Cannabis Beverage Brand Cantrip Looks To Double Its Footprint This Year
March 19, 2024The Cantrip brand of seltzers and sodas has been rapidly expanding its presence on liquor store shelves as the new wave of hemp-derived THC products gathers strength in various markets around the country. The brand includes a range of 3mg, 5mg, and 10mg seltzers and sodas in flavors like Blackberry Lavender, Lemon Basil, Ginger Peach, Cola, Root Beer, and Orange Soda, with distribution largely handled by wine and spirits wholesalers. After growing its business six times over in 2023, Cantrip is poised to enter a number of new states this year, including Wisconsin, Illinois, and Georgia among others. SNDC executive editor Daniel Marsteller spoke with Cantrip cofounder and CEO Adam Terry in the first part of this two-part interview.
SND: Can you give a sense of the scale of the Cantrip brand currently, and what you see for the future?
Terry: Right now we’re retailed on the ground in five states: Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, and Tennessee. We’re adding Wisconsin and Illinois, we’re going to expand in Texas, and we’ll also be adding Connecticut, Georgia, and possibly Florida. And we ship to about 38 states direct to consumer. We’re growing at a decent clip. We’re definitely going to be one of the largest THC beverages, if not the largest, in the next five to 10 years. In the meantime, I believe we probably rank somewhere in the top 10 or 15 in the country.
There are a lot of big CBD beverage brands out there, but it’s clear that THC has the stickiness that CBD always wished it had. People were interested in CBD when it started, but because of the lack of intoxicating effect, a lot of people didn’t come back to it. We believe this will be a more permanent category over the long run.
SND: How have you navigated the transition from dispensaries into liquor stores?
Terry: What we saw really quickly when we launched into Minnesota in September of 2022 was that while the dispensary beverage channel was struggling in terms of price point and sell-through, these hemp-derived products were flourishing because of the venue that they were in. You can think of a dispensary as a specialty retailer, which is not necessarily integrated into consumers’ day-to-day lives, unless they’re regular cannabis consumers. Dispensary sales were static, with beverage at around 1% or 2% of overall sales. A can of Cantrip used to go for over $7 on the shelf at a lot of dispensaries, and that was at an original 3mg of THC.
You can now find Cantrip on a liquor store shelf for $13-$15 a four-pack. It’s a lot more approachable for consumers, and the volume has picked up drastically. Our sales increased six times year over year between 2023 and 2022, and so we’ve entirely stopped producing for dispensaries and are focused on the THC opportunity in traditional liquor store channels.
SND: Are you using primarily alcohol distributors?
Terry: We’ve ended up with a lot of wine and spirits distributors. Liquor distributors know how to pitch an intoxicating product, they know how to distribute beverages. And running a company like this is not that much different from running any other beverage company with an intoxicant. There are rules and regulations around alcohol as well, much lighter than most adult-use marijuana rules, but there’s still some level of applicability there.
I know a lot of people are gunning more for the beer distributors because of the volumes that they push. We just saw a competitor of ours launch with one of the biggest AB InBev distributors in Texas. That’s significant, because to date AB InBev distributors have only been distributing in states where cannabis is otherwise legalized.
