This Kentucky Company Makes Good Cannabis Products

Cornbread, based in Kentucky, ws co-founded by Jim Higdon in 2019. Higdon serves as its Chief Communications Officer. Before forming this hemp-based company, he was a journalist and he earned Master's degrees from Brown and Columbia.

Before forming Cornbread with CEO Eric Zipperle, Higdon wrote a book that was published in 2012, The Cornbread Mafia. He started working on this in 2005 after writing at The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico. He is a native of Kentucky, and telling this story from the 1980s allowed him to become knowledgeable about the hemp industry. The story was about 70 Kentucky farmers that were busted for 200 pounds of cannabis that they were growing outdoors. You can learn more about Higdon and his story in this interview that he did with Cultivated Media in November 2024. I am a big fan of Jeremy Berke, who is a co-founder and the editor-in-chief. I knew him from when he wrote on the cannabis industry at Business Insider.

What Cornbread Does That Is Good

Cornbread is privately held, so it is difficult to gather information about the company. I like that the company shares its physical address in Louisville on its website.

I also like that they educate visitors to their website. As I often say, cannabis is confusing!

The company seems to sell mainly directly, but Total Wine & More, which is very active in THC Seltzer, does sell their seltzers. I did find other stores that carry their products.

One strength of Cornbread is the breadth of their offering. The company sells seltzers, gummies, tinctures, topicals, capsules and pet products. The products are organic and without synthetics or solvents. There is a large variety of flavors. The products are lab-tested and are vegan too.

A page on its website helps potential customers find the right product by asking what type of relief they are seeking:

What Cornbread Could Do Better

In my view, good companies do not hide. They share with their customers who owns and/or operates the company. I was able to find information on the two folks that run Cornbread on its website, but it is not easy to find. The CEO and the CCO both feature their Cornbread positions on their LinkedIn profiles too. The company has a page on LinkedIn, and there are many employees linked there.

I understand that sometimes very high doses of cannabinoids are necessary, especially for medical purposes, but I think that many companies sell high-dose or fake having high dosing in order to boost sales. I do not think that Cornbread is doing this, but they do have some products, the gummies, with high dosing that do not discuss why. Also, it is not clear exactly what they are describing in their dosing, as there is no mention of THC on their website at all. Or do they???

The reality is that they do, but it is hard to find.

Conclusion

Cannabis is confusing! Companies like Cornbread that make products from hemp are federally legal, but they aren't well regulated. It seems like Cornbread is doing things the right way.