Head + Heal Products Make Headway on Major Retailer Shelves
Wegmans is the one-stop-shop where North Easterners go for just about everything: fresh baked goods, produce, affordable prices, and great customer service. Now, the major chain can also serve as your local CBD store. Rev member company, New York Hemp Oil is selling their recently launched line of Head + Heal CBD products at various
Co-founder Karli Miller-Hornick says getting their products in the 90 out of 100 Wegmans locations was no quick and easy feat.
“We presented at the Rev food and agriculture networking night last year and the wellness buyer for the Ithaca Wegmans was in the audience,” Miller-Hornick shared. “They passed our information on and shortly after we were invited in for a meeting.” This meeting took place well before Head + Heal had any product shots or determined prices.
“We really hustled to get that done,” Miller-Hornick says. While she and co-founder, Allan Gandelman, were determining pricing and curating product shots, Wegman’s was waiting out the legal landscape. In 2018, the United States farm bill, or Agricultural Improvement Act, made it possible to implement hemp and CBD oils on retailer shelves.
Head + Heal can now be found on several of those shelves as the only New York sourced and produced CBD products in Wegmans’ stores.
“They are only carrying our 600 mg and 1200 mg tinctures right now, but we hope as we see more success, they’ll bring in more products,” says Hornick, who also notes that several stores are already beginning to sell out of the Head + Heal tinctures.
“We were really excited to see a bigger national brand like Wegmans take in our products and make it more mainstream,” she says, “a lot of the time it’s locked behind cases and there’s a stigma. Everything is out in the open at Wegmans.”
Karli and Allan hope this opportunity will create an incentive for consumers to learn more about the benefits of CBD and hemp oils. Currently, Head + Heal is selling at various local farmers markets as well.
“It takes about 15 to 30 minutes to educate our customers on the products,” Hornick said. “We’re really hoping that by educating consumers, we can make these products more mainstream.”
As for their customers who are well-versed in the world of CBD oils, Head + Heal hopes that having their products in a main retailer like Wegmans makes the brand more accessible.