This Colorado company is making CBD extract by the truckload
BOULDER The nondescript building in east Boulder is like many other in the city; is, in fact, identical to several surrounding structures. Passing motorists and pedestrians wouldnt know that theres a multi-million dollar manufacturing operation inside. And thats the way the folks at CW Hemp want it.
Even if someone did manage to peek inside the 18,000-square-foot lab, warehouse and office space, they wouldnt know that one of the most famous strains of hemp in the world is processed here.
Between 600 and 1,000 units of CWs product ship from the premises each month, extracted from a strain of the plant called Charlottes Web, made famous by the 2013 Sanjay Gupta-hosted CNN documentary Weed.
Gupta, who had previously come out in opposition to marijuana legalization, reversed course after interacting with then six-year-old Charlotte Figi, who suffered from severe seizures as a result of Dravet Syndrome.
Charlottes story, and the tales of many other children like her with debilitating physical conditions, sparked a wave of media coverage and an influx of desperate parents to the Colorado Springs dispensary where the Stanley brothers were selling extracts from their low-THC strain that they later named after their first patient, Charlotte.
The waiting list for the product grew to 15,000. So the Stanley brothers Jared, Jesse, Joel, Jon, Jordan, and Josh set up a lab and production facility in Boulder in 2014, and CW Hemp (then called CW Botanicals) was born.
Today, they grow 150,000 hemp plants on 65 acres in Wray. Every pound is brought to Boulder where it is extracted and combined with organic olive or coconut oil and then sold by the truckload on the companys website more than $1 million worth in each of the past two months.
Were looking at sales weve never seen before, said Vijay Bachus, CWs director of operations.
Bachus, a Longmont resident and University of Colorado grad, came to CW in December after 10 years facilitating brand growth in the natural foods world, including at Longmonts Madhava Sweeteners and Boulder Organic Foods.
Now, he is prepared to do the same with the two-year-old CW as it undergoes a rebranding and effort to move into retail. The products are currently available in Alfalfas and Mountain Mamas, a Colorado Springs chain.
But Bacus is already thinking big a national pharmacy rollout, small packets in every convenience store and gas station in America, even international expansion to the EU and South America.
Were working on becoming the Kleenex of the industry.
Thats often an insult levied against the company, whose product became synonymous with the non-psychoactive CBD during the media coverage of hundreds of parents moving their ill children to the state to gain access to Charlottes Web.
Thousands of patients ended up in a holding pattern for the product as demand overwhelmed supply and all across Colorado, industry veterans say, dozens of dispensaries had backstocks of CBD oil on the shelves.
Joel Stanley, now CEO of CW, respectfully disagrees with that assessment, saying the boom in CBD products started after Guptas Weed aired.
Prior to that point, there was almost nothing with CBD in it, Stanley said. Very few people could even pronounce cannabidiol. After the piece, in 2013, is when it blew up. There were 13, then 30, then 100 CBD things on Amazon.
Whether the Stanleys were the pioneers or merely the poster children, many in the industry agree CW gave a giant boost to the idea that cannabis could do more than just get people high.
It gave idea that this is medicine, said Travis Howard, owner of Gunbarrels Green Dream medical dispensary and Niwots Shift Cannabis consulting. Without that story and Sanjay Gupta and the rest, a lot of states might not be moving.
It got the conversation going, added Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industries Association. We have 25 states that have ...
