Heady Vermont (www.headyvermont.com), a cannabis advocacy group that partners with most of the major cannabis producers in the state, says that its guess is that half the CBD businesses in the group’s directory are owned by women. Kathy Blume, Heady Vermont’s content and events manager, says, “At workshops, and also Women of Cannabis networking events we host, there are a lot of herbalists, who are primarily women, who already have tremendous capacity when it comes to working with plant medicine. Cannabis, as we know, is an incredibly powerful medicine, and it’s been an opportunity for them to expand an already deep repertoire and bring, at this point legally, CBD and, hopefully in the near future, full spectrum with THC cannabis into the work that they’re doing.”

Bridget Conry, operations manager, and Amy Bacon , kitchen manager, work at Champlain Valley Dispensary’s headquarters in Milton. Photo: Jan Doerler

“In sustainable business they talk about the triple bottom line: people, profit, planet,” she continues. “In cannabis I think there’s a sense that, yes, people want to earn a living, but they also want to make things better.” This was true for all the women I spoke to, including Bridget Conry and Amy Bacon of Champlain Valley Dispensary (CVD), a company that, according to the dispensary’s website, “is one of the largest producers and sellers of medical cannabis in the state” (www.cvdvt.org).

“I was looking for more, and that’s what I like about cannabis, the therapeutic aspect of it,” says Bacon, the infusion kitchen and processing manager. She and Bridget Conry, director of sales and product development, both come from culinary backgrounds, working with farm-to-table chefs and mentors like Alice Waters and Maury Rubin. Conry was also the owner of her own herbal clinic. They bring the same discipline of a commercial kitchen and sensibility of food as medicine to their work at CVD’s processing facility in Milton.

When medical marijuana was legalized in Vermont in 2011, CVD was awarded the first license in 2012 to open a dispensary in Burlington. A year later, the dispensary was awarded a second license to operate a sister facility, Southern Vermont Wellness, in Brattleboro. This past summer it opened additional dispensing locations in South Burlington and Middlebury.

The company’s newest venture, Ceres Natural Remedies (www.ceresremedies.com), is focused on CBD products with stores in Burlington, Brattleboro, and Middlebury. “Everything we offer patients is produced at our Chittenden County facilities,” says Conry, including the Ceres line of products. There is a strict policy against consuming any products at the workplace for employees, which, Bacon says, “is funny in the test kitchen. Coming from the food industry, I’m used to being able to taste everything. I can’t do that with all our finished products.”

From mother plant to caramel edibles, CVD is a vertical facility, meaning the company controls its products from start to finish. The dispensary has its own labs where employees can test plants, extract, and final products, an advantage in an unregulated industry where, according to Conry, “as many as 80 percent of labels are incorrect.” CVD also tests the 60 brands of extracts, capsules, edibles, pet, and body care products made from hemp that it carries in its stores to ensure proper dosage and labeling. “It’s often a matter of finding the right product from the right source for people. If one doesn’t work, another might. People just need to find what’s right for them,” says Conry. “Patients coming into both the medical marijuana dispensaries and Ceres Natural Remedies are primarily looking to manage pain, spasticity, inflammation, sleep, and anxiety. Most of our customers are looking for relief without the high. CBD alone does not work for everybody or every condition—that is where we open up the conversation to other cannabinoids and companion botanicals.”

The Entourage Effect

Champlain Valley Dispensary is one of many companies that is seeking to partner CBD with other botanicals for what’s called an “entourage effect.” Lauren Andrews, a clinical aromatherapist and nurse, focuses on blending “high terpene aromatic plant oils, like citrus, lavender or clove bud, to our Vermont-sourced, organic, full-spectrum CBD extract,” she says. “These plant oils, when combined, create highly effective synergies that address a wide range of health issues.” Her business, AroMed, has a storefront on State Street in Montpelier and a newly opened second location next to Planet Fitness in the Berlin Mall.

When she first started selling CBD products, she was not impressed with what was on the market. She had a difficult time finding products that had no synthetic colors or fragrances and began to produce her own because, she says, “I knew I could do better.”

“Our most popular offering is AroMed’s Relief Lotion,” she explains. “It is a combination of analgesic plant extracts, like arnica, white willow, clove bud, and CBD. It is not unusual for people who get pain relief from it to come in and buy multiple jars and send them to friends and family. We now have customers as far away as Hawaii that use it.” She also carries CBD-infused dark chocolate, maple syrup, maple sugar, and gummies, but AroMed’s signature products are still its tinctures.

“Our botanically infused CBD for under-the-tongue application has been a game changer for AroMed,” she says. “Our most popular blends can significantly decrease pain and anxiety while addressing insomnia, digestive issues, and women’s health challenges, like PMS or symptoms of menopause. CBD, at its core, is a strong anti-inflammatory.”   

Much of what Andrews does is to educate the public and customers. “There’s a lot of buzz,” she says. “People are curious. They are hearing from friends and family who are having positive effects from CBD.”

Last year, Andrews completed a seven-week online course in the Cannabis Science and Medicine Program through UVM’s Department of Pharmacology and earned a professional certificate. She says the course was definitely “worth it.” According to its website, the program is designed to “help address the increasing need for research-based and relevant medical Cannabis education across the country.” UVM is the first medical school in the nation to offer a professional certificate in cannabis and medicine and estimates that of its 150 participants to date 66 percent have been women. In addition to the certification, the program has five accredited modules in continuing education in cannabis and medical science. The program is directed by Dr. Monique McHenry, who is also the executive director of Vermont Patients Alliance, a dispensary that serves 30 percent of the 3,500 Vermonters on the Vermont Marijuana Registry for therapeutic use of cannabis.

For Love and Money

Biologists in the field sometimes like to note that the high numbers of women working with cannabis make sense since the industry almost exclusively works with the female plant. However, Denise Stubbs, of Vermont Hemp Nursery in Plainfield (www.facebook.com/jmc429/) stresses the importance of both plants.

“People are wondering, ‘How can I get my piece of the pie?’ About a year ago, my permit was number 90-something. In just the last growing season, the number of registered hemp farmers has jumped to 400.”

Stubbs has lived in Vermont since 1989 and worked with local farmers over the years. “I’ve always had an interest in growing,” she says. “I have a day job. I work for mental health, and I love that work, but I really love growing. This has actually given me an opportunity to think about where I’m truly happy, and it’s in the plant world.”

Although there are a lot of women in the cannabis and hemp industry, Stubbs says, “I haven’t met very many female growers. I think that you’ll find that there are more male growers in hemp, and you’ll find a higher number of females that make the products. At least, that’s my experience in the past year.”

“I’m proud to be a hemp farmer,” she continues. “It’s just the beginning in Vermont. There’s a lot of room for growth for everybody.”

That is certainly true for Bryttnie Supalight, owner of SupaLitCBD of Burlington (www.supalitcbd.com), who recently moved to Vermont from Maui. Before Hawaii, she lived in Colorado and worked in the cannabis industry. She says, “I came here to grow hemp, and I just decided to stay and start my own business and see what I can do with it.” She launched her business in October, making and selling body care products, tinctures, and even hot cocoa, all infused with CBD.

Supalight began working with cannabis for the same reason as many people: it worked. “I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was 14 years old,” she says. “I was put on strong medicine that didn’t help. When I found medical marijuana years later, it was the thing that helped me. That’s really what got me into it, seeing for myself the effects that it could have. It made me feel like I could live more of a normal life.”

“It’s interesting how it’s all evolved,” she continues, “how they’ve been able to isolate out the CBD and make a product for people that’s not psychoactive. I thought about doing this years ago, but that wasn’t as readily available then. It’s really a good time to get into it, where you can offer people a product that they won’t be so scared to try. What’s really inspiring to me is the helping-people aspect. Everybody needs it, we kind of can’t have enough, so it’s good that we’re all doing it.”

The story of Michele Waters, who founded Green Mountain Hemp Company (www.greenmountainhempcompany.com) with her husband in St. Albans two years ago, is another example of years of experience and personal healing coming together to launch a CBD business. Waters set on the road to healing at an early age, first as a nutrition major in college, followed by nearly 20 years of work as a masseuse. She has had, she says, a focus on helping people, what she calls an “eye for brokenness.” When her husband’s back pain wasn’t responding to any treatment available, they decided to give CBD a try. Their first experiments were with a topical cream, one of their cornerstone products now, called Silk. The first time Waters felt it on her own tense shoulder muscles, she says, “I looked at my husband and told him, ‘You’re really onto something here.’” What began in their basement as products for themselves, both for back pain and Waters’s own struggles with her thyroid, quickly grew through word of mouth until, she says, it was the “next organic step” to go into business. “It’s nice to know that without even showing up I can help many,” she says. “It’s like healing going into bottles.”

Michele Waters, cofounder of Green Mountain Hemp Company in St. Albans, is opening a new store in Burlington in spring 2019.

Now, Green Mountain Hemp Company is actually three businesses: a wholesale and retail business with a storefront in St. Albans, a sister store in the works for Burlington in the spring, and VT Grow Shop (for all your indoor/outdoor growing needs), also in St. Albans. They are poised to go nationwide early next year with “As Seen on TV” ads featuring one of the original sharks on Shark Tank, Kevin Harrington, endorsing their products. They have a large product line, including tinctures, topical cream, bath salts, deodorant, and edibles because, she says, “everyone has a different routine. The little things we do daily can matter, and not everyone is the same.”

Navigating a New Market

Despite their success, Waters says that the industry “is not for the faint of heart.” She describes the hurdles in the business as steel doors. “If I had given up at the first closed door,” she says, “we wouldn’t be here today. When one door closes, another opens: that’s true.” She cited the difficulties they’ve encountered: credit card processors that dropped their account or charged heavy fees, applications rejected from banks and insurers. “It can make you feel defeated,” she says, “and question what you’re doing. I keep my focus, persevere, and remember that I’m able to send something to someone that helps them. I think this is the feminine part, the part that wants to help and that steps up to persevere.”

She makes a good point. The booming CBD market isn’t simply an opportunity for entrepreneurship and public good. It’s an industry that comes with its own risks and hazards. Vermont is the ninth state to legalize marijuana for personal use, but federally cannabis is still a schedule 1 drug, in the same category as heroin and LSD. This makes it problematic to deal with banks, investors, and online payment platforms because the federal laws conflict with those of the states.

According to its website, Vermont Cannabis Solutions is “Vermont’s first and only cannabis law firm dedicated to helping everyday Vermonters develop and grow their cannabusiness.” Lauren Andrews has used the firm’s services to “resolve a website payment platform issue with PayPal and get our trademarks approved, which given the ongoing confusion about CBD’s legal status on a federal level, makes trademarking any name with CBD in it tricky,” she says.

Because the industry is not yet regulated, “There’s going to be a lot of people out to make a buck and take advantage of people,” says Denise Stubbs. “It’s going to be important to know where your product comes from. It’s important to ask if it meets compliance. Buy locally, know the farmer, know where your product comes from. Vermont’s good about that. That’s the beauty about living in Vermont.”

Andrews agrees. “It’s a buyer-beware market,” she says. She only buys local producers of CBD that have their products batch tested by third parties and share those test results. “We are all very protective of the Vermont brand,” she says, “and keep the bar high for quality and transparency.”

In Vermont, a clear trend in the growing cannabis industry is the support, education, and cultivation of the next generation of women cannabis business owners by women already thriving in the market. Heady Vermont recently organized a monthly Women of Cannabiz Learning Series geared directly at women. The series covered topics ranging from harvesting and curing cannabis to branding and marketing.

On average, 10 women per class participated in the series, including guest speaker Ashley Reynolds, the president and cofounder of Elmore Mountain Therapeutics (www.emtcbd.com), a local hemp-derived CBD extract company in Morrisville. Her commitment to collaborating with other Vermont women business owners has not only become the “secret sauce” to her company’s success but has increased economic development in over 25 Vermont-based businesses.

“We aren’t breaking the glass ceiling,” she says. “We are breaking the grass ceiling. Vermont’s cannabis industry isn’t going to be dominated by men because we are choosing to make it a safe and inclusive place for women.”

Heady Vermont will continue to offer quarterly networking events for women in far-reaching parts of the state. “There will be people there who are very experienced with cannabis and other people who’ve never tried CBD products before,” says Kathy Blume. “It’s a safe space for people to come and ask questions.”

The goal of Heady Vermont is to normalize cannabis, and to that end Blume says, “There’s a lot of fear and stigma that we want to overcome. If anyone is curious, has questions, has fears, give us a call, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We have a lot of information. We’re very happy to talk to people.”

Denise Stubbs agrees about the importance of educating the public: “Educating the masses that hemp is different than the cannabis THC plant is a big thing. Trying to work through that stigma of the old-school culture of reefer madness … it’s a cultural shift. It’s the beginning of a wave of making history.”  

“We work hard to be truthful about what’s useful and what’s not useful,” says Blume. “The truth is that CBD doesn’t work for everybody; recreational cannabis doesn’t work for everybody. We’re not starry-eyed about it. We just feel that there’s so much value here we want to promote it.”

Michelle A.L. Singer lives in East Montpelier and can be reached at michellealsinger@gmail.com