Cornbread Hemp®

Cornbread Hemp is the fastest growing CBD brand in America, shipped nationwide from a single USDA organic farm in Kentucky. Family-owned and operated, Cornbread Hemp has quickly become one of America's most recognized and revered CBD brands.

Cornbread Hemp co-founder Jim Higdon grew up in the small town where the Cornbread Mafia was headquartered, which is where the name "cornbread" comes from. In 2012, Jim published the official nonfiction account of his hometown, "The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History." The book’s success launched Jim into a journalism career, where he covered 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 that embraced America's deep history of hemp. 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 into the digital marketing landscape, ending the year at nearly $2M in net revenue (after discounts). 

In 2022, we continued our aggressive growth and ended the year with $5.5M in net revenue. We acquired our processor to become vertically integrated and improve our margins, which are now above 90%. And, we raised $1,675,000 in a Reg D raise from 12 investors on the exact same terms that we are offering Wefunder investors.  

Our proven metrics

Fueling our impressive growth is a 5.3 LTV-to-CAC ratio and better than 90% 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. Of course, this is a forward-looking statement that cannot be guaranteed. 

Our market position

According to a recent study, only 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 (to our knowledge) 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, including $300,000 in MRR from subscribers. Our customer reviews speak for themselves:

Go-to-market strategy

We are finding new customers every day by scaling our 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, according to us.

Here's the plan

To meet our projections, we acquired our processing partner in October 2022. This acquisition will pay for itself in 3 years with reduced COGS and increased margins, and it has made Cornbread Hemp a vertically integrated company with a scalable supply chain.

In 2022, we launched a seed round with a goal of raising $1.5M. As the round gained steam, we received permission from our investors to oversubscribe the round with a new goal of $2M. We closed the Reg D portion of the round in December with a total amount raised of $1,675,000 from 12 investors. 

Now, we are coming to Wefunder to raise the remaining $325,000 on the exact same terms as our Reg D investors to get us to our goal of $2M raised. 

For the $325,000 we are raising on Wefunder, we plan to put the first $50K raised directly into our digital ads budget. Of the remaining $275,000, we plan to put $100K towards inventory, $75K towards growth consultants, $50K towards our trade show budget; and another $50K towards digital ad spend.