What does the legalization and normalization of CBD mean for the restaurant industry?
To answer that question, the best place to start is with what CBD doesn’t do. It DOESN’T get you stoned. It’s THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, that does that, and it’s responsible for movies like Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke.
Conversely, CBD IS a wonderful, naturally occurring substance that has well documented effects. Just look up Charlotte’s Web, the CBD strain that has changed the lives of many children afflicted by seizure disorder.
What Does CBD Have to Do with Restaurants & Bars?
To answer that, we should delve into a more complete explanation of CBD. First, CBD mirrors many of the health benefits of cannabis in that it acts as an anti-inflammatory and anti-axiolytic. It’s known to relieve life-stress, anxiety, and pain. But this alone isn't what allows CBD to benefit so many conditions. That happens through how the cannabinoids found in hemp interact with receptors throughout our body. The link is an in-depth explanation, but suffice to say, cannabidiol (CBD) occurs naturally in your body and adding more is a really good health strategy.
With all that in mind, we can now properly answer the question of how it fits with your restaurant. To start, CBD is one of the hottest new health trends in the country. It’s available in dozens of forms -- from vape pens to body creams. Which is exactly why it’s time to introduce it into cocktails and food in our industry.
Managing CBD in Your Cocktails
That sounds easy enough, until you start searching around for how to both acquire and implement CBD influenced items on your menu. When you Google “CBD in drink recipes” it returns a paltry 9,610,000 results from the query. The good news is that means you’ll have plenty of ideas to choose from, but few of them actually solve the problem of how to manage and control your inclusion of CBD in the recipes you choose.
This is where a great new product called Industry Hemp, CBD for Cocktails (www.IndustryHempCo.com) can eliminate those hurdles. Industry Hemp has created a simple delivery system for their CBD oil that is easy to use, and will fit with the fast pace of most bars and restaurants. The product comes in a 1000 mg bottle which means 1000 drops of 1mg each per container. The key here is the dropper system that delivers just 1mg of CBD per drop of oil. This is a perfect portion control system to include CBD as an ingredient in any cocktail you create.
You can create your own specialty cocktail menu with CBD-specific recipes that improve the craft experience, but you aren’t limited to that approach. Why not treat CBD as an upsell opportunity with a per milligram price to add CBD to any cocktail. Industry Hemp prices their CBD product at about $0.075 per milligram (1 drop from the dispenser pipette). With that in mind, you could add 10 mg of CBD to a drink for just $0.75. Some operators are pricing at $5 for 10 mgs added to a cocktail. That works out to a 15% cost of sales.
Consequently, this product is not only trendy and relevant, it’s also hugely profitable.
Whether your motivation is profit or staying current with health trends, you are bound to experience a great response to adding CBD to your menu. Also, you aren’t limited to cocktails and could easily add CBD to a sauce or side-dish item to include it with food. CBD is stable, has a long expiration period, and is now so widely accepted, you have nothing to fear, except FOMO -- just sayin’.
