You’ll have to decide whether to introduce a food that is perishable, frozen, or a dry grocery item. Perishable means you store, distribute, and retail it under refrigeration, below 45°F. That’s expensive and increases your potential losses and returns from the store or distributor. It’s a major hassle and I discourage starting there, having done it myself for decades.
Frozen might have fewer returns, but it’s also a bigger hassle and the freezer cases are very expensive and competitive real estate in every store. I strongly encourage you to start with dry foods, which don’t require refrigeration or freezing.
This decision also impacts your operations down the road; your relationship with wholesale Buyers is critical. If you have a great relationship with a frozen Buyer, it does you no good when introducing a dry or perishable product. I realized that the hard way when introducing the Hempeh Burger as well as the HempNut chips, bar, oil, and lip balm. While we knew the perishable Buyers for many years, the frozen, dry, supplement, and body care Buyers had no idea who we were, instantly turning us into a start-up in their eyes. Therefore, stay within the same segment you start in.
Potential food applications for shelled hempseed include animal feed, baby food, bagels, beverages, biscotti, bread, breading, breakfast cereal, brownies, cakes, camping foods, candy, caramel, caramel popcorn, cheesecake, chocolate, cookies, crackers, cream cheese, cream soup, dessert topping, dips, dressing, dry mixes, dukkah, energy bar, extruded or puffed snacks, falafel, flour, frozen dessert, fudge, granola, hard cheese, hummus, marinade, mayonnaise, meat alternatives, medical foods, miso, muesli, muffins, nut butter, nutella, pancakes, parmesan alternative, pasta, pastries, pesto, pie crust, pilaf, pita, pralines, pretzels, protein drink, pudding, sauces, scones, seasoning, shakes, smoothies, snack chips, sour cream, spreads, tabouli, tahini, tapenade, tempeh, toffee, tofu, tortillas, trail mix, truffles, veggie burger, waffles, yogurt, and thousands more. You can usually run it on your current equipment with little or no changes needed, just treat it like any dry ingredient.
Find a local fresh pasta shop and ask them to make a special batch for you. Or a local maker of corn chips, chocolate, bread, tofu, nut butter, ice cream, frozen dessert, or cheese; look around— it could be used in anything. It’s not like it has to be only in some special factory. Even rent a commercial kitchen by the hour or a restaurant off-hours and make them yourself.
Or recreate in your city the spectacular success of the Tofutti phenomenon in ‘80s New York City, with hemp soft-serve ice cream and hempseed topping.
While aseptic hemp milk is considered a dry grocery product since it is not perishable, it’s a massive undertaking and will cost you several hundreds of thousands of dollars up-front before you sell even one. I did a test run of the first aseptic hemp milk in 1997 at the Tetra-Pak® plant in Illinois. Aseptic hemp milk is why a movie star’s hemp company told the Ninth Circuit it was suing DEA for to stop it legalizing hemp products, then after winning it never did get introduced. In a market now glutted with plant-based milks, you better have a spectacular marketing plan if you do it. I’ve seen companies sprout the seed slightly and call it “activated” for differentiation.
One way to figure out what to market is to look at scan data for your region, see which dry grocery items sell the best, and start your decision process there. Obviously catsup is out because it would be hard to use hempseed in it, but not a Hamburger Helper®-type product. Not salt, but yes to corn chips. Potato chips are out, but not chocolate bars.
While no doubt you’ll consider the branding of just shelled hempseed, note that it is going to be tougher competing with so many established brands with a redundant “me too” commodity. I suggest you start with prepared, ready-to-eat branded foods. It uses less hemp, at a 5% to 10% level, but can still give you massive points of differentiation so you stand out among the crowd. You are also less susceptible to shocks from fluctuations in the price of seed. With branded foods, you could conceivably have three brands all in the same space: a value brand (low price), a mid-range, and a premium brand (organic, regenerative, patented tech).
One way to look at shelled hempseed is that since it takes 2½ pounds of whole to get one pound of shelled, it is 250% hemp. Similarly, hempseed oil is 500% hemp. But most of the foods on these pages use only 5 to 10% shelled hempseed. It’s a way of making the limited supply of hempseed stretch.
Here is a chart showing the value of 1,000 tons of hempseed sold at different stages of processing. The farmer could sell it for $1,050,000 as whole seed, or $72,000,000 as a branded consumer food with 5% hemp content. Another advantage of selling branded consumer foods is that it is harder to knock you off the shelf and replace you with a cheaper product like it is when selling bulk.
Are you located in the Southwest? Sell hemp tamales or a line of branded corn chips made with 5 to 10% shelled hempseed. That adds even more value than packages of shelled hempseed, which is still better than selling seed in bulk.
In Minnesota? Sell a branded line of bread. In California? Sell smoothie additions and license your brand to food processors using your brand of shelled hempseed. In NY? Create a hemp soft-serve ice cream brand à la Tofutti. In Vermont with an unused dairy plant nearby? Make yogurt or cheese. There are a zillion possibilities.
In Maryland? Make salad dressings or soups. In Iowa and have an unused meat processing plant nearby? Make hemp burgers and hemp dogs. Have an unused cereal plant, or oil pressing plant nearby? Or a peanut butter factory? Or an aseptic milk packaging line? A chocolate, fudge, or brittle factory? All those and more could be what you make, brand, and sell.
Once you have your distribution network or pipeline established, leverage it; add more branded products appropriate for that channel before expanding out of it.
Other venues to consider are food trucks, pop-up booths in malls, festivals, and farmers’ markets (Justin’s Nut Butter started by selling at the Boulder Farmers Market, then sold the company several years later for 2/3 of a billion dollars).
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.