The company known for its festive fruit baskets just launched a new website for hemp-derived, THC-infused beverages and gummies.
Edible Brands, the parent company of the fruit basket outfit Edible Arrangements, is taking a bite of the cannabis industry.
The Georgia-based company, which had $500 million in annual sales last year, launched Edibles.com this week, an e-commerce site that sells hemp-derived THC products made by some of the biggest brands in the marijuana industry, including Wana, Kiva and Cann. Edible Brands is not selling marijuana, which is federally illegal, but is focusing on THC products derived from hemp, marijuana’s less potent and federally legal cannabis cousin.
But these products are still strong enough to get customers stoned. “This is a really natural fit for us,” Edible Brands CEO Somia Farid Silber tells Forbes. “We’re already called ‘edible’, right? We know that sometimes there’s even a little bit of an expectation from a customer for [cannabis] products.”
Edibles.com, which the company acquired last year, will launch in Texas first but will soon expand to Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, and expects to go nationwide later this year. With its network of more than 700 Edible Arrangements stores, the company says customers can order online and get their cannabis products delivered to their door faster than an old school pot dealer.
“We have an incredible delivery network with our franchisees for fulfillment—we can reach 70% of U.S. households within an hour,” says Silber.
Because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level but hemp has enough THC to get someone high, some of the weed industry’s biggest players have started selling hemp products outside of dispensaries. The hemp and marijuana industry used to be at war, but over the last year some of the biggest cannabis companies, from Curaleaf and Trulieve to Kiva and Wana, have embraced the federal legality of hemp-derived cannabinoids, thanks to the 2018 Farm Bill, and started selling their own products.
The hemp products industry is even bigger than the marijuana sector, which has been throttled by a punitive federal tax code for drug traffickers and overregulation on the state level. In 2023, hemp products sales hit $28 billion while marijuana sales topped $26 billion, according to Whitney Economics.
Joe Hodas, the CEO of Wana, one of the country’s best-selling edibles manufacturers, says he sees hemp as a way to expand to states that do not have recreational marijuana laws. Wana has also started selling its hemp-derived THC beverage line in Total Wine stores.
This is not the first time Edible Brands dipped into the cannabis space. In 2019, Edible Arrangements launched its own CBD edibles line, which are not psychoactive. But this pivot to THC is even more bold. And it’s a signal that cannabis products, especially edibles and beverages, have gone mainstream.
In 1999, Pakistani immigrant Tariq Farid launched the first Edible Arrangements store in Connecticut. Now based in Georgia, the company has become the go-to fruit basket gifting company by selling chocolate covered strawberries, cookies and bouquets of cut fruit for birthdays, anniversaries, funerals and other life milestones. In addition to its franchised stores across the U.S., Edible Brands also owns freshfuit.com and Roti, a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant chain.
Edible Brands is going headlong into the political battle over THC hemp products currently underway in Texas. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is leading a push to shutter the industry, which is composed of more than 8,000 hemp shops across the state. On Wednesday, the Texas Senate passed a bill that would ban all products containing THC, including gummies, vapes, flower, and beverages. The bill has not become law as the House still needs to vote on its proposal, which would regulate, not eliminate, the state’s hemp market. None of this is stopping Edible Brands.
The company is also building a flagship Edibles store in downtown Atlanta. The company will own the first few hemp products stores under this concept but will eventually open the model up to franchisees.
“We’re treating it like a bodega style [store],” says Thomas Winstanley, the executive vice president of Edibles.com. “We want to make it feel like it’s a regular consumer experience that’s elevated, that’s premium, and doesn’t feel like you’re walking into a smoke shop, or a gas station.”
When asked if Edible Brands is betting its future on cannabis, Silber, the founder’s daughter, is clear. “For us, this is just one of the pillars of our growth strategy,” she says. “It’s definitely not a make or break type of thing. We’re going to continue to diversify and grow this brand, just as we are with [our] other brands.”
