So now that you know what it is… how could you make money from hemp food?
Note: this will be primarily a sales-driven effort, hemp foods don’t just sell themselves. If you or someone in your organization is not good at sales, then don’t even start. “Make it and they will come” is a bad strategy. A Broker you retain for a percentage of sales counts as a qualified salesperson, for sure. The best ones can make your company successful, lame ones could put you under. I and many others would not have existed in the market but for those folks, the unsung heroes of the retail wars working for 5% of net sales.
Now that marijuana edibles are such a huge business ($1.4 billion in the U.S. and climbing), with far greater sales than hemp foods, you have to manage the trade and consumer fear of THC, of getting high or failing a drug test from your hemp foods. That might be your biggest obstacle so be prepared to deal with it. I did quite effectively until the fiber group sued DEA; when you sue to be allowed unlimited THC in foods everybody assumes you have unlimited THC in foods. Epic fail by those with no skin in the game, no burden of compliance and despite being warned of the danger by better minds, those actually in the business.
In hemp, the key to success is to pivot, not start fresh. Expand, don’t start anew if you can help it. If you are already in the food processing business, create a hemp line extension or even a whole new line of hemp foods as a new brand if you’re worried about the fallout from your current trade. I had to do that, Whole Foods Market and a few others hurt our non-hemp business because of hemp foods, it literally cost us millions of dollars. Don’t worry, today “WFM ♥ Hemp Foods” because the tsunami was just too much to resist. The pioneers first through the breech are the ones who take the hit. YW.
If you have a restaurant consider adding a hemp dish, say hummus, or add it to your veggie burger, smoothies, or pizza crust. As mentioned earlier, it has a low isoelectric point, so be careful of heat when blending or making say a soup, it could curdle. (High heat denatures the protein so it won’t curd, such as with UHT aseptic milk.) Or use it as a topping for salads or other dishes. College feeders will find the students very receptive to a hemp dish. Start with one dish once a week, try different recipes, and see what becomes the biggest hit.
Decide if you want it to have functionality (omega-3 or CBD or whatever) or if it’s mostly for marketing (“Now with Hemp!”). I aimed for a respectable 5% to 10% level in my commercial foods, and while hemp energy drinks have as little as 0.01% hempseed oil in them just for marketing reasons, don’t be THAT guy. Keep it real. Low-solids foods such as sodas will by their very nature require less hemp material, so that’s fair, but even my aseptic hemp milk had 5% shelled seed in it. Also consider using hemp essential oil, your soda will taste like a grow room in flower; add a little green for color and watch people buy it by the case.
If you don’t already have a food processing plant or a restaurant, you can still do this. Such as if you’re currently a food broker or salesperson or have a distribution route, get a hemp food made for you and sell it. Look around and see what commercial food is made in your town, or by your friends or family. Approach a local maker of foods or a restaurant and ask them to make a hemp version of one of their foods for you to distribute, or rent time in their kitchen and make one yourself. Fast food and other casual eateries could see an increase in meat sales by having vegan offerings. When four co-workers go to lunch, the one with the most restrictive diet is who the group considers. With these new plant-based dishes, old-school meat shacks are back on the list. Coincidentally, that was also the pitch to restaurants in Las Vegas in the ‘90s which resulted in GardenBurger® doing 1/3 of its sales there.
You can sell your foods online, even way back in 2000 our Yahoo! Store sold as much as $10,000 of HempNut foods monthly at its peak; it was the first online hemp food store. We set it up so that if anyone, whether a store, distributor, or private person bought a full case then they got the wholesale price, typically half what the retail price per single unit was. That was to encourage “Hemp Evangelists” to sell our hemp foods in their town to whomever: stores, gas stations, even at festivals or farmer’s markets. It allowed them to finance their activism. We even offered display racks. Click here to see the Store’s animated banner ads in action, archived by the Wayback Machine.
If your co-packer can do the product formulation for you, all the better. They are much more skilled at it. Don’t be shy to actually be at the factory when the co-packer does your first run, or even all the subsequent ones. It helps keep honest people honest.
Think outside the box, like prototyping a hemp franchise of some sort. I was planning on opening a HempNut Café in Sebastopol California until the market for hemp foods was sabotaged for years starting in 2001. It would have prepared food, a few dozen seats, cooking class set-up, and a retail store of all things hemp. Or sell “Home Hempeh Kits” by first buying these in bulk, adding 3 ounces of shelled hempseed then affixing your brand’s label to it.
Keep your eyes open for the potential to pivot to a new hemp business from your current one. In 2015 I offered to help a friend expand his online gift box business by adding newly-emerging legal CBD products. He had the back-end fulfillment system to build and ship gift boxes of various organic goods, and I knew who was making quality CBD products and how to market them, especially through my Medicinal Hemp Association. It would have been easy to add a new page for them and unlike his other items, inventory could be on consignment or delivered JIT. Profit margins would be way fatter and average sale way higher. And with his presence marketing the national CBD distribution business so early, the company would have been worth millions in just a few years. But he said no and the gift business died a few years later. Lack of vision can be costly.
There are marketing/branding companies that can help you take your product from idea to shelf. These include Agilery, Hempful Farms, Hemp Brand Builders, Mile High Food Science, The Vivid Team, and Velocity CPG. In CBD/CBG, Leotele is the best for white-label capsules, tinctures, and ointments.
Did you know that besides pioneering the production of CBD in the U.S., Colorado also has long been a hemp food hotbed with the most hemp food companies, over twenty?
Some of the same people who botched hemp and marijuana are now trying to work that magic on psychedelics. Synthetic psilocybin is the Pharma model, a single molecule API made under GMP conditions, consistent and controllable. It’s not always bad, see: LSD and synthetic thyroid medicine. But psychedelic fungi are profoundly quick and easy to grow, and very stealthy. And with decrim, nothing stopping us. If I were 30 years younger I would get in the growing kit business now, “sell the shovels.” Or I would add a functional mushroom line extension of some kind, then a legal psychedelic line awaiting legalization of psilocybin. BTW, there are over 200 species of mushrooms that are psychedelic, not just the one, and most are legal.
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.