Chris Martin is a medical-marijuana pioneer. He’s also a biker, ex-con, and father of five — a nice guy with a rough side, lots of tattoos, and a head full of business ideas. He got out of prison in February after serving a two-year sentence on a weapons violation related to a 2012 raid on his first medical-marijuana company, Zonka.
His Zonka chocolate bars and other edibles became popular for a while not long after Arizona voters passed the 2010 medical-marijuana law. But this was before state-authorized dispensaries; Martin sold the infused candy to unauthorized compassion clubs. Police raided the clubs and Martin’s home, finding guns (he says they belonged to his older sons) that he shouldn’t have had in the house because of a past felony conviction.
Now Martin, his family, and friends are back in the medical-marijuana business. And this time, they may have struck gold — or, rather, struck oil. CBD oil.
They’re tapping into a profitable industry of over-the-counter health products that is already generating tens of millions of dollars but may triple in total revenue in just the next three years. The growth is based on a compound found in marijuana plants called cannabidiol, a.k.a. CBD.
The products that Martin and others sell may produce a range of medicinal benefits, like reducing pain, inflammation, and anxiety — but don’t get people high.
To capitalize on the boom, Martin is renovating a dilapidated strip-mall space at 17th Avenue and Bell Road. He’s got a retail shop at the front of the unit and is outfitting the back with new appliances and equipment to help crank out their product lines for pets and people.
Through their two main companies, Hempful Farms and Paw Puddy, Martin and his crew make more than 30 CBD-containing items including tinctures, salves, patches, capsules, candies, edibles like s’mores and brownies, inhalers, vape cartridges, eye drops, and dabbable concentrates like shatter and wax.
They make their products with processed CBD — in powder and oil form — obtained from manufacturers of hemp, which is the name given to Cannabis sativa plants that contain only trace amounts of the better-known, psychoactive marijuana molecule, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC.
Chris Martin, Phoenix medical-cannabis entrepreneur.
Hempful Farms was a beehive of activity on a recent weekday in mid-October.
The shop seemed to operate like one big, happy family.
In the shop’s main production room, which was still half-empty, Billy “Irish” McMaster, who was Martin’s cellmate in prison, sat on a stool filling bags with Paw Puddy’s horse pellets. He also gives presentations on their products to local naturopaths.
At another stainless-steel table, Jay Thede, the cousin of Martin’s wife, Andrea (who goes by Andi), squirted CBD oil into a tray full of uncapped capsules with the intensity of a man working on a jigsaw puzzle.
Marnie Taylor, Andi’s longtime friend, was sticking labels on a CBD rub that smells like aloe.
One of their machines poured a beige, CBD-rich gruel into bone-shaped molds — these will be packaged as dog biscuits and sold as a pain remedy for dogs. A bag of a dozen goes for $26. Each biscuit has 33 milligrams of CBD, as tested by Phoenix’s Delta Verde Labs.
Expecting many more orders, Chris Martin has been shopping for a “high-volume, high-capacity cookie machine” that can churn out as many as 3,000 biscuits a day, he said. He’s also planning to buy an automated pill-maker that will allow Thede to work on other projects.
Martin and his wife own the companies. Their 12-year-old son, Christopher, is the CEO of Paw Puddy. But Martin was clearly in charge — he’s the one with the connections, vision, and drive to make it all happen.
One minute, he’s directing two men there to install a new freezer. Then he’s meeting with one of his business partners, Payton Curry of Flourish edibles, who’s sipping from a mason jar of iced, dark-green, raw-cannabis juice. Later, he and Andi stood in front of a laptop in a small office, going over their latest sales figures.
“If I wasn’t standing here seeing it, I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “We’re seeing 300 percent growth month-to-month.”
Since he was released from prison, the companies have netted more than $250,000 in revenue. He has 41 wholesale accounts. Every day, retail customers from all over the United States call or use the Hempful Farms website to place orders.
The Martins are not rich — yet. The earnings go into salaries for Martin and his employees, and get reinvested into the growing business. But business is booming, and Andi Martin marvels at how, just a few short months ago, while her husband was in prison, “we were counting change to get gas and kid clothes.”
There’s just one problem with this lucrative business.
credit:420intel.com