondary products like cereal. It’s also the easiest for existing businesses to add hemp to their product line or for new entrants to start.
Hemp foods stand at the intersection of plant-based foods, climate change mitigation, and hemp reintroduction and normalization.
Commercialized only in the 1990s, today hemp food is sold worldwide and has the most consumers and retailers of any hemp product, as well as the most potential ones (everyone eats). Over 200 companies are marketing hemp food around the globe, including Walmart, Costco, and Woolworth’s. Hemp food can be highly profitable, one hemp food company sold in 2019 for $419 million, at an unusually high multiple… twice. Unlike CBD or even Hempcrete, hemp food is 100% legal to regulators everywhere. Food is also the best way hemp can fight climate change, three times more than Hempcrete and eleven times more than Electric Vehicles.
Long before anyone could spell “CBD,” certain hemp products sold for hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the U.S. and have for years. Products containing hemp have long been in almost every supermarket in the U.S. and Canada, sometimes dozens of products. None of this is new, it was here long before the CBD bubble and it will be here long after FDA shuts down drug hemp.
The U.S. hemp industry didn’t suddenly spring up in the first legal season in 2019, or 2014 after the first Farm Bill, or 2013 and Colorado’s first legal hemp harvest. No, the hemp industry in the U.S. never really died, with birdseed and fiber products being the big early markets. Imports continued unabated, when the birdseed market was sabotaged in 1999 it was using 3,000 tons/year of hempseed. Check the ex/import data, global hemp trade didn’t die and definitely not in the U.S.
Even before Canada legalized in 1998 hemp foods were in national distribution there and the U.S., appearing on national TV not as a joke (“The Tonight Show” notwithstanding) but as legitimate new commercial foods. Rosanne Barr made a hemp potato salad on CBS wearing all hemp clothes. National magazines like Rolling Stone, Details, and New York Times Sunday had positive stories, as did thousands of newspapers and hundreds of radio stations. Even notorious hunter Ted Nugent was kind in his interview with this vegan entrepreneur.
One hemp burger had an FDA-legal health claim for “reduces risk of heart disease.” Another had a legal Structure-function claim for organic hemp corn chips. The hemp industry’s first year for awards was 1997 and included one for food innovation.
Food marketing pros just doing what they do best generated hundreds of millions of media impressions and put hemp foods on thousands of shelves in the U.S. and Canada. And all before today’s companies even started, literally in the last century. That eventually became hemp’s first successful product category, driving most of the acres for the next 25 years in Canada and China.
If you truly want to see hemp succeed, then start with its largest product success, the one with the most current and potential sales, products, consumers, and retailers. The one proven, stable, 100% legal market. Literally and figuratively hemp’s low-hanging fruit.
How often do you build a house, or buy jeans? But you eat daily, right? Walls are nice but feeding people is noble; it’s good, clean, honest work. The shelled seed is one product that almost every food company can use in some way, and is the easiest way for a company or person to “get into hemp.” Hemp foods could be on the shelf in days or weeks, not years.
What has worked in the past is a glimpse into what will work in the future. It’s rarely discussed because few know it and even fewer write on it. If we could unite to popularize this one highly successful hemp product, the other 24,999 will follow. Food is the sharp edge of the hemp normalization spear. Bonus: it provides at least four times more stalk than seed, so it’s a hemp world Win-Win-Win.
This is how to get there from here, like Canada did a generation ago: 10,000 acres of grain within an hour of a seed processing plant, with R&D and equipment mostly from public money. Align processors’ interests with farmers’ via a co-op structure, and add a consumer brand for better margins. Replacing foreign products, it’s an instant $10-20 million right out of the gate.
A generation ago I proved the model for how to make money on hemp by slightly pivoting my successful Inc. 500 business from using tons of soybean to using tons of hempseed. Working with the dozens of brokers and distributors that helped us make America’s most-hated food (tofu) popular in the Reagan ‘80s, we had shelf placement in thousands of stores in just months. It’s the same business model still used today throughout the industry. And you don’t even need a farm, building, or equipment to get started.
If I can do it then there’s nothing stopping you, and I’ll show you how here.
The above was excerpted from “Seedy!” by Richard Rose, a free ebook released in 2024. “Seedy!” or How To Start A Hemp Food Business reveals how to do well by doing good with hemp foods. Seedy! is 177 pages, 52,000 words, 200 images, and thousands of links. Cost: free. Value: priceless. Never before has an industry insider pulled back the curtain on the successful strategies used to create hemp’s biggest industry segment. Part how-to, part hemp history, part self-help guide.
Click here to download a free copy.