Cornbread Hemp™

In the 1970’s, the Cornbread Mafia began its massive cannabis cultivation operations, which continued into the 1980’s, when 70 Kentuckians were arrested with over 200 tons of cannabis. 

Growing up in Kentucky during this time, Cornbread Hemp co-founder Jim Higdon wrote the official nonfiction account of The Cornbread Mafia, published in 2012. The book’s success launched Jim into a journalism career, covering cannabis for POLITICO, Washington Post, and more.

While reporting on the 2018 Farm Bill that would re-legalize hemp, Jim realized that there were no companies making authentic, high quality CBD products, and he knew that something better was possible. That’s when he approached his cousin, Eric Zipperle, to start a cannabis company to deliver that higher quality product, while also representing the 250-year tradition of Kentucky cannabis.

In 2019, Eric and Jim co-founded Cornbread Hemp with $100,000 in angel investment.

More than 1,000% growth since 2019

We shipped our first CBD products in April 2019, and by the end of that year we were gaining momentum. But when the COVID lockdown started in early 2020, we turned to Wefunder to support our growth and raised nearly $400,000 from 900 investors.

In 2021, we grew rapidly thanks to the funds we deployed from our Wefunder investors, ending the year at nearly $2M in revenue. In 2022, we have continued our aggressive growth, and we are beating our projections by 12% through the end of August.

Our proven metrics

Fueling our impressive growth is a 5.3 LTV-to-CAC ratio and 85% product margins that allow us to quickly recycle acquisition dollars, reinvesting positive cash flows into further marketing efforts that allow for quicker market expansion.

Market growth and future outlook

The market for Cornbread Hemp products is growing in a number of ways. For starters, the CBD market is poised to grow into a $55.8 billion industry by 2028. 

Our market position

According to a recent study, fewer than 5 percent of CBD brands are USDA certified organic. That puts Cornbread Hemp in a very elite group, and inside this group, none of the other brands offer Flower-Only™ extraction with up to 2mg of THC per serving.

Creating customer loyalty

More than 50% of our monthly revenues come from return customers, and our customer reviews speak for themselves:

Go-to-market strategy

Scaling PR and affiliate marketing, increasing our social media ad spend, partnering with influencers and radio hosts, and geo-targeting our marketing resources for maximum impact. As a result of our increased awareness, retail expansion will begin in 2023.

We're just getting started

At the peak of the market in 2019, there were thousands of CBD brands clamoring for customers. Today, only the strong brands have survived and Cornbread Hemp is experiencing rapid growth – 300% year over year.

Cornbread Hemp is now positioned to own a sizable share of the CBD market by being an authentic brand from Kentucky with a scalable supply chain of the highest quality organic hemp on Earth.

Here's the plan

To meet our projections, we will be acquiring our processing partner as part of this seed round. The acquisition will pay for itself in 3 years with reduced COGS and increased margins, and will make Cornbread Hemp a vertically integrated company with a scalable supply chain.

Our plan is to spend half the money raised in this round to secure our acquisition, and the remaining $1.5M on hiring and marketing for 18 months of growth. For more information, please review our slide deck below. 

For a more in depth analysis of our company, please request access to our diligence room.