Today we’d like to introduce you to Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock.
Jake’s background was all over the place (banking, consulting, private equity) and the common thread was working to build/advise exciting consumer brands. He started working on the idea behind Cann while at business school at Stanford. The goal was to create a social beverage using cannabis that could become a replacement for alcohol. After experimenting on classmates, the idea for a micro-dosed beverage with adult savory flavors was born.
Luke and Jake met while working at Bain & Co in 2012 and had stayed good friends since then. While Luke would listen to Jake’s ideas for a cannabis beverage, he generally thought alcohol did the trick just fine. It wasn’t until his hangovers started getting worse that the prospects of a mainstream cannabis beverage became exciting. Luke’s had stayed at Bain & Co following two years at Harvard Business School and his background was in helping large CPG companies launch new products on an accelerated timeframe. They both were frustrated with their alcohol consumption and figured that others would love a product that gave them the same social buzz as alcohol but without the physical and emotional hangovers, empty calories, and questionable ingredients.
Through painstakingly deliberate formulation, food science and manufacturing challenges, Luke and Jake created Cann — cannabis in a cann! The product was launched in Venice in June 2019 and has been a huge hit in LA and across California. It is the first microdosed cannabis beverage in California and has sold hundreds of thousands of cans to date.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Definitely not a smooth road!
First off, one of the hardest parts about starting a company is often the people close to you are the most critical of your decision. Their relationship with you is often founded on fear and they want you to be safe (and risk-free!). That can be really tough — and was for us — in the early days.
Second, launching a product is really really hard! There are one million things that you “should” do and yet never enough time to do them all. Prioritizing what actually matters and needs to get done can be really tricky. A couple of times we had major setbacks where we couldn’t find the right ingredients or the food science was creating issues. By putting one foot in front of the other and being singularly focused on bringing this product to market helped us stay on track.
And finally, a lot of folks including investors and partners tried to encourage us to do things that we didn’t believe in. Swap out a premium ingredient for a less expensive one or launch a product with dubious efficacy around it. We felt a lot of pressure in those moments, but sticking to our “main thing” and only doing what we believed in paid off.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Cann story. Tell us more about the business.
We are the first company to bring a micro-dosed cannabis beverage to market and the first to give social people an actual alternative beverage to alcohol. We think that any social beverage can’t sacrifice on the buzz! Folks shouldn’t have to decide between going out and drinking (booze) or staying in (and sober) and missing out. Cann’s energetic, social, uplifting buzz is similar to that feeling we love from a light beer or glass of wine, so folks don’t have to choose.
We also use the best ingredients in our cannabis-infused social tonics. Our lemon and blood orange juices are from Sicily and our agave nectar is from Mexico. We use the purest California cannabis extract and always all-natural flavors directly from the herb and never mixed with other natural flavors.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Yes! My favorite story about luck was at a Coachella party that we were sponsoring before we launched the first Cann products. Luckily, the actress and RHOBH star Lisa Rinna came up and tried our product. She loved it so much that she posted a photo of her with us and the product on her Instagram the next day. Again luckily, a buyer from an account we were trying to get into saw the Instagram post and reached out to us. Now they are one of our top accounts!
At Cann we have a general rule to never pay anyone for posting about Cann. That way, we try to attract folks with genuine, authentic interest and love for the product and if they choose to post, their passion really comes through. That plus a little luck has served us well.
Pricing:
- Each six-pack retails for $24 dollar pre-tax
- Our 24-pack boxes are exclusively available at shop.drinkcann.com (retail for $75)
Contact Info:
- Address: 555 Rose Ave, Unit 6
Venice, CA 90291 - Website: http://www.drinkcann.com
- Phone: 3039292286
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drinkcann/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drinkcann?lang=en
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