Reshaping Access to THC Products: Behind Edible Brands’ Move to Bunk With Hemp

Fresh fruit baskets, flower bouquets, chocolates and … THC deliveries?

When Edible Brands, the parent company of Edible Arrangements, announced its entrance into the hemp-derived THC marketplace in late March, the move represented a rare overlapping of mainstream corporate America and the highly uncertain landscape surrounding intoxicating compounds from a plant.

Edible Brands launched Edibles.com in Texas—with plans to expand to Florida, Georgia and other markets across the Southeast—to provide an e-commerce platform for same-day and next-day deliveries of THC-infused products from some of the nation’s leading cannabis and hemp brands.

Behind its reputation of helping families and friends celebrate personal moments in an adjacent space of strawberries, roses and gift baskets, Edible Brands is now hoping to enhance accessibility to THC products and redefine the category.

Moreover, the company plans to increase consumer confidence in hemp-derived THC products through its partnerships with well-vetted and established brands, cannabis industry veteran Thomas Winstanley, who serves as executive vice president for Edibles.com, told Cannabis Business Times.

“There’s often a cognitive dissonance with consumers where they see products that are, in my opinion, good for health and wellness sold at a gas station,” he said. “There’s something that doesn’t quite align with that, and I think we’re bringing a little bit of reputation management to that—the optics of the consumer—by saying, yeah, these are products that can help you with sleep or relaxation or energy. And so … we’re bridging that last mile. We’re going to be turning on shipping, and we want to be a trusted source for some of the best brands that exist in this industry.”

Some of those partnered brands include CANN, Wana, 1906, Happi, Cantrip and Ayrloom.

Winstanley previously spent six years with Massachusetts-based multistate cannabis operator Theory Wellness, most recently as the company’s chief marketing officer.

Here, he provides insights into Edible Brands’ entrance into the THC space as well as his personal transition from cannabis to hemp.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.

Tony Lange: What excites you most about launching an e-commerce marketplace for the hemp industry?

Thomas Winstanley: I came into it from a unique view, coming from the six years at Theory Wellness and being in the cannabis industry, and seeing how much work we put in on making access to THC products. And that’s why I originally got into this in the first place was I’ve always been a big fan of THC and its byproducts. And when hemp started to take shape, it was something I was very intrigued by. When I started to have discussions with the team here at Edible Brands, they said, “Hey, we have Edibles.com.” I was definitely a little skeptical. I was like, “OK, well that’s good, but are you going to use it for the right reasons? Can we do this in a way that’s scalable, that’s true to the consumers, true to the products?” And it was one of those meetings where you’re like, “Oh, wow. They actually are very much philosophically aligned with my view of this space.” … Their approach was not like a let’s go smash and grab cash on this thing and try to make it grow really quickly and just unscalable.

Lange: What makes Edibles.com unique as a delivery marketplace?

Winstanley: This is the first time in the consumer segment that you’re actually being able to interact with a portfolio of products as diverse and as unique as this one is in a traditional direct-to-consumer (DTC) model. The only times I’ve ever seen an assemblage of these products together were in dispensaries. … This is a true CPG approach where right now we’re focused on that last-mile endpoint, where customers who are looking for these products or want to order them DTC, we can bring them to the consumer faster.

Lange: What makes Edible Brands well-positioned to make this work?

Winstanley: A lot of the consumers out there need permission to try these THC products. I think one thing that is really abundantly clear on the hemp side is that everybody’s familiar with the existence of these products. But the consumer gap to actually start taking them seriously and buying them, that threshold hasn’t been crossed enough in certain ways. I think it’s getting better, but when you have a brand like Edible Arrangements, which is part of the portfolio of brands, there’s a built-in fail-safe with a 25-year-trusted brand that has celebrated personal moments for people’s most intimate parts of life. When they come into this space and say, “Hey, we’re committing to this,” you know that you’re getting a level of quality and reputation and trust. And I think that’s something that’s exceedingly important in this category, because it is a confusing category.

Lange: With same-day/next-day deliveries, do you foresee Edibles.com becoming an Amazon of the hemp space?

Winstanley: That analogy has been thrown around, and I honestly think it depends on how you define Amazon. If it’s a signal of convenience, sure, but I don’t know that Amazon’s quality is maybe always the best. And I think some probably argue that Amazon’s dominance of buying and selling products may not be a great thing. What we really want to be able to do is more so look at it from the lens of we want to be able to get you convenient access to safe and tested products, and give you options of what those products are, regardless of where you are. Whether you’re somebody who has never tried this stuff before or have loved Wana for the last 20 years and now are excited to get it delivered to your door, that to me is way more important than, “Are we going to be the Amazon?”

Lange: In this transition to Edibles.com, what’s been your biggest challenge, and how has your background at Theory Wellness helped you navigate that challenge?

Winstanley: I think with Theory, what was interesting was when I started, we were just two medical-only stores in Massachusetts. By the time of my departure, we had somewhere around 18 retail stores in seven states of all different types and kinds. And I think what was different compared to today is, working in the cannabis industry, everybody’s universally primed to know what you’re up against, where you know there’s going to be a lot of regulatory work, you know that there’s going to be a massive amount of hurry up and wait when you’re building out a retail store and waiting for that final license. There’s a lot more industry knowledge that is carried through in a cannabis company.

What is different here, and I wouldn’t say it’s more of a learning curve—this company has been incredibly successful managing a highly challenging type of supply chain with perishables in the form of food, operational excellence on the store side, the fulfillment side, the e-commerce side—but I think one thing that is a little different is just this requirement of regulatory compliance following policy, which is very hotly debated now in a couple of these markets that we’re interested in.

Regarding Theory, Theory was an amazing run where I got to work on making the products and developing the brand infrastructure and helping solve retail challenges and marketing challenges. And so, a lot of what I learned at Theory carried beautifully into this. And what I love about what we’re doing now is it’s a lot less encumbered by policy in certain ways, where you’re not going to hit a geographical state line that says you can’t go any further. This really opens up the door to reach a lot more people with a single brand, and that is probably one of the most exciting parts about this whole thing.

Lange: With the regulatory uncertainties around hemp-derived THC products, why do you think that Edible Brands decided to enter the hemp space at this juncture?

Winstanley: Given the rise of the hemp category, it made a lot of sense from a business standpoint. … When it gets to the regulatory side, sure, there’s always going to be uncertainties, and I think they’re well enough aware of the current challenges. I speak to this a lot with our leadership team on, “Well, why can’t we just go into the state?” Well, we have to do a thorough compliance check. We need to make sure that the policies that are being discussed right now are thoughtful and in the best interest of the consumers. And those are roles that we want to continue to have a voice in. I think we bring a very unique voice to these discussions around policy.

We’re not just a product brand that’s trying to keep their products on shelves, but we’re in some ways a point of distribution that there are very few brands like ours in hemp today that came from a totally adjacent space. We’re coming from the other end of the spectrum by having a supply chain of strawberries and making beautiful baskets and gifts for folks. And I think that is a huge signal to show that, well, if a company like ours can do this and make the investment in it, well, it probably isn’t that concerning by the standards of how the rest of corporate America looks at this. That’s a unique privilege for ours, and it’s one that we think about and we talk about quite a bit too, of “How do we make a meaningful impact?” … We’re partnering with well-vetted, well-trusted brands that have been making exemplary products for a very long time, and making that work is critical.

Lange: A couple of the potential regulatory obstacles include Senate Bill 3 in Texas and Senate Bill 438 in Florida. How could those bills impact your business plans?

Winstanley: There’s no doubt that there is a risk associated with it, but I also think nothing good comes from something easy. I also try to put myself in the shoes of a politician who’s looking at this category like I was. When I came to Georgia, and I saw that there are hemp products that are 1,000-milligram chews sold at a gas station, that’s a consumer health threat, and that’s one that I think is inexcusable. I think these bills are coming from that insight. And so, I want to be very clear: I see where the onus is to develop policy that is directly related to the bad actors who are developing products in this category that are not playing by the intended policies that were created to restrict access to them.

I also think when you look at an outright ban in Texas of these products, that has a much deeper risk to the end consumer, because ultimately, all you do is you punish the good actors and remove them from the market. And that allows the black market and the markets of products that do not meet certain standards to then proliferate. Because part of the concerns around this category is that there’s not a lot of policy enforcement. When you don’t have policy enforcement and you just say, “We’re going to kill this industry as a whole,” well then you just are basically handing the keys over to the actors that you actually want to get out of the marketplace.

So, does S.B. 3 represent an existential threat? No question. Is it coming from a place of trying to do good? I want to believe it is.

Lange: When it comes to quality and curation, how important are your brand partners to the success of Edibles.com?

Winstanley: The goal is always to continue to grow across the country—go as far as we can. And to do that, not all brands are at the same point in terms of their lifecycle. Having been on the cannabis side, having seen these products in retail, and having tried these products, it was a pretty clear decision moving forward. We are in discussions with a handful of other brands, both on the beverage and edibles front, and it’s a similar criteria where we want to make sure that they’re at a certain scale and level where they have some skin in the game where we want to make sure that they’re not cutting corners and that they’re not running into major compliance issues and that they’re probably going to last for a long time. That’s what’s really nice for us is to look at these individual products and also look at them from a curation standpoint of “Are we getting the right blend of products? Are we moving the products in the right sell-throughs? Are we seeing the right level of acceleration on them and learning from our customers what they want and what they don’t want?” And we’re also going to get into making some of our own in-house products as well, just because I love making products. I love building these brands. And so, that’s an integral next step for us.

Lange: A lot of licensed cannabis operators have a disdain for hemp-derived THC products. However, several cannabis companies have expanded to the hemp space. Why is that?

Winstanley: We’re literally talking about regulating a molecule. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s from cannabis or it’s from hemp, which are also the same [plant species]. What we’re really talking about is creating access to THC products. And I think that when you look at some of those operators who are MSOs or even single-state operators, well, if there’s an opportunity to connect more people to safe, tested products, it’s the same foundational footprint of why most people got into cannabis in the first place. People wanted to provide safe, trusted access to controlled products that didn’t exist for consumers previously.

We know that the American public wants these products. … One thing hemp has done is it has absolutely democratized access to these products. I argue that is a very good thing. … I think the consumers have showed up in this category in a way they were never able to in cannabis. And that, to me, is really positive.