Flowers are a popular Valentine’s Day gift, but here’s a twist on the standard bouquet: Rose- and vanilla-flavored cannabis gummies, by Palo Alto’s Plus Products.
Texturally speaking, the limited-edition edibles — like all of Plus’s gummies — are as soft, springy and lightly sugar-coated as any pate de fruit you’d find in a confiserie in France.
The dice-sized cubes join the company’s latest round of intensely flavored offerings — sour watermelon sativa THC ($15), lemon and blackberry indica THC ($15) and pineapple coconut CBD ($16), which hit the market in December. To comply with new laws that regulate dosage and packaging, each gummy cube delivers 5 mg of THC or CBD, with 20 pieces per tin, for a total of 100 mg per tin.
Plus started with cannabis gum, but transitioned into gummies in March of 2017 in response to consumer demand, and found them “an immediate hit,” said Jake Heimark, 30, who worked at Facebook before moving to a startup and then founding Plus.
“We use very similar recipes to what high artisanal makers are using in Europe, where they make some really high-quality gummies,” Heimark said. “I’m happy to talk about our gelatin, an all-Kosher beef gelatin from Argentina. But our sugar and other stuff is actually kind of a secret.”
His chef, a man he identified only by the nickname “Crunchy,” develops the flavors, in part in response to the flavors in the strains of cannabis that are used.
He said the company found a recipe that releases cannabinoids more quickly based on the structure of the hydrocarbons and food product, and the sugar that’s used “is sort of our secret sauce.”
It’s no secret, however, that Plus works with five cannabis suppliers in California who Heimark says provide “high-quality, pesticide-free” cannabis on a scale large enough to keep production steady at the company’s new manufacturing plant in San Bernadino County.
Heimark is not a long-time devotee of cannabis, nor does he do well with THC-laden products, favoring his own CBD gummies because they don’t make him high.
One thing he does love, however, is making a product where everybody from the person manufacturing it to the person who’s consuming it enjoys the process.
“Sometimes in software, you don’t see the end customer; it’s not exactly clear who the customer is and what’s being sold to whom,” Heimark said. “When you make physical goods, it’s different and that’s been great.”