This week, Brewbudz debuted a line of coffees and teas spiked with marijuana flower and encased in single-serve, fully . Each pod costs about $7 and is available at select dispensaries in Nevada.
The idea is simple: Sink a pod into your Keurig or Keurig 2.0 brewer, drink, and enjoy a caffeine jolt that comes with a buzz.
Kevin Love, director of product for Brewbudz parent company Cannabiniers, said the company wanted to crack the marijuana edibles market with a low-calorie product that uses a socially accepted delivery mechanism. When they read the stats on coffee consumption, Cannabiniers (whose name combines "cannabinoids" — chemical compounds found in marijuana — and "pioneers") knew they found a match. Nearly two-thirds of Americans drink coffee every day.
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Cannabiniers didn't come up with the concept. A K-Cup-styled marijuana coffee product first debuted in Colorado in 2015. Earlier this year, marijuana startup Somatik teamed up with a San Francisco coffee roaster to create a $12 weed-infused cold brew.
The pods come in regular and decaf coffee and tea varieties, and are available in a range of doses from 10 milligrams to 50 milligrams of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana that gets users high). It's a high threshold for a product geared for recreational users, who typically have lower tolerances than medical users. If a 10-milligram cup is the rough equivalent of a shot of espresso and a glass of wine, then a 50-milligram cup would be all that and a Four Loko.
Love told Business Insider that the company hopes to launch a micro-dosed product for recreational users, as well as a large variety of infused marijuana strains, in the future.
Brewbudz are not licensed by Keurig, nor are they officially called K-cups. Keurig did not immediately respond to comment, and Love doesn't expect to hear from the company.
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"We have an eco-positive product, [Keurig has] an eco-negative," Love said. "What are they going to say to us?"
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