CBD oil continues to seep into Richmond.
Lamplighter Coffee Roasters, which has three locations in the city, this month began selling beverages with hemp-based cannabidiol (CBD) oil mixed in.
Its efforts are fueled by a relationship with Green Valley Nutrition, a Charlottesville-based company that produces a variety of hemp-based CBD products, including pills, oils and bath bombs.
Lamplighter now offers drops of Green Valley oil as a boost to all beverages, along with a new Daydreamer latte, which includes maca root and gogi berry.
“We chose the maca, gogi and maple because we wanted the beverage to be very healthful,” said Noelle Archibald, co-owner of Lamplighter. “We didn’t want to put it with cane sugar. We wanted to make sure all the ingredients were coming together in a way that was going to be beneficial.”
It marks Lamplighter’s leap into a trend that’s begun flowing into Richmond in different forms, including CBD-infused lemonade at Ellwood Thompson’s, an infused beer at Strangeways, and local head shop Kulture’s sale of hemp-based CBD products, including oils, creams and gummies.
Dispensary will help market
While those all involve hemp-based products, the CBD trend is set to take its biggest local leap with the development of a dispensary that will produce and sell a different form of medical-grade cannabis oil products by prescription from a forthcoming facility in Manchester.
CBD products can be derived from hemp plants and marijuana plants. Both hemp and marijuana are considered cannabis sativa plants, though they are different sizes and contain different levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the component that allows users to get high.
Hemp-based products may be sold in Virginia – albeit because of a lack of regulation – but the plant can be grown in the state only for research purposes. Hemp has many uses and is already present in some paper, beauty products and textiles.