The Food Standards Agency list of CBD businesses still allowed to trade has frustrated those businesses forced to pull products from the shelves after they failed to submit evidence and meet deadlines.
In an interview with Nathan Wogman, Managing Director of Taylor Mammon, he explained being born with feet defects eventually led him to using CBD to help with his own ailments. Though they were surgically corrected, he struggled while growing and when he got to his early 30s, he had to move career.
He said: “I had to move from a career in property stomping the streets of the West End into finding something else. It was around that time my best friend suggested that CBD was a product I should look at for relief of my ailments because his younger brother who suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome was using it.”
He said at that time there was no one out in the market delivering high quality products that were regulated or even felt like they were regulated so him and his business partner, Oliver Mammon, decided to develop a range of products that they first tried out on themselves to help their symptoms.
He said: “We are in our seventh year now and we have grown in prevalence and could say that arguably we are one of the country’s largest white label manufacturers – purely dedicated to CBD. We have the skill set of manufacturing and understanding cannabinoids and we have built a really good business.
“We work with existing brands or new people who come to market who want to develop products and really the debacle with novel foods for us is frustrating.”
Huge impact
He said the impact of the novel foods legislation has had on the white label business has been huge across the whole industry because of the amount of uncertainty that now exists in the marketplace.
“For new entrants coming to marketplace, it’s frozen and the lack of clear regulation and trade bodies and consultancies providing an opinion has created uncertainty which has been very impactful on the industry. So, trying to get into the nub of the frustrations as it stands now, Taylor Mammon have had a fully compliant white label catalogue of products in market before the February 2020 deadline.
“What is very unclear, is whether or not those who want to open their own new CBD business can take my product that I produced before February 2020 - a white label version of the tincture and wrap their brand's label around it, it doesn't seem like that's going to be possible.
“The impact of novel foods has created a situation where there's very little product development going on in the industry. And we're being left with a pool of very vanilla products, when the market has moved on so substantially from the early stages of 2020.”
Nathan said edible CBD is a very substantial, but only one part, of what Taylor Mammon does as a business but there has also been a huge drive into tropical products because CBD has proven to be so beneficial.
Tropical products
He added: “The businesses and markets of old and new product developers is really going to go into skincare and tropical products, anything from beauty products all the way through to transdermal patches and kinesiology. The market is hugely advancing at a rate of knows in developmental and tropically applied products. People have really begun to understand the benefits of plant-based medicine and wellness so there is already a big push towards already compliant ingredients – like mushrooms for example.”
The novel food regulation, nathan said, is effectively a position of grandfathering in those brands that were in market pre Feb 2020 and that while CBD is, as a raw material, it is going through a process of being defined as safe for human consumption.
He said: “However, there's a group of early entrants into markets who were on the shelf who are being given the chance to stay on shelf. Once CBD has gone through the due course, to ensure that it's a safe product for consumption, and when the ingredients are approved, new product development and growth, new brands and new products will start flowing back into the market.
“Unfortunately, people in the industry at the moment don’t know if they’re coming or going – and uncertainty is what breeds stagnation and stagnation is what kills.”