Cannabis Edibles and Drink Review had the pleasure of sitting down with Josh Kirby, Founder and Chief Product Office at Kin Slips.
CEDR: How did you get into the cannabis industry?
Josh: I got into the cannabis space sort of accidentally. Before I was in cannabis, I was actually a touring musician. I’ve been a musician my whole life since, I was like two years old and went to college for music. After college, I started touring, playing some gigs and also doing sound and tour management for a few different bands. And at the level I was at, I wasn’t really making enough money to pay for my life off the road.
So, I ended up getting all these weird jobs trying to fill in the gaps between tours. And one of the jobs that I had was working for guys who were trying to create startups in the Cannabis space. This was around 2012 in Colorado and Washington. My task was to figure out what the hell was going on and I got really, really interested in what was happening. I decided that I was going to move from where I was living in New York to Seattle to try to get involved.
I started looking around for what the opportunities were in the space and particularly what the shortcomings of the current industry were. And it became obvious quickly that there wasn’t a good focus on CPG products and specifically when it came to trust.
There was this huge gap between what Sanjay Gupta was saying on TV 24/7 at that point in time versus what you could actually get in a dispensary. You know, it was being pitched as “CBD can help with all these things. And if you have any number of ailments and you found nothing in traditional medicine that works for you, you should try to go into a dispensary.” At the time, your only options were brownies in Saran wrap, which are okay, but there was a huge gap between what I was expecting to see and what was really there. Thus, the opportunity was trying to figure out a way to make a product that is sort of indistinguishable from something that you would buy from a Walgreens. And that was really the spark for what got us going in the space.
CEDR: How much of your day on the educating consumers?
Josh: It’s almost entirely around education. It’s really what makes a company like ours. What we’re trying to do is a little different from the traditional cannabis company or most of the gummy companies out there. There’s all this misinformation. There’s a ton of interest, but really very few people understand what’s going on. So, we’re trying to enter that space with some level of clarity about what our product does. And our product is fairly complicated to understand at first, because it’s not it’s not a normal product.
CEDR: Are you all using Nano technology?
Josh: So, we aren’t actually using nano encapsulation or nanoparticles in our product. And this is one of those areas that has a high level of confusion and a high level of interest for the industry, because there are a lot of people out there who are claiming that they have “nano particles” or some sort of weird, fantastic technology that they cannot prove that they have, and they don’t actually know if they’re making it.
There are some companies out there who are legitimate, but they are the minority. What’s happening is that there are massive amounts of people out there claiming that they have that technology (when they don’t) who are just muddying the waters for everyone else.
The nano thing is interesting because it’s something that people at a surface level think they understand; a smaller particle makes total sense. However, there’s a lot more to it than that.
CEDR: But if you’re putting something under your tongue, like Kin Slips, the onset can be quite rapid?
Josh: Yes. It can hit real quick, having nothing to do with Nano. You don’t necessarily need to get to the nanoscale for sublingual absorption to work properly. It would probably benefit our product to do that, but it’s difficult to truly create a stable emulsion. It might save us a few minutes (of onset time) down the road once we have more resources. For now, given the complications of Nano and given the some of the potential pitfalls of emulsions, we we’ve decided to stay away from that because the effectiveness of our product is more or less the same, with or without it.
CEDR: So, what is your typical onset timing?
Josh: It’s super-fast; about ten minutes. That said, everybody’s physical makeup is a little different, including the pore sizes underneath your tongue that allow for things to pass through.
CEDR: To what degree can you make something that’s sublingual and strain specific?
Josh: That’s an important question for what’s going on right now. And this is also super complicated, unfortunately. It comes down to the specific combination and ratio of terpenes and cannabinoids.
For example, if you want a Granddaddy Purple strain, you have all these terpenes, and cannabinoids. With a Jack Herer strain, you may even have the same set of terpenes and cannabinoids, but in different ratios. This occurs by introducing a molecular makeup that is similar or analogous to what was in the plant originally. What really matters is how much makes it into your bloodstream.
Our products don’t use a single strain origin. We start with isolate compounds and then we build our own strain profiles from there. This allows us to have control over the consumer’s experience on a batch-to-batch basis.
CEDR: Do you have expansion plans beyond California?
Josh: Yes. We’re working on a whole bunch of stuff right now. One of the most exciting things is that at the beginning of the year, we announced a partnership with a Canadian company called Aleafia, to help bring our products into Canada. We’re also working on a number of different expansions for the product line, including expanding our core product line from the four blends that we have right now. We have several new products in R&D that we’re looking to launch before the end of the year.
CEDR: Thanks so much Josh! Please keep us posted as 2021 progresses.
