Have you ever imagined you and your friends walking into a bar and instead of asking for beers to get drunk, you’d get high with it? Because that’s what’s happening in some places with legalized recreational marijuana like Canada and California.
Large beverage companies are always trying to keep up with trends such as craft beer, flavored seltzer, etc. If you’ve been in the shadows and have not heard of the edibles boom of the 21st century, you can see here how easy it is to infuse any meal with something like coconut oil. In order to keep up with demand, beverage companies are now infusing cannabis compounds such as THC and CBD into their drinks.
As an example of that, Molson Coors Canada announced last August the company would be partnering with The Hydropothecary, a Canadian cannabis producer, to create a standalone company for non-alcoholic, cannabis-infused beer.
The awareness around what we consume is constantly increasing, and PepsiCo Inc. is finding problems for growth as consumers back away from soda. Recently, its shares took a hit after the company’s CEO told analysts that PepsiCo hadn’t planned anything for cannabis.
In contrast, Coca-Cola Co. recently said the company was analyzing the possibility of infusing CBD into “functional, wellness beverages around the world.” The company’s interest is another step forward out of the black market and into the shelves of supermarkets.
It was expected that by the end of 2018 that legal marijuana would rise to $11 billion in the U.S., against $9 billion in 2017. So far, cannabis-infused beverages account less than 1 percent of that money.
However, according to recent reports from the Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. bank, it is expected that sales of cannabis-infused drinks will make up 20 percent of the U.S. edibles market, and they also will reach $600 million in sales by 2022 in America.
“Right now, drinkables make up a very small portion of the cannabis market,” said the CEO of ArcView Troy Dayton, which leads researches into cannabis markets. “Many big companies are looking at the intersection between functional beverages [infused with cannabis] and beer. Those are coming together to create a big hotspot.”
As the first state to legalize recreational marijuana in the US, Colorado sales of cannabis drinks practically doubled last year, and they have grown additional 18 percent in the first six months of 2018, reported from Flowhub LLC.
The booming of cannabis investment started back in August after Constellation Brands Inc., also known as the responsible for making Modelo Especial beer and Robert Mondavi wine, plowed $3.8 billion into the Ontario-based marijuana company Canopy Growth Corp.
The company Canopy apparently took the first step before other companies, and it has been working on cannabis-infused drinks for the past two years secretly. It all happened in an area of its Ontario campus, called the Section 56 Exemption lab.
Canopy is testing to figure out how much cannabis should they infuse into beverages, how long will the effects last, and how long do they take until they disappear. When the company first started talking to Constellation about their partnership, it didn’t mention the project fearing that they would try to steal the idea.
Canopy’s Chief Executive Officer Bruce Linton Canopy says there’s a giant market for weed drinks. “I think I would quit if I was the CEO of a beer or spirits company and I was not allowed to move on this,” he says. “I would quit because you know you’re going to get fired in the future because you didn’t catch it.”
The rumor has it that the liquor giant Diageo Plc is also interested in the market, which has helped to increase the value of more than 10 Canadian companies over $1 billion. One of the companies’ biggest concerns is that people might change their wine or drinks for a weed beer or some THC-infused drink, an idea which they name it the “substitution effect.”
If you are curious about the flavor of weed beer, scientists describe the taste of it as dry, savory, and less sweet than a typical beer. The weed beer with high THC supposedly hits faster than edibles. Scientists reported that early attempts at the weed beer tasted like cotton broccoli. Gladly, it has changed.
Shift Frequency © 2019 – Latest Trend to Hit the Alcohol Industry