Just a few years after the first states voted to legalize marijuana,
the legal weed industry is blowing up.
Retail sales reportedly hit $3.4 billion in 2015,
and they're expected to go up to $21 billion in the next four years.
As a part of our series on how legal weed will impact the planet,
it only made sense to explore some of the ways to get blazed, too.
Turns out, some of them can be pretty delicious.
That's right. I'm talking about pot food.
The market for concentrates and edibles currently makes
up to 30 percent of total sales in the legal weed industry.
Some retailers report that edibles make up to 60 percent of their total revenue.
That's a lot of brownies.
It's also a lot of money.
We wanted to check out what this new industry looks like,
so we went to the experts to see how edibles get made on a large scale.
We like to think that we make relatively simple food done exceptionally well.
And we add one more ingredient, and it's an extract of marijuana.
This is Mike Dublin.
Mike, along with his two brothers, run Zoots,
an edible manufacturing business in Seattle.
Zoots has opened up a 25,000 square- foot facility to make their products --
things like brownies, lozenges, and cannabis drinks.
OK, this is our grow area.
White walls, you have floor drains, you have cooling systems built into the room.
This food processing plant works pretty well for growing weed.
Our extract process starts with rows of marijuana, and also, we use ethanol as our solvent.
If someone had told me in college that I'd be at this point in my career,
where my business is making products with weed and Everclear --
Right, right.
I'd be like, "Yes! Fantastic!"
We take the marijuana and we mix it with alcohol.
We create what we call a green extract.
We then take that extract, we distill it down to get rid of most of the alcohol, and concentrate it,
and in the end, we come up with this.
So this is what our finished extract looks like.
That's 7,000 brownies.
Wow! Wow.
So, that's the level of concentration that's in there.
It's only that much of our extract that goes into a cookie, right?
Do you have human subjects who do your, who --
I mean, you can get the potency on sort of a chemical level, but --
Yeah, no. The only people who can do sampling are employees, and we can't sample on-site.
When marijuana was illegal, making products on a big scale like this was difficult.
Now, people with backgrounds in food manufacturing are
getting into this new, and potentially very lucrative, market.
Black market, medical market, and recreational combined --
the estimate's about $40 billion a year, retail sales.
Woo!
That's about twice the size of the specialty coffee store market.
So, think how many Starbucks there are.
Oh, wow.
We also met up with Jody Hall, creator of the Goodship,
an edibles company that's been around since 2014.
Jody started out in the cupcake business,
but now she makes pastries with a little something extra.
The Goodship is now in the process of developing some new products,
and Jody took us along for a test drive.
We're working on a new recipe.
We're going to make our oatmeal cranberry cookie.
I think one of the trickiest parts about baking with cannabis is that
you have to balance between blending the cannabis completely consistently throughout,
but not overworking the flour.
Here is the extract.
It's beautiful.
I'll pour that in there carefully.
Do you still feel like there's a stigma in this business?
You know, in the early days, I'd be like,
"I'm doing [mumbles]" and now I'm like,
"Yeah, we have the Goodship, we're in the recreational marijuana industry."
So what are some of the particular challenges of being a pioneer in this industry?
It's a federally illegal Schedule I substance.
A lot of the things you don't think about -- like, we're
using organic chocolate. We could not put the organic bug on our product
because that industry is federally regulated.
You gonna go whole cookie or half cookie?
Whole thing for me. I'm committed.
Mm. It's good. Good mouthfeel.
Do you get the marijuana taste, just a hint of that?
Very small. Very subtle.
Good cookie. Talk to me in an hour.
Magically delicious.
As for what the future holds for the legal weed business,
only time will tell.
But for now, both Zoots and the Goodship will keep cranking out the cookies.
And maybe, someday, a cannabis cookie will be as accepted and as common
as a craft brew or a bottle of wine.
Stay tuned.
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