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Meet Nancy Whiteman of Wana Brands in Boulder

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Whiteman.

Nancy, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Back in 2009, when the economy was in the midst of the Great Recession, I was talking to a neighbor who had mentioned he was getting into the infused cannabis beverage business. It was the right place and time: Colorado was just beginning to regulate medical marijuana and this conversation got me thinking. A lot of business owners got into the cannabis industry because they had a family member with a medical issue or for advocacy reasons. At the time, I was a marketing consultant, but I was looking for an opportunity to create something that wasn’t tied directly to billable hours, something I could scale. So my partner and I rented a small commercial kitchen, bootstrapped the launch of Wana, and we were off to the races.

In the early 2010s, it was a bit of the Wild West. We didn’t have any data to work from so we made all kinds of infused products, including infused nuts, cookies and bars, baked goods and candy. We started making gummies around 2011. We tried everything and then watched what sold and what didn’t. We found that baked goods didn’t have a long shelf life and beverages were heavy for shipping. The confectionary products, such as gummies, were easier to ship and shelf-stable. We really hit our sweet spot with our Sour Gummie line.

In those early days, there were major issues with product consistency, but from the beginning, Wana has third-party tested its products to ensure purity and potency. This high bar for consistency has instilled a great sense of trust for Wana among consumers and retailers. Wana Sour Gummies are handcrafted and infused with high-quality tincture during the cooking process to ensure the best tasting, highest quality, most consistent gummie on the market.

Over the past decade, we invested greatly in our recipes, which makes our Wana products even more of a treat. More than 30 different types of pectin were tested to determine the best possible consistency and scalability. Plus, fruit pectin makes Wana Sour Gummies vegan. All Wana products are made with gluten-free ingredients and taste like real fruit, thanks to all-natural flavoring, coloring and sugar. Wana gummies contain no mineral oil or artificial sweeteners, which can cause stomach upset. As you can see, we’re constantly looking for ways to continue to innovate, such as our new Wana Quick Fast-Acting Gummies, which launched in Colorado in March.

Has it been a smooth road?
From regulations to marketing, there’s nothing easy about owning and running a cannabis brand. The biggest challenge is building an industry from the ground up. Regulations are different in every state, affecting everything from production to advertising. We can’t have centralized production like most CPG companies because we can’t ship across state lines. These state-by-state regulations mean we can’t have consistency in the visibility of the brand and sometimes even in dosage. For example, Illinois doesn’t allow us to use fruit on the packaging. And while most states have an individual serving size of 10mg, Oregon’s regulations specify 5mg servings. So it’s very important to find the best partners in each state we expand into. No one can go it alone. Your success depends on your supply chain partners and the level they are delivering. To add another layer of challenges, the cannabis industry can’t deduct expenses from our taxes because of 280E.

And of course, now we’re operating in a world that is being rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve had to pivot goals and objectives in nearly every department of the company. In production, we had to account for social distancing and rework shifts and work station layout. In marketing, we pivoted from a B2B focus to a consumer focus. And the pandemic has greatly affected the onboarding of our out of state partners, pushing back launch dates. Finally, while cannabis has been recognized as an essential business in Colorado and the seven other markets we’re currently operating in, we also are not recognized as a federally legal industry. This means the cannabis industry can’t access federal funds like any other business can. But through it all, we take one step at a time and learn to be creative.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Today Wana Brands is the No. 1 edibles brand in the United States, with more dollars sold than any other brand, according to BDSA 2019 Brand Share Report. Wana products offer diverse product forms, including edibles, vapes, and extended-release capsules, four different CBD/THC ratios, as well as a variety of different dosages, onset times and duration of effects. The portfolio is designed so products can be used singly or in combination to address specific health, wellness, and recreational needs.

Wana is focused on leading the industry in innovation. To that point, we identified a need for a product that could deliver a less intense inhalation-like experience in an edible form quickly and predictably, so we set out to make that a reality. Our recently launched Wana Quick Fast-Acting Gummies more closely mirror the onset and offset time of a typical inhalable cannabis product or an alcoholic beverage, making them a unique alternative to the traditional edible experience. Wana’s traditional edibles take effect in approximately two hours and last about six hours. Our recently launched Wana Quick Fast-Acting Gummies featuring new Happy Hour flavors provide another consumer option: a novel edible experience, with an onset of 5-15 mins and Delta-9-THC effects–similar to an inhalation effect rather than an edible effect–lasting three to four hours. Plus, the new Wana product line features a new all-natural recipe, with no high fructose corn syrup.

The encapsulation technology is paired with new flavors from Wana, including CBD/THC 1:1 Strawberry Margarita, Sativa Peach Bellini and Indica Piña Colada. Since we launched a decade ago, we’ve expanded far beyond our Colorado headquarters. Wana products are now also available in California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon and Oklahoma dispensaries, with Maryland, Missouri and Florida (as regulations allow) among the states imminently coming online. We also expect to launch Wana Brands internationally to Canada in 2020.

I’m also really proud of Wana Brands’ focus on “Enhancing Your World” through a strategic Corporate Social Responsibility program that invests in local communities through Donations and Aid, Volunteering, Environmental Impact and Sustainability, and Ethical & Transparent Business Practices. And we’ve made sustainability a priority throughout the organization, last year unveiling a more sustainable packaging solution that reduces three layers of packaging to only one.

Being part of this amazing industry and helping it to grow and evolve is very inspiring to me. I’m very competitive, so I love the process of building the company and creating opportunities for our team. We’ve just started implementing our Corporate Social Responsibility program and knowing that we have the chance to enhance people’s lives in very concrete ways keeps me motivated as well.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Yes, our city is the perfect place to get involved in the cannabis industry. Anyone who’s looking to get into the industry needs to have a passion that will sustain them through the trials and tribulations. They will also need patience, perseverance, flexibility, resilience and creativity.

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