Maybe…
There are some that speculate water- soluble CBD, THC, and other cannabinoids could completely change the cannabis market.
There aren’t many water- soluble CBD or THC products on the market yet. But some manufacturers of water -soluble CBD see it as a facet of the industry poised to make serious headlines.
Cannabis Business Times recently spoke with Ronan Levy, chief strategy officer at Trait Biosciences, an emerging biotech company in the water- soluble CBD industry.
“I’m one of the believers,” said Levy, “that the biggest opportunity in cannabis is to displace alcohol, but to provide cannabis consumption in a way that our entire society is used to, which is sitting down with a bottle or a glass and drinking and socializing.
If you do that with cannabis and not have hangovers and not have those terrible health effects…it’s going to be a natural displacement for alcohol.”
Levy says that most cannabis beverages you can currently purchase in the US have a natural occurrence of separation as water and oil don’t mix.
Since you have to shake the drink or use crystalline forms, it doesn’t make for the best beverage experience as say, vodka or a cold beer. Having to shake a beverage, Levy says, isn’t the most ideal…or quality design.
When asked about his outlook for the water- soluble CBD market, Levy had the following to say:
“Someone described it to me the other day, and I think it was appropriate.
The guy I was speaking to was instrumental in developing gluten-free foods in Canada, and he said version one gluten-free foods, they were by and large, pretty bad.
They didn’t taste good, they had terrible texture, but if you had Celiac’ s Disease, it gave you an option.
But with time, technology, investment and more people flooding into the market of gluten-free foods, the quality of gluten-free foods has increased substantially and now the gluten-free breads are comparable with other breads.
“The cannabis industry is the same way.
There are drinks out there that people are consuming because they like the format, but they don’t taste very good, they have an unpredictable effect, and I think the first line of products coming out are probably going to be bad to OK.
But with time, investment and technologies that address a lot of the fundamental issues around the existing technologies that make mediocre drinks, you’re going to see the quality of beverages improve.
“My instinct from a market perspective is people who are just trying to throw cannabinoids into existing products like the alcohol-less wine and add cannabinoids instead, I don’t think that’s the direction.
I think there’s going to be a unique category of cannabis beverages that are distinct from the existing categories of alcohol beverages, such that you have wine, vodka, tequila and then there’s going to be a category of cannabis beverages that aren’t exactly any of those.
I think it’s going to be its own category, like tequila is different than vodka.”