From Seed to Sale #4: Know Your Dose

“It’s as much of a surprise that we’re here to us as it is to anyone.”

Every brand should have a story – and the good stories stick. Anheuser-Busch has the Clydesdales and America; Apple has the black turtleneck and rebellion; Google has a garage and an idea.

Dr. Norm’s is a brand founded by a brother and sister team, based on their father’s credibility as a physician and their mother’s credibility as a maker of delicious treats. The brand capitalized on family recipes and the transition of the California cannabis market from medical to recreational. I recently had the pleasure of connecting with the sister half of the dynamic duo, Roberta Wilson. Please enjoy.

Beginnings

Full disclaimer: I am a huge fan of Dr. Norm’s. In early 2018, one of my colleagues at Jane recommended them because they “don’t taste weedy.” I tried them and I was immediately infatuated. This fandom sparked my first question to Roberta. I asked her, with giddy curiosity, to tell me everything – the whole story.

RW: My mom was a legendary baker – a pharmacist by profession, a baker by passion. She baked almost every day of her adult life, and that’s how she spread love. When she passed away, I felt compelled to honor her legacy and carry on that tradition.

I started a company called Audrey’s Cookies, and first it was out of my house. We donated a portion of all of our sales to her favorite charity, Starlight Children’s Foundation. The first five years were just the website and word of mouth.

Then I decided to branch out – and that was a crash course in entrepreneurial ventures. I had to learn about packaging and manufacturing and distribution and all of that. So, it was scaling a cookie company from scratch – and we ended up in the likes of Whole Foods, Bristol Farms, Gelson’s, Sprouts, and eventually even Costco. It was mostly on the West Coast, but Sprouts was national.

It was pretty crazy. We got to the point where we had to decide – should we round up investors and scale? To compete effectively in that business, you know, where you are up against Chips Ahoy and Pepperidge Farms and the Oreos and Nabiscos of the world, you have to have very deep pockets for marketing.

Our product was fantastic – but we had no money to promote it.

Roberta was, unwittingly, gathering experience points. Audrey’s Cookies taught her about supply chain, recipe testing, wholesale, retail relations, and marketing – 90% of what she would need to launch a successful cannabis cookie company. All that was missing was, well, the cannabis.

RW: Right around the time I was coming to terms with the marketing budget problem, cannabis was being considered on the ballot. My brother, who has worked his whole life in the music industry, had been helping me with the advertising and marketing side.

One day, I said to him, jokingly, ‘we should go into the medical cannabis business,’ the cannabis cookie business.

And the reply came: ‘That’s the best idea you've ever had.’

Now what?

I love an origin story, and Roberta was armed with some very useful retail knowledge. But I still wondered: how do you even go about starting a cannabis business?

RW: Well, back in 2015 it was a very small industry and you would just ask people. My brother Jeff is very good at networking, and so it would just be sort of asking one person who would lead you to the next who would lead you to the next.

We named the company in honor of our dad who was actually a doctor in Los Angeles. We also used our mom’s recipe. So, it’s an homage to both of our parents in every possible way. And we talk about how we’ve become sort of a summation of them because my dad was the diagnostician, and my mom was the dispenser of the medication. So, we have become a mirror image of them through our own business.

While neither of them is around to see what we’re doing, we think they would be really, really, really excited by the business and how we’re helping people.

Anyway, in 2015 and 2016, we were doing all the R & D and we had it in our minds that if we were going to do edibles, we knew there were two big misconceptions: One is that every edible tastes like weed, and the other is that they just get you fucked up. And so we knew we had to tackle both of those head on.

While the founders of Dr. Norm’s are surprised that they ended up in the cannabis cookie business, they are not ignorant or ill-prepared: Roberta’s experience in the food business and Jeff’s experience in music advertising and marketing came together well, and they were able to develop a value proposition based around two major differentiators: taste and consistency.

They knew a bit about brand signaling, too: 

RW: We planned for the rec market. We put my dad’s face on it so it was welcoming, trusted. It would not knock you flat on your ass.

We were the first company to do single dose servings, like mini cookies. Now everyone does them. But at the time, no one was doing individual dose cookies.

We did all low doses at the beginning. We did 5 and 10 milligram serving, which was very unusual. We started selling in January of 2017 and the shops told us that nobody was going to buy them. People just wanted a high dose. In the medical market, they were kind of right – so eventually that year we ended up doing 25 milligram and 75 milligram cookies that sold. 

We couldn't keep them on the shelf. Within a short period of time, though, the market was going to transform, and those 5 milligrams were going to be very popular. Our mantra and our trademark is ‘know your dose.’

On the taste side, we came into this with real high-quality expectations ‘cause we were in the traditional cookie market. And if you don't have a good tasting product, you can't possibly hope to succeed. But it's really high-end ingredients: real butter, pure vanilla extract, heath bar, pecan. We go high end on all our ingredients.

And it really comes out in the taste. We were also the first edibles company to actually use distillate. Now everyone does. But at the time, the reason why everything tasted so weedy was because they were using all the terpenes and cannabinoids in the full plant.

The other thing that I think really set us apart in the early days was consistency. We heard a lot from shops that a lot of edibles companies fluctuated in taste and intensity, and ours were always consistent.

So, our company is really based on three pillars: One is that we're family owned and operated; then, responsible dosing; then, amazing taste.

The Future

Roberta and Jeff successfully navigated through the choppy waters of the first two years of adult-use legalization in California – which is no small feat.

RW: It has been my brother and I from the very beginning. We don't have any full-time employees. 

We had a rocky 2019, but we’re thrilled to be back in 2020. We're launching a bunch of new SKUs. We've always had our chocolate chip and our peanut butter, as you know. In the next month or two, we are going to be launching our red velvet and a gluten-free snickerdoodle.

In hindsight, we take the early days for granted. There was nothing near the competition that there is now. Stores are flooded with vendors; you can’t just walk in and talk about your product.

What about slotting fees? They’ve been creeping up of late.

RW: Well, it’s a reality of the ecosystem, but it is a bummer that customers will have their choices whittled down based on the budgets of the brands. It just means there are a lot of small brands that will never see the light of day.

I think that anyone who has made it through 18 and 19 is going to stick around. It's going to be much harder to get into this business as a manufacturer on the manufacturing side. You know, anyone that says I'd like to go in now is, you know, they’ve got to have their head examined because it's just crazy.

I asked Roberta what she thought it took to be successful in this space.

RW: You have to reinvent yourself and pick yourself up by the bootstraps. You have to be resilient, because otherwise this industry is just going to beat you down. The regulated market is not for the faint of heart.

But, in our case, it’s a passion. It's a family passion, and we want to bring relief to the masses. And if we can do it through products that taste great and help people, it's worth fighting for.

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Roberta Wilson is Co-founder of Dr. Norm's, a THC and CBD-infused cookie company. Find out more at https://www.doctornorms.com/