The woman who brought cannabis to Waitrose
As medicinal oil takes off, Rebekah Hall tells Helen Chandler-wilde how she plans to be Britain’s first CBD millionaire
When Rebekah Hall is asked about her line of work, she’s become used to raised eyebrows.
“People don’t expect me to be talking about cannabis. I’m a middle-class white woman,” says Hall, the founder of drinks business Botanic Lab, whose soft drinks are infused with CBD, the non-psychoactive compound found in the cannabis plant.
Interest in CBD, also known as cannabidiol, is exploding, with hundreds of products flooding the market in the past year as the compound is shown to alleviate health problems from anxiety to chronic pain.
Hall, 38, is riding the ups and downs of the cannabis market, with ambitions to become the first person in the UK to make a million from CBD. She hopes her CBD tea will become an alternative to a glass of wine after work. Her products are already stocked by Harrods, Waitrose and Ocado, and she has her sights set on Marks & Spencer.
“I totally want to be the queen of cannabis,” she says.
We meet in her converted warehouse office in Shoreditch, east London. Hall, who grew up in Somerset with an IT worker father and a mother working in sustainability, spent a decade in the City, working as an accountant and investment banker, before growing restless.
“I looked at my bosses and I didn’t want to end up in the glass office doing that job for the rest of my life,” she says. “I turned 30 and thought: ‘Unless I give it up and start from scratch, I’ll never do it.’”
After running through a couple of ideas, Hall decided to quit and open a health drinks business, sensing that the UK market was far less developed than that in the US.
Botanic Lab came into being in 2014, with the aim of making “drinks that do something”, using ingredients like ginseng for immune system support and turmeric to fight inflammation. Hall says she was always keen to develop a CBD product, but was waiting for the public to be “ready to accept it”.
The turning point came last summer with the case of
Billy Caldwell, the 12-yearold boy with a severe form of epilepsy that can be treated with medical cannabis. His plight caused public perceptions of the drug to change drastically, leading to Sajid Javid, the home secretary at the time, to issue a licence allowing doctors to prescribe medicinal cannabis oil in the UK. “We brought out our product within four months of that,” she says.
CBD helped the company to grow: today, it employs 10 people, and is expected to pull in £3.5million of revenue this year. There is still much more room to grow, including for Hall’s salary, which is still far below what it was in banking. She says one casualty of the business is her Net- a
Porter shopping habit.
Dutch Courage, the company’s main product, contains 5mg of CBD per 250ml. Hall describes it as a “social lubricant” like alcohol: a way to shrug off nerves without the hangover. “It might be before a big meeting when you’re feeling nervous, it might be the end of work when you want to wind down, it might be a drink with friends when you’re chilling out,” she says. Hall herself enjoys it regularly.
Dutch Courage is just one of a dizzying range of CBD products launching in recent months, from hummus to hand cream; the Centre for Medicinal Cannabis, a think tank, estimates that it will be a £1billion industry in the UK by 2025. Even Coca-cola has announced that it is developing a Cbd-infused beverage.
Hall calls it “cannabis 2.0”: the drug is shedding its image as a source of teenage rebellion and is set to become a premium wellness product.
Although she imagined Botanic Lab’s customers would be healthconscious young professionals, there is also interest from those in middleage and approaching retirement.
“One thing that’s interesting is the amount of CBD sold to golf clubs,” she says. “They’re often slightly older, with joint problems and they need a good swing.”
Hall sees this mainstream acceptance of CBD as the first step on the road to full legalisation, which she thinks will happen in “five to eight years”. She thinks this will be a great thing for the economy, but also for the many patients who could benefit. “From a therapeutic perspective, there are people who rely on these products, who need to know that they’re getting good consistent quality.”
Hall says she will expand her cannabis business as regulation becomes more accommodative, and would release a drink containing THC, the compound in cannabis that gets you high. “Whatever your views about legalisation, we’re fully committed to cannabis as a plant.”
But until full legalisation happens in the UK, the murky legal status of cannabis makes the industry something of a Wild West. The compliance teams in big brands are wary of touching it, says Hall. “Big retailers have a huge reputation to protect. And their lawyers have no idea what they’re talking about.”
There are two schools of thinking about the legality of her own product: “If you read the letter of the [European Commission’s] Novel Food directive, our product is legal, if you interpret it it’s not.” The ongoing confusion makes this at times a risky business: Botanic Lab’s website was shut down for three months by the American company that handles its online payments, after it thought she was running an illegal company. “We’re creating a product where you don’t know if you’re going to be able to sell it tomorrow. My shareholders have had to be pretty supportive.” Nervousness among big companies leaves a cottage industry of small producers left to pick up customer demand. This is made possible by the fact that CBD is considered a “novel food” by the Government, so its regulatory oversight is not as tight as if it were sold as a medicine.
This adds to the stress that Hall is already under as an entrepreneur. She croaks her way through our interview because of her “Ibiza flu”, caught from a break on the island with a friend during which she worked every day from nine until six. It was the closest thing she’s had to a holiday in the five years since opening Botanic Lab. As you might imagine, she’s rather steely: one of her team tells me she’s “a horror” with negotiations.
But however stressful life is, you would have to prise the business from her dead hands. She’s tired of women building a business only to delegate the “numbers” to a man: “If you don’t have your head round the numbers, it’s not your business.”
She has a problem with other female stereotypes, too. “The rhetoric towards women that you can have it all is bulls---. It’s one of the biggest poisons that is holding women back.” She says she chose running the business over focusing on her private life. “I am single, childless and proud,” she says. “I probably wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing had I had children in my 30s.”
She is hoping to inspire other women to be honest about what they want. “When women are asked ‘What’s your goal?’ they say ‘I want to change the world and make people’s lives better’. Those are all very worthy goals, but my primary goal is to make money. And I’m not ashamed of it.”
‘CBD is being sold to golf clubs, to older people who need a good swing’