CBD is the trendiest wellness product going right now—good luck finding it in Canada.
With big name celebrities like Kim Kardashian jumping on the CBD hype train, the already huge popularity of the non-intoxicating cannabis compound is only getting bigger. Hell, in the US you can buy all sorts of CBD-infused products from mainstream drugstores right now. And with cannabis now legal for adult use across Canada, you might think getting a bottle of the non-high-inducing CBD oil should be easy enough.
But as it turns out cannabis producers in Canada just can't make enough of the stuff to fulfill market demand.
"I don't think the licensed producers really realized how popular CBD was, so there's none available, really," said Krystian Wetulani, founder of City Cannabis Co. in Vancouver.
Legal cannabis producers in Canada have been struggling to meet the demands of the market. Dispensaries across the country have struggled to keep products on the shelves and consumers are often disappointed that the specific products they want aren't available.
Supplying the market for recreational cannabis is one thing, but meeting demand for wellness-focused CBD products has proven to be something else entirely.
When the US federal government passed the Farm Bill last year and effectively legalized CBD across the country,demand for the product exploded. From high-end luxury retailers to dietary supplement vendors, CBD products are now sold everywhere—even if they aren't reliably in stock.
"Because of the farm bill passing, the sexiness or the in-vogue profile of CBD went through the roof," said Khurram Malik, CEO of the Canadian cannabis conglomerate Biome Grow. "The demand side just blew up and caught everyone by surprise, on both sides of the border."
There is some hope that Canada's CBD shortage will be cleared up much quicker than its overall cannabis supply issues, though.
CBD can be extracted from hemp, a cousin of cannabis that doesn't contain much THC, the compound in cannabis that gets you high. Since regulations around cultivating hemp aren't as strict as the ones surround growing cannabis meant to get you high, producers should be able to scale up their hemp production in relatively short order.
But while cannabis producers will be able to ramp up their CBD production rather quickly, that doesn't mean supply will improve any time soon. When Canada finally allows the legal sale of cannabis-infused food and drinks later this year, a large amount of the supply will be used to create those products.
And until the CBD supply finally does start to level out, our best advice is to just act fast when a new shipment hits your local dispensary.
h/t Huffington Post
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