Meet the Queen of Legal Weed
CAN A 58-YEAR-OLD FORMER INSURANCE EXECUTIVE BUILD THE FIRST NATIONAL MARIJUANA BRAND? WITH THESE GUMMIES, SHE JUST MIGHT
NANCY WHITEMAN STILL MOURNS those candied, spice- dusted almonds. “They were so good. They were so stinking good,” she sighs longingly. And so stinking hard to make—legally.
Because Whiteman, the unlikely co-founder and co-owner of the most successful specialized candy business in Colorado, didn’t stop with the curry powder and sugar and salt. She also dredged those almonds through syrup infused with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
After all, that’s what her seven-year-old company, Wana Brands, makes: treats that can get you really, really high. The Boulder-based business, which Whiteman runs with her
ex-husband, ended last year as the best-selling purveyor of marijuana-infused edibles in its home state of Colorado, according to industry data firm BDS Analytics.
Whiteman may have begun her legal-pot career rummaging through weed-extraction videos on YouTube and testing recipes in a kitchen that was “one step up from an Easy-Bake oven,” but Walter White she is not. Nor is she even Mary-Louise Parker’s Nancy Botwin, the housewife-dealer of Weeds. A 58-year-old mother of two, Whiteman presents as more sales rep than druglord: russet hair in a sensible bob, a sly sense of humor tucked beneath a Northeastern reserve, and the professionally tidy business casual of someone who started her career in suits. “Whatever your stereotype might be of somebody in the marijuana business, I’m probably not it,” Whiteman, a former insurance marketing executive, wryly acknowledges. “I think a lot of times people are just surprised.”
Whiteman happened to be in the right place at the right time. Colorado in 2012 became one of the first two states to legalize marijuana for nonmedical (or what’s called recreational or adult) use and is now its biggest U.S. market. Anyone age 21 or older may now walk into a dispensary there, show an ID, and buy an ounce of loose “flower” to smoke, or concentrated oil for a vaporizer, or a pot brownie or chocolate bar or ice cream or granola bite or any other of the many, many types of food that are infused with THC.
Wana—an abbreviation of marijuana, and the brand name for the Mountain High Products parent company—currently sells about a dozen edible products in both medical and recre- ational varieties. What put Whiteman on the map last year, helping her company earn $8.4 million in revenue, is Wana’s sour gummies: neon-bright, sugar-dipped, vegan cubes of pectin and corn syrup and fruit flavor and 10 milligrams of THC-infused oil per bite. They look like fancy square gumdrops, taste like gourmet Sour Patch Kids, and can pack the wallop of a powerful sleeping pill that simultaneously stokes every lingering anxiety about your email backlog. (In this reporter’s experience, at least.)
Whiteman’s pragmatism has enabled her to thrive in an industry that is still illegal federally, and very much a minefield. Routine business tasks like keeping a bank account, setting up social media promotions, and shipping products around the country to the 28 other states ( plus D.C.) where cannabis is legal to varying degrees can be difficult to impossible. State regulations are an ever-shifting complication, affecting everything from product packaging (which in Colorado must be childproof ) to labeling (which now includes THC warnings stamped into each gummy or other piece of weed-laced food) and even language (since October, Whiteman can’t legally call her sugary products “candy”).
Take those delicious weed-infused, curry-dusted almonds Whiteman still misses. “There was no way to make sure that each dosage” of spice mix was evenly distributed across every almond, says Whiteman, leading her to yank one of her favorite Wana products from the shelves. (She would’ve had to anyway: In 2014, Colorado started requiring edibles makers to ensure that THC was consistently spread across their products.)
Even with the industry’s many constraints, it is booming and has drawn entrepreneurs of all stripes trying to get in on the ground floor. The Colorado market alone accounted for more than $1 billion in sales in 2016, or almost a sixth of national revenue, according to Arcview. The investor group and research firm projects that the North American marijuana market will exceed $22 billion in revenue by 2021. According to the Brewer’s Association, that’s about the current size of the craft-beer industry, another entrepreneurdriven legal-vice market. Investors last year poured $205 million into legal-cannabis startups, according to CB Insights, including those that grow the plants, dispensaries that sell its various incarnations, and consumer-products makers that turn it into food—not to mention all of the supporting software providers and payment processors and branding specialists and other auxiliary businesses that have sprung up to support this industry just starting to take shape.
Now Wana is one of several fast-growing startups trying to establish a national presence. Whiteman and her ex-husband/co-founder, John, are jockeying with a crowd of other Colorado edibles entrepreneurs who have their own product hits, including infused- drinks producer Dixie Brands; chocolate-taffy maker Cheeba Chews; chocolate-bar maker Incredibles, and rival gummy company Americanna. Someday—in years or decades— one of these companies could become the Mars candy or Sam Adams of edibles, on the shelves of every Target and 7-Eleven.
But like everything else in the cannabis business, the road to becoming a national consumer brand is exponentially more complicated. Wana can’t legally ship anything that contains marijuana beyond the Colorado border, so it is setting up licensing and distribution partnerships in every state it wants to
ONE OF THESE COMPANIES COULD BECOME THE MARS CANDY OR SAM ADAMS OF EDIBLES.