Martha Stewart Embraces New Role as Champion for Chewable CBD

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- At a party in the East Garden of the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., on Feb. 22, the cocktails came in coconut shells bearing garnishes of gummies in three flavors. Speared onto toothpicks, the coconut, pineapple, and mango candies were the latest offerings from Martha Stewart's line of CBD chewables.

“They're delicious,” Stewart said, explaining that she'd sampled plenty of wellness gummies made by other companies and found them to be awful. She compared hers to the jellied treats served at the end of a fine French meal. “They're like pâtes de fruit. We got it down almost perfectly,” she said. “There's no aftertaste, no bitterness.”

The trio of new flavors make up the Tropical collection, which joins Citrus, Berry, and Harvest (a medley of green apple, Concord grape, and pomegranate gummies). The cost for a 30-piece jar is $35, or $1.10 per gummy.

“I wouldn't say you use these for entertaining,” said Stewart, 80, looking across the party at blond socialites chewing among lemon trees. “It's not replacing the fine chocolates on your table at the end of a fancy dinner. These are therapeutic, relaxing and useful, and nonmedicinal, which is what I go for. I'm not on a stack of medicines.”

Stewart first joined an advisory board of the product's maker, Canada-based Canopy Growth Corp., four years ago. The gummies, which were introduced in September 2020, have become a juggernaut. They're now sold in 5,000 stores, including Wegmans and Vitamin Shoppe.

The timing is good.

“It's helpful for the stress of the pandemic, and it's helpful at all times,” Stewart noted. “There are plenty of stresses these days—read the headlines.”

“What Martha has done is to make people feel safe coming into the category,” said David Klein, chief executive officer of Canopy. “Martha's made a career out of helping people live well. It ends up being like a vitamin.”

Stewart said that later this year she'll introduce “amped-up gummies with a higher dosage of CBD that will help you sleep,” among other solutions. She doesn't cook with them, she said, but she does cook with the CBD oils she offers with Canopy and suggested the lemon oil would be great to flavor a cake. At night she takes two or three drops of the CBD orange or lemon oil. “I sleep nicely,” she said.

“We have dog therapeutics, too. They are not treats, exactly, they are useful bites,” she explained. The chicken-and-cranberry chews are for calming, while the chicken-and-blueberry ones aid mobility.

Has Stewart tasted the doggy chews herself? “Of course!”