 Hi, how's everybody doing today? I am your host Rich here on behalf of Rich2VLive with our very special guest. It is Jason Mitchell, the CEO of Hemp Fusion Wellness. How are you doing today, Jason? I'm doing really good. How are you? I'm doing really well. Very excited to have you on the show. Congratulations on the new IPO and the success thus far. No, thank you very much. Yeah, it was an exciting time and it was a long time coming. It was a lot of work. Yeah, and I know it's just the beginning and we're excited to learn more about the company. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about Hemp Fusion Wellness. It's a leading health and wellness CBD company utilizing the power of whole food hemp nutrition. Can you give us a quick overview on the company? Absolutely. In order to give you the full overview, I think I just want to back up a little bit even before Hemp Fusion was formed because I think it's an important piece of the puzzle is that what inspired all of this to come together was that in 2011, I was diagnosed with an unfortunate disease that was very, very challenging for me. It's called ulcerative colitis. Now, our products didn't cure me or anything of that nature. That's not how this works, but I'm a board-certified naturopathic doctor. For me, the options that the medical community were offering me were nerve-wracking. They came with side effects far more challenging than you would expect. It inspired me to start the first company that is actually a part of Hemp Fusion Wellness, which is Probulin. Probulin probiotics, we started in 2013, and if you were fast forward to today, it is one of the leading probiotic companies in the naturoproducts industry. In fact, the fastest growing according to spin syndicated data. So really, really cool company in itself, but does not have anything to do with CBD. But in 2015, I met my now co-founding partners, Andrew Oliver, Ryan Griffith, and Ian de Kerois, where the four of us got together and they were very experienced in the cannabis space. And me, I was actually rabidly opposed to cannabis. It was really kind of a funny interaction. Not only two years before I met them, I was completely opposed to cannabis. And as a naturopathic doctor, they didn't teach us that in medical school. They didn't teach about the endocannabinoid system. So I was wholly ignorant. And because of my age, being a Gen Xer, I was in that time when they were like, this is your brain on drugs and the war on drugs and say no to drug and all these different things. And so you really get programmed as a very young age. Well, interestingly enough, when I did my research because of what the doctors were sharing with me and then meeting partners like this, I began to realize how wrong I was and how amazing the endocannabinoid system and what this plant represents for the future. And I apologetically wanted to put the company together. So wow, kind of a little highlight. We're in over 4,000 stores. We have over 40, we have roughly over 46 products that are now on the shelf between our family of brands. We're in multiple countries. Wow. And we have an amazing management team. And we have really, truly assembled what I like to believe is a rockstar team to be able to pull this off as we enter what we are calling now the CBD 2.0. And so HempFusion is not just a hemp CBD company. It is also a well diversified company with an entirely different market of probiotics. But interestingly enough, from a scientific perspective, there's some interesting crosstalk that will happen between these two brands as we move forward. Wow. That's impressive. You guys have put together quite a company. I'm excited to see you guys evolve and grow. What sets you apart from other CBD companies in the health and wellness space? So what sets us apart is our raw material to start with. Our raw material is USDA organic certified hemp. Now, why that's really important is we believe we're the only company in North America, possibly the world, that is actually publicly traded and a USDA organic certified hemp that we actually use in five products that we have that are USDA certified organic. So that's a really important differentiator. Another differentiator is we have a multifaceted approach to where we're heading. And that is that we're focused on five specific channels. One is the natural products industry is where all of us started all the different hemp derived CBD companies started there. We're moving into the food drug and food drug and mask big box. We're actually going to be looking at convenience. We're looking at the doctor practitioner channel in e-commerce is probably single-handedly one of the largest opportunities. Now from a product portfolio what separates us is we have an entire line of OTC drug listed products. Now to help you understand what that is is it's these are topical products, but they are listed on the FDA drug registry as drugs. And why that's important is the number one area of enforcement the FDA has had in the United States so far is on companies that are developing products using CBD and making illegal unsubstantiated health claims. Things like pain relief and all these things that are actually drug claims. We went through an entire very involved process, very expensive, very lengthy, requires a lot of patience that setting up these products to be proper introduced to the market allows us to make very specific claims like pain relief. We can make a pain relief claim in an eczema claim because these products are properly formulated with the right ingredients, properly validated and all substantiated legally and then subsequently listed with the FDA as drugs and they all have NBC numbers so that's a huge differentiator. But the raw material that we use our hemp material is called our panoramic organic hemp extract. Not only does it have CBD but it has all these other minor cannabinoids and terpenes and flavonoids all these wonderful compounds that oftentimes when you do extraction you destroy those. And as a naturopathic doctor my background is in whole food nutrition. I really love it. I believe you know my favorite phrase in medicine by Hippocrates is let food be thy medicine. What he didn't say was let a singular isolated compound identified in a laboratory double one plus he just didn't say that he said let food be thy medicine and so we really wanted to approach this closer to the way nature would have it intended. So that means we offer the same amount of CBD per serving as any other company we just offer a lot more of the other hemp actives so we're pretty excited. Wow that's interesting yeah like that I'm very excited to see how this is going to play out and you guys are already growing internationally and you mentioned a little bit about hemp fusion just received USDA organic certification for its hemp fusion CBD tinctures. Can you tell us a little bit more about the significance of this? Absolutely you know to share a little bit about this also requires just a little bit of explanation on why we did this not just from the marketing perspective that USDA organic demands a premium look right. When you look at a USDA organic product you know that that's a much higher quality product. But the ethos of our company was based on the fact that we wanted to make sure one the products that we designed are legal and most importantly safe for our consumers. And as a differentiator even beyond organics is that we have probably one of the most robust regulatory portfolios with toxicology safety studies to make sure that when we sell a product that it is actually safe for human consumption and these toxicology studies when assembled and published properly they end up giving you what is called self-grass affirmation which is generally recognized to say. We're also involved in what we believe to be the largest human observational toxicology study at the request of the FDA and so we know that this information is really important for the future of our industry because when the FDA finally does speak we know that safety is a big issue. Well organic plays into this for this reason is that organic not only is a premium quality ingredient and demands attention from the consumer in a very special way but hemp is this plant that if it's not grown correctly without their use of pesticides and herbicides and so on it can absorb these things in a really different way to where unfortunately they end up potentially in the finished products which could potentially make these products unsafe. I believe that the only path is using organic hemp and so as a result from day one we've only ever cultivated or certified organic hemp. Wow now you guys are actually right now there where your products currently sold and which markets are you looking to expand into if you can talk about that and which products are you looking to launch next. Absolutely so right now we have 46 products like we said and the USDA organic ones that are certified USDA organic right now are tinctures anywhere from 10 milligrams to 50 milligrams per serving and so those are really exciting products they just hit our website just recently so we know that consumers are already receiving those very well and retailers alike they're already being distributed through vitamin shops so very exciting. Anyway so where we are currently marketed today between our family of brands is we are in the natural products industry which includes the likes of whole foods it includes the likes of Sprouts Farmers Market, Fresh Time Farmers Market and many independent retailers across the United States. We have made our first entrance into the food drug and mass big box through the fourth largest grocery retailer in the United States and at this time we have to leave them nameless because we haven't been given approval to publicly announce this because they have just newly this this past year got into the business of offering CBD to their consumers and they have yet to do their official announcement so we're we're we can't wait to share who that is but the current success we're already having with that chain has been nothing short of amazing. Now the expansion into that particular market there is still a unbelievable number of doors that we can still access there and we are targeting them we are in conversations with them and excited about to see what the next steps there are. We're also looking at convenience convenience represents a really unique type of retailer with people that buy daily products impulse item buys and different things about nature and that when regulations allow things like beverages and snack foods and so forth that you can really expand your offerings to reach consumers in so many different ways. We're also trying to move into the doctor practitioner space in fact we have our first significant fully executed distribution agreement with an organization called Fullscript so we want to market directly to doctors and practitioners because they have a very different intimate relationship with their customers in addition to that we're also looking at e-commerce see currently we only have about six percent of our sales exist online everything else is bricks and mortar retail well e-commerce we know that roughly about half of the purchases that are currently happening and this is according to Brightfield data and other consumer data out there is that about half of the purchases are happening online which represents single-handedly one of the largest opportunities for us to grow so with the funds that we have taken in as a result of this IPO a very large percentage of that is being invested directly into e-commerce marketing and what's really awesome is that when you market products that contain CBD online it is incredibly difficult right now you cannot use the normal tactics like google and facebook and things that you would normally do you have to use very alternative tactics now we have brought on to our team probably single-handedly what i would consider one of the most amazing digital e-commerce teams that has already done this for other for another leading CBD company in the industry and so they already understand exactly the ebbs and flows of this so we've just begun and i'm looking forward to where that's going to head so we're excited now you mentioned you have a rock star team hemp fusion as an extensive leadership team which you mentioned a little bit about with a proven track record who are your key members you mentioned a little bit before and what do they bring to the table absolutely so i didn't mention this but prior to me starting provulin and subsequently hemp fusion i was the chief science officer for country like vitamins i was there for 15 years i designed about 300 of their products and was responsible for helping that company grow from a modest number to a very significant number and through an acquisition in 2006 by kikamon food so very understanding of how to build a team products and how we actually infiltrate the market we also have john viscer which is our chief revenue officer an absolutely amazing individual that has virtually every relationship you could possibly imagine in the food drug and mass big box area and comes with us with such a depth of experience from different organizations that he was involved in such as abit who had eas and he had premier one he was with and so many other brands that just really did an amazing job on the doctor practitioner side we have nancy angiolini who herself is a practitioner but also understands that network very intimately and is the reason why we have the fully executed agreement with full script so that's been really incredibly special ola lasard who is our chief marketing officer currently she is the president of the us hemp roundtable which is one of the leading advocacy organizations in the united states on him and has an incredible depth of understanding on marketing tactics from retail and trade and also crossover into many other areas of marketing she was previously with bar lean's a very leading dietary supplement company that i happen to love myself and use their products so you know that's just the tip of the iceberg of the amazing team that we have so there's a number of other teams another there's a number of other members on our team that we're equally as excited to talk about but those are the highlights now it's exciting to watch a company like yours launch now 2021 just started you know i'm sure have tons of plans for the year we don't want to ask you anything that you can't talk about but is there anything you can talk about for the investors that are watching all over the world that we can look forward to from hemp fusion wellness in the next few months absolutely so what i can say you know and you obviously know that because of we we've just gone public that we can't do anything we can't give any guidance or anything right but i will tell you it's not an accident that we timed ourselves to go public when we did and we wanted to make sure that we were mature enough from an infrastructure standpoint that we had the right team the right products the right momentum in very specific areas that would allow us the opportunity to expand and grow like we would need to in a public format and also to make sure that we have our regulatory ducks in a row because i think 2021 like i said earlier we're calling cbd 2.0 it's kind of like a refresh if you were to go back a few years and see what companies did they expressly grew their revenues and many of them are unfortunately coming apart at the seams they're not able to hold on to their revenues they're in a freefall state companies are running out of money there's a lot of noise in the space and almost none of them are prepared for what the fda guidance will be we took a very different path in our initial inception years while we were building some revenues and developing some infrastructure we were focused intently on the regulatory portfolio that we now have in full order it allows us not only domestically but also international expansion and so we believe that we have timed our regulatory setup correctly we have the right team the right products and the right relationships and so as far as guidance goes i can't give it but i can tell you i've never felt more comfortable and prepared about the direction we're heading now products that are coming we're launching gummies very shortly so those are going to be really good and we focused on taste most importantly because i can't tell you i've tasted so many different gummies in the marketplace and i'm like wow i understand they're a gummy and i understand they have cbd but aren't they supposed to taste good right and do we have to use a lot of artificial garbage to make them taste good and that is definitely not up my alley i got to make things natural and make sure that we use you know natural not artificial flavors no artificial sweeteners we've got to do them right from the formatted structure and so i couldn't be more excited about our gummies they're delicious they're formatted right and i mean those are things i can talk about that we're launching because they're like literally right in front of us i mean we're launching them just about eminently so we have investors from all over the world they're going to see this video how can they get in contact with you jason or some of the members of your team if they've got questions if they like to invest if they like to be a partner they're just in a product how do they go about doing that the best way to get in contact with me or the company is to go to ir which stands for investor relations ir at hemfusion.com and you'll have our team led by danie brody and spencer and hunter scarf all the gentlemen of our ir team will absolutely do an amazing job at helping to guide whatever it is that you need and guide you in the right direction and if there's conversations with me we can set them up through spencer but you know they can contact us anytime through ir at hemfusion.com fantastic well thank you so much for your time today jason mitchell the ceo of hemp fusion wellness and if you guys like the video please smash the like button comment down below and share the video everywhere and subscribe for more updates thank you for watching jason keep up all the great work we'll be watching very closely thank you for joining us today i really appreciate risk thank you so much my pleasure thank you guys for watching if you're not winning you're not watching we're bringing the winners and we're bringing them to you first hemp fusion wellness i think has a chance to be a huge winner for our community thank you guys for watching and have a nice day