Nuggets spoke with Thorpe this week about the history of his business and future plans. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get into the cannabis business?
I was living in Colorado when it first went recreational. I was more involved at the time in what would be described as the legacy market. I was doing a lot of extraction at the time and coworking with some small to medium-sized growers processing hash oil. As far as innovation goes in the extraction agency, there was still a lot being learned. Me and some other people were basically doing a lot of experimenting with different forms of extraction at that time in Colorado, specifically.
Where did the idea for infused pretzels come from?
A bit less than 10 years ago, I was hanging out with a group of friends around the University of Minnesota. One of them had a mom who would drop off snacks periodically, and one of those was a seasoned pretzel mix. Being who I am in certain friend groups, I was approached with the classic question of “Could you make this medicated?” And my classic response was, “If you give me anything remotely approaching the recipe, I can medicate anything.” I got a scrappy version of a seasoned pretzel recipe, did that a few times and was able to share that with friends at gatherings. Then I started to tweak the recipe, making more of them over time and sharing with more and more people. After a certain point in time, there was a growing amount of attention as far as that being a locally available product at that time. Gummies and caramels were the two other popular ones that I have made the most in my years previous to the hemp-derived market. The caramel was a family recipe. That is part of the reason why Granny’s is the name of the brand.
So there is a granny in the business history.
Absolutely. My grandmother had a caramel recipe. My mom would help her with that. I never got to actually meet that grandmother of mine. But to this day, my mom makes dozens of pans of this caramel. At a young age, she enlisted me and my sisters to wrap hundreds and thousands of caramels for her to give out to friends and families around the holidays. This is still something, to this day, which is relevant in our family but unfortunately it has maybe ruined the love of caramel for some of us.
Granny’s pretzels were available on the black market prior to legalization of hemp products. Were they packaged? How did that work?
Even before the branding existed, I started to get feedback on larger amounts of production. People wanted to know more about the product, whether that be the potency or just having a nice look, legitimacy if you will. That’s when the branding started to happen, as well as us clarifying the milligrams. It started off with some low quality stickers I would put on a Mylar bag, on the backside it was clear and you could see the pretzels. Obviously, that’s not compliant packaging today. We eventually put a little bit more time and money into having nicer packaging. Being in the legacy market absolutely helped grow our consumer audience.
What time period is this?
I started doing the pretzels about eight or nine years ago.
I’d imagine they were much more potent back then.
That’s true. Instead of them being one milligram per pretzel, they were closer to five milligrams per pretzel. A whole bag of pretzels at the time was 200 milligrams instead of 50 milligrams.
How many employees do you have now?
It’s me, my sister and Aaron [Morrison, production manager]. That’s the core. We have about five people who I use for packaging help, prep, deliveries, stuff like that. We’re a very small, lean operation.
Your website says you use live resin in your products. What is that?
Live resin is something that we are using in our gummies, which are launching this week. It is a solvent-based extraction utilizing a blend of propane and butane, often in a pressurized piece of equipment called a closed-loop system. You’re running the solvent through the plant material at specific temperatures [to produce] a concentrated form with a higher potency material as an end result, as well as a higher amount of terpenes. This form of extraction isn’t currently allowed in the state of Minnesota, but without getting super specific, we’re using a proprietary technique to utilize a natural and organic amount of live resin terpenes in our products. It’s replicating the natural amount of terpenes that would be in a concentrate. That is used for both our gummy and beverage production. We’re rereleasing two [beverages] that have live resin and two that have rosin.
What is the difference between live resin and rosin?
Live resin is a form of extraction that utilizes solvents, mostly butane and propane.The reason they call it “live” is because you harvest the plant and then freeze it immediately. The extractor is trying to utilize as much of the plant from when it was alive, transferring it into the final form of extraction, whether it be for smoking or infusing into an edible.
Rosin is a solventless form of extraction. It utilizes a process that goes way back, referred to as bubble hash, in which you’re agitating plant material with cold water and ice. The trichomes will fall off and get caught into different micron-sized bags, which you then separate and air dry or put into a freeze dryer. Then, typically, the end result is that you take your bubble hash and press it between two hot plates, which secretes your filtered concentrate. I could nerd out and talk about these things for a very long time.
Can live resin extraction be done in a food-safe way with these solvents?
It’s an efficient form of extraction. It’s an incredibly safe and food-safe way of putting these types of input materials in final-form consumer products. In the food industry, other solvent-based extractions, like ethanol and/or butane and propane, are also used for different forms of food concentration as well.
What is your preferred method of consuming cannabis?
I feel somewhat conflicted to tell people that I actually am really not a huge edible person. I love smoking my concentrate and I also love smoking flower. Rolling a joint is my favorite way to smoke flower and I am a big fan of [vape] cartridges because of the convenience, but I do take dabs pretty frequently.
Do you see your business staying in the low-dose market, or are you planning to expand into adult-use?
The Granny’s brand itself would absolutely plan to stay in the low-dose, hemp-derived space. I think it’s absolutely amazing the way that we’re able to have access to low-THC products in Minnesota. In a perfect world, we will be prevalent in both adult-use and low-dose hemp. In what ways, exactly, I couldn’t be certain. It’s exciting to consider the future possibilities.
