Edibles come in all different shapes and sizes, but there are not many brands in the Missouri cannabis market that make consumption easier than Ripple—a Colorado-based cannabis company.
Ripple’s dissolvable are available at dispensaries throughout the state in five different forms—Sleep (100mg THC, 50mg CBN), Revive (100mg THC, 100mg CBG), Relief (200mg CBD, 5mg THC), Pure (100mg THC), and Balanced (75mg THC, 75mg CBD).
The marijuana is packaged in almost a pill-looking plastic canister, with 10 individual packages inside. Pop open the bottle, split your preferred packets, and then pour the flavorless, dissolvable powder into any food or beverage of your choosing. Quick, easy, and spices up any of your favorite sodas or commodities into a soon-to-be high.
The Pitch spoke with Ripple CEO and Founder Justin Singer to discuss the brand’s expansion to the Show-Me State, some of his early beginnings, and what makes these little packets of cannabis so eccentric.
The Pitch: Can you give me a little background on yourself and how you got involved in the cannabis space?
Justin Singer: I’m a consumer protection seller. Back in, like, 2013, 2014—when Colorado went rec legal, and they started talking about a seed-to-sale tracking system and the ability of testing infrastructure—That was music to my ears. As a consumer safety advocate, you’re talking about companies having to verify what they claim they’re doing. This is basically what I always wanted the FDA to do with supplements. I came from a legal background. I came from a venture capital background. This is something I dreamed of in the private market for a long time.
This was also exciting to me. Cannabis is my drug; pot’s my drug. I’m not a drinker. This has been my drug of choice since high school and college, and I’ve always been very upset at the fact that it barred me from entering into most civic areas. I’m a very weird dude for the cannabis space—I wanted to work for the FBI, the CIA. They were like, “You smoke pot, don’t bother.” And so, instead, I went to law school and business school and worked as a venture capitalist, where they didn’t give a fuck about that. Then, this industry happened, and we got very excited. We moved to Colorado, and we got up and running. The initial idea was like, hey, cannabis cannabinoids are everything that supplements want to be, and then alcohol wishes it would.
I’ve always been a smoker. It’s a routine thing for me. But I don’t believe the world’s making more smokers, nor should it. I think edibles are controlled. This is my dose, I want that every time. And the nature of packaged goods is predictability. I drink that glass of wine, I know what it’s gonna do to me. I drink that beer, I know what it’s gonna do to me. I eat that M&M, I know what’s in there. Not the case in pot. So, at first, we were just like, “How do we create predictable products that don’t require people to change their whole identity to consume?”
Can we create a low-dose product that’s in a form factor that feels illicit? That was our first product, which released in 2015, ’16, called Stillwater Tea. That was a two-and-a-half milligram tea, organic tea, the very first product of its type—the first water-soluble product, the first microdose product in the country. Very proud of it, and stores were super excited. We quickly discovered that dispensaries are no place to sell a low-dose product. That ain’t the market we have created.
In producing the tea, we were just trying to get to something that didn’t have fat because it was the brownie and cookie era. We were like, “Nobody eats their cookie, their medicine cookie, before going to bed. You got to give them something that fits their life.” How do we get to something that is flavorless, dissolves cleanly in water, and is consistently dosed time and time again? To make the tea, we made this powder that we dual-filled with the tea. And some of my employees were taking the powder home to infuse their Diet Cokes or Coca-Cola. You can clearly make anything an edible. We worked so hard on that; It became so exciting.
You touched on the medicinal aspect of the product, and it even comes in a little bottle that almost reminds me of a pill bottle. Was the plan to design the packaging to make the product appear similar to over-the-counter supplements?
That was very much the goal. Look, we’re one of the only companies in the country that has done the actual research around our products. To say that we start out medicinally, in that sense, I don’t want to get so narrow as medicinal, but therapeutic. It is what people need in their lives. I put it up there like Tylenol. It’s nothing to freak out about. It is something that is useful in many different walks of times. That’s the level of medicine we think about, not like opioids.
We’re the only people who’ve published peer-reviewed research and have stuck needles in people’s arms to see what their blood circulating concentration of THC is when consuming our products versus other people’s products. We’ve done four of them, and I’m pretty sure nobody has done any. There’s lots of research that’s federally funded that involves pot from the University of Mississippi. We were the only study that actually bought products at dispensaries and tested those on people.
The THC [study] was in 2022. We did a bunch of CBD [studies] after the Farm Bill in 2018, ’19. But, in 2022, we tested all of our products against Wana and their fast-acting because they were the leader in the state at that time, and we found that we were at least twice as fast to onset, but more importantly, you absorbed four and a half times as much THC. So, you were getting almost five times the bang for your buck versus other products. That’s what people don’t understand about non-emulsified THC, poorly emulsified THC; You end up pissing out most of it. It doesn’t actually get to your bloodstream. My 10mg delivers four and a half times more into the bloodstream than Wana’s 10mg.
That is incredibly interesting. Is that strictly because it’s dissolvable and it can get to your bloodstream quicker or are there other aspects in the product that affect how much your body is truly receiving?
It’s everything about it. We control the ingredient. There’s no way to know ahead of time which ingredient is really going to absorb that. You can only do that through blood testing. Try three different formulas and see which one works best. Then, you update your formula, focus on the one that works best, and see, in that formula, which three different particle sizes work best.
We test all of these things over time. We discovered that nano doesn’t matter, like doesn’t matter at all. In fact, it is counterproductive after a certain point. So guys are just turning their nano up to 11; That ain’t doing it. You get 10 times the mileage out of picking the right emulsifier, the right ingredient deck. Most people in this industry are picking their emulsifiers based on how easy it is to manufacture and how cheap it is to buy. We’re picking our emulsifier based on what’s gonna deliver the most THC.
What has the reception of the product been like in Missouri since the brand’s expansion?
We were hoping to get there early. We missed out on the window. Now, it’s a high-quality product. What I love about Ripple, and what we’ve always loved about Ripple, is we don’t market it. It’s word of mouth, people trying it and being like, “Oh my God, this actually works.” This actually is the product that it claims to be and like that takes a little more time, because I don’t like marketing in this industry.
I know that Ripple is in a total of five states, including Missouri. What are some of the challenges with expanding to new states?
Licensing is hard, especially if you want to do it right. It’s very easy to find somebody who will pay you a royalty to slap your name on a piece of shit in the hopes that a consumer will sell it. If you want to work with somebody who actually cares about producing the same product that you produce in Colorado and all the other states, that’s a lot harder to find. Even if you find them, then you have to train their people. It’s a process; It’s really hard. Nothing in the marijuana industry is easy. It’s doubly difficult with the whole interstate shit.
It’s the least consumer friendly market out there. I hate how much everybody looks at the cannabis industry. Speaking specifically with lawmakers at this point, we’re like, “Okay, what we really need to do is give people pads to get rich, or we got to give people pads to banking.” Yes, you do, but you start from the perspective of, “How do people get rich in this space?” And the answer is that people buy their products. Regulation exists to protect consumers from people who are operating in a very gray legal area. Once you understand that cannabis legalization is about consumers, not about manufacturers, it all becomes much easier.
We’ve discussed how the dissolvable products here in Missouri are flavorless and can be added to pretty much any food that consumers want, but have you all considered making a flavored product?
We do have flavored packets that we hope to bring to Missouri sometime in early 2025, along with tablets, which I believe may have just launched in Missouri. So, there’s two follow-on products from our powder technology—One is an adult Pixie Stick called Ripsticks. If you go to tryripple.com and look at those, that’s just flavored in the same packet, pour it directly on your tongue.
We’ve got versions of that that I’m super fucking proud of, all under live rosin. I think we do something unique in live rosin—We don’t actually try to cover the flavor. We try to complement the flavor.
We also have tablets that have launched in Colorado and are extremely successful where we’re able, with our powder, to load more cannabinoids into a tablet than anybody else. They’re awesome and fast-acting, easy flavor, cheap, small, like Advil sized.
We do gummies here in Colorado. We’ve got a brand called Ripped that was the fastest growing brand in the country last year. I love it to death, because that’s quality gummy. It’s got all the food science. But the reason it grew so fast is because we’re really good at operations, and we reduced our cost structure to the point where I could undercut the market.
Looking at what the Missouri cannabis market currently has to offer, I don’t see many other dissolvable edible brands.
We’ve got a patent on powder. I’ve literally had a patent application outstanding since the Obama administration. I’ve got the patent in the EU and in Germany, and I expect the one in the US anytime. This was something we invented. Nobody thought to put this in a powder, this is something that was invented.
We do a very different powder than everybody else. We’ve looked at our powders and other people’s powders under an electron microscope, so you can really see what the surfaces look like, and that’s how you know how it’s going to behave in water. You look at something that most of the other powders are produced through a process called spray-drying. It’s basically like snow making in reverse—apply heat and atomize, aerosolize a liquid through it and in midair it becomes dry. If you look at that under an electron microscope, it looks like salt crystals.
Now ours, we produce with a process called agglomeration. It’s the way that quicksand works. What you can do is start building up the particle. So, instead of one grape, it looks like a bunch of grapes. When you look at ours under the electron microscope, it looks like a round sponge that has, like, all these little crannies and crevices in it. That’s why it pours well: because it’s round, not square. And that’s why it dissolves well: because the water gets into those crevices and breaks them all apart, rather than a crystal that the water just surrounds.
Catching up with Ripple CEO and Co-Founder Justin Singer to discuss the unique aspects of the product in the Missouri cannabis industry. Read More
