BUCKHANNON, W. Va. – Most spring mornings of 2019, sisters Riley and Macie Queen got up before dawn and went to her family’s hemp farm in central West Virginia with her childhood friend Cayla Collett. After hours of cutting and caring for hundreds of plants with loving precision, they all went to class at the local university, with hemp leaves still glued to their hair.
“We just had to tell our teachers how, look, we don’t smoke before we get to class,” Riley Queen said. “But we’re working.”
His multitasking has paid off. Led by three generations of women in the Queen family, Moon Flower Hemp is nearing its third growing season. The company, which has four full-time and six part-time employees, has sold to customers in all states, placed products in about 30 stores, created more than two dozen new items and bought space for a future traditional retail. location in one of the most vibrant cities in West Virginia.
All this in spite of a fire in November 2020 that destroyed inventories and supplies worth $ 60,000 and caused damage to the building worth $ 200,000, as well as a pandemic that closed thousands of small businesses across the country .
The company has had 400% growth since the first year, Riley Queen said.
Moon Flower sells hemp products for smoking online and in retail locations, as well as CBD tinctures, teas and balms and delta-8 edibles, a product created by combining CBD with acid that can create a marijuana-like high.
The company’s growth is partly tied to the prolonged deployment of medical cannabis in West Virginia. It is the slowest in any state, said Karen O’Keefe, director of state policy for the Washington, DC-based Marijuana Policy Project.
State lawmakers legalized medical cannabis in 2017, but the first dispensaries did not open until November 2021 due to banking problems. At first, it was unclear who would fund the industry.
Observers have said that in places where cannabis is not legally accessible, it appears that people are using delta-8.
“There are several patients in West Virginia who have turned to the hemp industry for some relief while waiting” with medical cannabis, including CBD and Delta-8 products, said Rusty Williams, West Virginia’s Patient Advocate. Medical. Cannabis Advisory Board.
Moon Flower also found a niche that employees say puts health and wellness above benefits and focuses on the customer experience.
Promotional material often features queens on the farm using the products. The family turned down the opportunity to sell products in a chain of convenience stores along the East Coast because they feared that the items would be placed among others less scrupulous and because they thought customers would not find store owners. informed to ask questions about Moon Flower or cannabinoids in general.
With a degree in fine arts, the 23-year-old co-owner of the company Riley is in charge of marketing and social media and creates colorful and distinctive packaging.
Her sister, Macie, a 22-year-old local newspaper reporter, is a co-owner and writes promotional material for the company.
Her mother, Jamie Queen, 47, runs the hemp farm and wholesale operations and has her third stake in Moon Flower with her husband, Jason Queen.
The couple has opened and closed more than 20 businesses since their daughters were young.
“We had a chain of convenience stores, we had a daycare, we had a retail clothing store, a granite countertop store; I could go on and on,” Jamie said. “We’ve raised them with this entrepreneurial spirit since they were babies.”
Jason, a long-retired police officer, approached the family in 2018 to buy land for a farm, initially thinking they would focus on industrial hemp products. The Queen’s sisters asked their parents for a space of their own there, where they could “raise their plants,” as Riley put it, and process them for a small secondary business, a fortuitous move given that the pandemic of coronavirus changed the thickness of his parents. Sale of CBD oil.
“The way this covid killed most of the things made Moon Flower take off,” in part because people were looking for solutions to the mental health problems that arose, Macie said.
Jason’s mother, Laura Queen, 69, had perhaps the longest learning curve as a retired employee of the county prosecutor’s office, where she had worked with victims of domestic violence. Four days a week, she arrives at Moon Flower around 6 a.m. to make jelly beans, a best-seller, using a turkey to fill molds.
“Do I get tired at the end of my shift? Sure, “Laura said.” But just to see where it started, where it went, and where it’s going, it’s been a lot of fun. “
Maybe Moon Flower’s ace in the hole is Collett, head of research and development. Collett, 25, who is working on a master’s degree in chemical engineering at Kansas State University, took classes in Jamie Queen’s dance studio as a child and stayed with the Queen sisters at the university. At Moon Flower he works in extraction, turning plants into oils and then into products. Its role differentiates the company from its competitors and could lead to the development of new products in the future, said Don Smith II, who has been involved in the cannabis industry in West Virginia for nearly a decade.
“If you have a chemist on board and you can guarantee a consistent, high-quality product … you have something in it,” he said.
Scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University have found “an alarming lack of safety standards, precise labeling and quality control” in the delta-8 market, which, unlike CBD and marijuana, is not regulated by any agency.
Other scientists have made similar observations. On a recent trip to Wisconsin, Marcel Bonn-Miller, vice president of human and animal research for the Ontario Canopy Growth Corp. marijuana company, took a double shot when he saw a “dispensary” in a state where even all medicinal cannabis is banned. A boy who said he appeared to be under the age of 18 went in to look for something to help him concentrate and went out with delta-8.
“I’m sure a lot of people are doing delta-8 right,” said Bonn-Miller, who is also a former adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. But “there are a lot of questions for me as a consumer.”
As Collett put it, “It’s always a mystery what’s inside” many of these products, especially delta-8, are sold in companies such as head stores and gas stations.
“We’re doing it the right way,” Riley Queen said. “There’s a lot of room for this cannabinoid to be extracted poorly, to be produced poorly. And there are a lot of bad delta-8 products.”
The Queens ship their CBD oil that Collett has processed and refined internally to an Oregon company that creates the delta-8 product. Moon Flower has its CBD and Delta-8 products tested at a neighbor Kentucky lab and posted the results on its website. (Delta-8 chromatography equipment is too expensive for the company right now.)
Although Moon Flower receives regular requests for delta-8 oil-filled spray cartridges, the only delta-8 products the company sells are edible.
“It simply came to our notice then [vape line] a couple of times, but there’s no way to do it for sure we feel comfortable putting it out there and it won’t affect anyone “negatively,” Collett said.
The Queen sisters said they receive feedback every day from people who say their products have helped with anxiety, pain and insomnia. Her grandmother has not tried delta-8, but swears by CBD to treat ailments such as aches and pains, as well as “gummy hands.” (It once made 7,000 in a week, according to the company.)
Some states, including Kentucky, have banned Delta-8, but West Virginia agriculture officials have taken a “neutral stance” on it, a spokesman said. The state Department of Agriculture sent a letter in October notifying hemp growers that “unnatural cannabinoid products” that have recently entered the state’s retail supply chain are not legal under the law. of West Virginia. (Moon Flower does not make or sell these.)
The state’s Agriculture Office joined law enforcement officials in opposing hemp production until it was legalized, said Dwayne O’Dell, the office’s director of government affairs. The organization has no public policy position in this regard.
Queens plan to open a store in downtown Buckhannon this year and hope to be seen as businesswomen and farmers. In the early days, they said, they often felt undervalued.
“No one was taking our farming seriously,” Riley said. “We probably grow these plants a lot more than anyone else.”
Macie agreed, “We’re here singing them.”
