Page 21 - BusinessWest November 23, 2020

Trays of CBD-infused gummies are ready for packaging at the Heritage plant.
because they’re not FDA-approved, are not allowed to make specific medical claims — com- panies like Heritage CBD and Western MA Hemp have set down roots (literally and figuratively) in a field that’s still rapidly changing, in ways both regulatory and otherwise.
Overcoming the Stigma
Jake Goodyear, who ran the Renewable Energy division at Sandri before moving into the role of Heritage CBD president, said it wasn’t initially a move he wanted to make.
“I was a skeptic,” he told BusinessWest. “I’d
been brainwashed into the stigma around cannabis and marijuana. It took me a while just to get my head around the history of the plant — and then I got mad that my point of view was so twisted on this subject because of what I had been told my whole
life. When I got over that, I realized there was a huge opportunity here, and there really was nothing negative about hemp and CBD, and there are a lot of positives.”
One of the first challenges was regulatory, as the federal government still listed hemp and CBD as a Sched- ule 1 drug, so Heritage was unable to access a bank account or merchant services for credit-card payments. That changed with the 2018 Farm Bill, though THC-rich cannabis remains federally illegal as a Schedule 1 drug.
Still, the state has offered its own unique series of barriers.
“Massachusetts policy gave us a license to grow hemp and process it into specific products like tinctures and gummies and soft-gel cap- sules,” Goodyear said, “but there was no regula- tory pathway to sell them to market.”
For that reason, product sales at both Heritage and Western MA Hemp are largely online. Both companies emphasize multiple layers of third- party testing to ensure the products are clean, free of pesticides and toxins, and contain the ratios of ingredients they claim.
“I had a cannabis background — I was a fan of cannabis, both medical and recreational; it helped me a lot,” said Lupario, who launched
his business a couple years ago with mentor and arborist Jim Sweeney. “He took me under his wing and provided some finances to allow me to put to use what skills and knowledge I had.”
“There’s a lot of misinformation and confusion out there about hemp and CBD and cannabis, and we want to bring it to people and explain what we do and how it’s done.”
The company also wholesales hemp flower and biomass to various processors for industrial uses; in fact, that’s the more lucrative side of the business while Lupario continues to grow his line of wellness products.
“It takes time to build a brand. We knew we wouldn’t be able to make our operating costs with what we made from these products ... so what we don’t use in our products goes into the wholesale line,” he explained. “Because we grow our own material, we can keep margins down, have competitive pricing, and still create a really high-grade product.”
On a similar note, on a tour of the Heritage plant, Van Epps paused in the room where gum- mies are being infused with CBD to point out a
Hemp
Continued on page 39
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