The Future of Cannabis Beverages

The founders of Pure Beauty raise a number of questions

Los Angeles-based cannabis brand Pure Beauty is one of my favorites. Founded in September 2017 by Imelda Walavalkar, who owned and operated a catering company and did social justice-oriented work before moving into cannabis; Tracy Anderson, who worked in branding and marketing for over 14 years and brought Marley Natural onto the market; and artist Irwin Tobias Matutina, “I think we’re probably the most environmentally—I like to say environmentally progressive now, because what does sustainable mean?—progressive cultivator in California,” says Walavalkar.

The list of progressive protocols is too long to be exhaustive, plus it’s constantly being edited, as Anderson and Walavalkar discover gentler ways of farming and manufacturing, but here’s an idea: They generate all of the electricity for their indoor facilities on-site and are even playing with replacing the natural gas that runs their microturbines with methane gases captured from dairy farms. They pull water from the air using HVAC and dehumidifiers and produce no runoff—it’s a closed-loop water system. They have a relationship with the City of Sacramento through which they donate soil to public parks. (Growing in living soil is, I’m told, rare for indoor farmers.) The bags in which they package pre-rolls are made out of vegetable starch and the rubber gloves they use at the cultivation facility somehow get turned into benches. Phew!

When I met up with Amerson and Walavalkar about a month ago, I wanted their take on, as you can imagine, drinks. If you read my interview with cannabis aficionado and author of the Cannabitch newsletter Jackie Bryant, you’ll know that she doubts the lofty projections about the future of cannabis beverages. Kenny Morrison, founder of VCC Brands, said something similar in a January newsletter from infusion technology company Vertosa: “This lacks nuance, but what we learned in 2022 is this: High-dose drinks compete with edibles. Low-dose drinks compete with alcohol. Smokers like to smoke, and old habits die hard. The outlook? Without federal legalization, it’s a long, tough road to ubiquity for cannabev.”

Anderson and Walavalkar don’t disagree, but they’re hopeful. Find an edited snippet of our conversation below.

Walavalkar: The beverage category, as a whole, is not profitable because of the way people buy. If you’re looking at Cann or Wunder or any of those brands, for instance, you’re buying a 2.5- to 5-milligram beverage for $5 or $6. For the average buyer, that’s too much to pay for that many milligrams of THC. Even with flower, people are buying based on THC.

So, in a way, the Little Strong Drink is more practical. One 2-ounce bottle costs $22, and you’re getting 100 milligrams.

Walavalkar: Yes, but also, for things that are really high dose, the market has always been a little more trashy. The classy comes in these micro-doses, and I think we took that and flipped it. It’s similar to the perception of indoor flower, which has always been presented in this super stoner, masculine way, [and we wanted to rethink] who the indoor customer is or can be. I think we made it classy and opened it to an audience that wouldn’t formally identify with indoor flower—and then you’re also getting the highest quality. I’m someone who likes to buy organic produce and go to the farmer’s market and everything, but I also like getting really, really stoned. I like my weed strong. So we took a similar approach where it’s like, “Okay, what’s something that is both strong and classy?"

And you’re expanding your beverage line, right?

Walavalkar: Yes. Launching in early March, we’re going to have a nighttime formula of the Little Strong Drink with CBN. Editor’s Note: CBN is a cannabinoid that's thought to have sedative properties. Also worth mentioning is that we’re the first to use live resin in our beverages. Most beverages use distillate, which is a THC isolate, but live resin is more full-spectrum. Editor’s Note: Full-spectrum is preferred to isolate by many because it means that multiple cannabinoids are present, and there’s this idea that they work best in concert with each other. The industry refers to this phenomenon as “the entourage effect.”

Why did you go with Concord grape as the flavor?

Walavalkar: We wanted to use something that would pair well with the strong taste of the live resin extract we use; it was important for us to celebrate the flavor of the resin as opposed to trying to hide it. We worked with endless flavor combinations, but the Concord grape provided a nice base, a beautiful color, and it just happened to pair really nicely with the resin, especially when we [added] a healthy dose of cardamom. Adding hibiscus, too, created a nice sour note to complement the sweetness of the grape. In the end, it’s kind of like an amaro, so you can either sip on it or you can put a little bit in soda water and cocktails.

Anderson: It’s interesting because you look at the data and what customers want is distillate with strawberry-infused [terpenes] that are artificially produced.

Walavalkar: It’s cheap and it tastes like candy.

Anderson: It’s easy, it does the trick, and that’s what it is. Our beverage is niche within a niche category within cannabis because we use more fruit juice and it’s all organic, so it’s twice the cost of anything else. It’s a small piece of our business, but Imelda is very passionate about food, and we do believe that the beverage category will continue to increase over time as cannabis use becomes more widely adopted.

Well, do you think? I spoke with Jackie Bryant, who wonders if it has legs.

Anderson: I think that it depends on how you look at the future of cannabis and how people will use it. Will it replace the socialization of alcohol? And how can you purchase it? Will it be next to the beer?

Will your bar cart have the alcohol-free option, the alcohol option, the THC-infused option, the who-knows option?

Walavalkar: This is a low-key controversial topic. I don’t think cannabis investors see it as viable right now, but a lot of people are thinking that over time, as federal legalization occurs, it could potentially attract, like, moms who are drinking less alcohol and don’t necessarily smoke. It’s a different kind of high, especially time-wise, compared to an edible. A lot of these drinks are nano-emulsified, meaning that the product hits your bloodstream faster, so you can feel it more immediately. I think that’s a compelling reason for why things might go in that direction.

Anderson: It’s challenging from a distribution perspective. How heavy is your truck? What is the cost for hauling X amount of pounds versus something that’s very light? Beverage is heavy. What is the incentive, when this is a very small category? So, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. I think beverage will eventually become a larger category—I don’t know that it will ever be bigger than pre-roll or vape, but I think it’ll have its place—but it doesn’t today.

This doesn’t have to do with drinks, but with my other career path: practicing therapy. I’m glad two articles were recently published about content-creating therapists, who make me deeply uncomfortable. (Franky, I wonder if I should remain on social media at all and have come to think that, had eventually becoming a therapist been on my mind when I started my media career, I wouldn’t have wanted to build even the relatively small following I have.) Of course, there are those licensed mental health providers who seem to navigate the media arms of their professional bodies of work in ethical and safe manners, such as Esther Perel, but things get dangerous when, as The New Statesman piece reads, “therapists turn the conversations of the consulting room into meme-able content” and, as the Refinery29 piece states, “we can be left with only a rough understanding of complex terms” when “these short videos are our sole entry point into the world of therapy.” Not sure what else I want to say about this at the moment, but it’s on my mind.