The rise of intoxicating hemp products has undeniably become an major trend across the U.S. cannabis industry over the past few years, with an increasing number of marijuana companies either pivoting completely to hemp or at least adding hemp goods to their product offerings. It’s also a trend that Wana Brands CEO Joe Hodas doesn’t expect to slow down anytime soon.
Rather, Hodas told Green Market Report last month, the obvious business benefits of hemp over marijuana – including the ability to sell online, ship across state lines and not be beholden to 280E – makes it an almost obvious, if not necessary, choice for companies that want to solidify their customer loyalty in the U.S.
Green Market Report sat down with Hodas to get more thoughts from the cannabis veteran on the potential of the U.S. hemp market going forward.
What motivated Wana to launch Wanderous and get into the hemp sector?
Hodas: We’d been watching the hemp sector for many, many years, and I’ll be honest, two years ago it was, “Delta-8 (THC) bad. We don’t want to be involved in this weird companies doing weird shit. That’s not what we’re about.” But as we continued to watch both at the federal level and at the state level, states began to form actual regulatory environments that allowed for it.
As we started seeing that momentum and understanding … there are ways that we can do this that would meet our standards and allow us to bring forward a good and safe product, we felt better about it.
And we said, it has to be part of our future because the (marijuana) regulatory side of things is still slow. Legalization hasn’t occurred, rescheduling hasn’t occurred. Markets are shrinking, companies are failing. We have to look for diversification of our revenue and of our audience.
This is a way for us to reach markets that we don’t have the ability to do otherwise.
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