Article orginally found at Feast Magazine.
Heartland Labs is a family-owned and -operated medical marijuana manufacturing company located just two miles shy of Buffalo, Missouri. Here, tried-and-true family recipes and hydrocarbon extraction instruments team up to make the Sweet Stone line of edibles, which features products like soft peanut butter cookies, low-sugar fruit-flavored gummies and local infused honey. The quality-tested products are available all across Missouri in dispensaries from Kirksville to Kennett.
Here, Maddi Pearcy, Heartland’s director of operations, chats about the mission behind the business, the key to tasty THC edibles and what the future holds for the medical marijuana industry.
What inspired your family to create Heartland Labs? My brother Hayden moved out to Colorado in 2011. While he lived there, he got involved with the medical marijuana community and really saw the medicinal value of the plant and how it has helped transform people’s lives. He moved back a few years later and filled my dad in on all of the medical benefits.
We’ve also had some family members who really could have benefited from medical cannabis, but unfortunately at the time that they were needing it, it wasn’t available to them. I’ve always been a big advocate for medical cannabis, too. Hayden was a part of Amendment 2 [the Medical Marijuana and Veteran Healthcare Services Initiative], and we both worked on the grassroots level for it.
What sets your production process apart for the Sweet Stone edible line? For all of our edibles, we use distillate, which is a flavorless, odorless, highly concentrated form of THC. All of our edibles are able to actually taste like a cookie or taste like honey – nothing tastes like there’s cannabis in it, which is awesome because not everybody loves the flavor of cannabis.
Where do you see the medical marijuana market heading in the next decade? I think that we’re going to start seeing a lot of higher-dose products. I don’t know how the recreational movement is going to play out, but I think as far as the medical market goes, there’s also going to start being a bigger push for some healthier products. A lot of gummies are coated in sugar and are not exactly health-oriented products, so I think that we’re going to start to see a shift toward a little bit more health-oriented products.
Sweets don’t have to be bad for you, and we’ve really tried to integrate that – our gummies are one of the lower sugar content gummies on the market. We are also partnering with Elder Farms to work on an immune shot directed toward the medical cannabis market.