Led By Pamos, Mac Brands Fields Diversified Hemp THC Portfolio
November 4, 2025The team behind the Pamos brand of spirits-style hemp THC beverages has expanded its range with the acquisition of Lolli THC sodas and Buddi seltzers and created a new company called Mac Brands to house the portfolio. Pamos ranges from $16 a 4-pack of 5mg THC cocktails to $45 a 750-ml. of Pamos Reserve at 10mg THC per 1.5-ounce serving. Lolli sells at $19 a 6-pack of 10mg cans, and Buddi includes seltzers at $14 a 4-pack of 10mg cans and a spirits-style Coco offering at $25 a 750-ml., containing 6mg THC per 1.5-ounce serving.
Mac Brands executives tell SND the company is seeing double-digit growth and is generally among the top THC suppliers to the distributors it’s partnered with. SND executive editor Daniel Marsteller spoke with the Mac Brands team—including cofounder and lead investor Nishant Machado, CEO David Mukpo, and president Jared Dougherty—to hear about the company’s plans for growth in the burgeoning hemp THC space.
SND: What sets the Mac Brands portfolio apart from other hemp THC operators out there, as market competition intensifies?
Machado: If you look at the types of beverages in the portfolio, they cover every potential use occasion. You look at the dosage, and they cover all the potential dosage demand out there with one caveat, which is we’ll never sell anything that’s over 10 milligrams a serving. From a price point perspective, Buddi is the value play, Pamos is the premium play, and Lolli is positioned in between. So when we’re thinking about the total addressable market, we have different form factors and price ranges to appeal to different demographics and consumer cohorts.
SND: How are you approaching the distribution side?
Machado: We are playing in a mature, sophisticated industry with alcohol and they have massive businesses to run every day. We’re with a combination of beer and wine and spirits distributors. This is a nascent category at a point in time when the alcohol industry has got a decent amount of challenges. Our job is to make this as easy and convenient as possible for our partners, and educate not only their teams but the consumers they touch. And through our diversified portfolio, we want to own the shelf. If you go into some of the larger retailers, you’ll see that has panned out.
Our initial approach was to go very deep in certain states to understand the consumer and what’s scalable. So we went very deep in Texas and Florida and learned a ton, and from there we’ve expanded to 20 states.
SND: Where is the hemp THC category currently in terms of trade and consumer education?
Dougherty: We’ve only scratched the surface. You see the 10mg products are outselling the 5mg and 2mg products. I think that shows that we haven’t even really started to connect with the new entrant to the category. As an industry we need to continue to normalize this category, make it mainstream, and we’ll see more and more new entrants come in. You’ve got to have those product options available for them as well, and that’s where our portfolio strategy comes in.
SND: What are you watching in the regulatory sphere?
Mukpo: We applaud the state-level regulation that’s taking place. One of the best parts of what’s occurred in the industry over the last 12 months is how much individual states have put into looking at regulated bills. That said, a lot of my focus is at the federal level right now.
In an interesting way, the regulatory side is as much about education as the commercial side is, whether it was in Texas where we helped commission the poll that showed over 70% of Texans were in favor of regulated hemp, or the recent poll on the national level that showed over 70% of Americans wouldn’t want a ban on these products.
So a big piece of this is ensuring that the legislators and regulatory bodies understand the products, and that in particular they understand that low-dose hemp beverages are extremely popular across the country. Our focus has been on compiling as much information as possible so that the legislators understand what they’re working with, and we’re seeing tremendous progress as people begin to really understand what the landscape looks like.
We’ll have more with the Mac Brands team in the second part of this interview.
