Florida’s Oceana Coffee Entering the CBD Category with Bhang Partnership

Oceana Coffee of Tequesta, Florida, took the top prize at Golden Bean roasting competition in 2016. File photo courtesy of Oceana Coffee.

Tequesta, Florida-based specialty coffee roaster Oceana Coffee has entered into a partnership with Miami-based cannabis products maker Bhang Corporation for a new line of CBD coffee products under the new brand names of Röst  and Cosmic Terp.

Bhang will hold a 51 percent stake in the partnership, while Oceana will leverage its coffee sourcing and roasting expertise to help bring the new products to market later this year, according to an announcement from 9-year-old Bhang.

Bhang received a $500,000 injection from the cannabis-focused investment firm Cannabis Growth Opportunity Corporation in April of last year, and the company now boasts of offering more than 100 hemp-derived DBD and terpene products including chocolates, pre-rolled joints, vapes, gummies, mouth sprays and more.

“We are excited to team up with Oceana Coffee to bring two unique brands together in a rapidly-expanding market that has shown significant interest in our combined products,” Bhang CEO and Chairman Scott Van Rixel said in yesterday’s announcement. “It has long been our strategy to bring the benefits of CBD and terpenes to a wider market of consumers that are expressing greater interest in incorporating these products into their everyday lives.”

The company said it is awaiting a shipment of 5,000 pounds of coffee from Honduras to begin production on the new CBD coffee products.

From a coffee industry perspective, the Oceana partnership with Bhang represents a rare case in which a specialty coffee company has headed full-throttle into the CBD category.

As the cold brew craze erupted in geyser-like fashion over the six years or so, it was often specialty coffee players — such as Stumptown, Blue Bottle, Slingshot and others — who were largely responsible for developing and defining the category.

The same can’t necessarily be said for CBD coffee in the United States, which has been driven mostly on two fronts: small coffee shops adding small amounts of CBD oil to their drinks; and well-funded upstarts with little to no coffee experience hoping to capitalize on the market potential of hemp-derived CBD and other cannabis products, made possible both by state and federal legislation.

The majority of the companies in the latter group tend to adopt brand names that suggest some kind of pseudo-spiritual or holistic therapy association, while their coffee sourcing and roasting operations tend to involve undisclosed private-label relationships.

Through the Bhang and Oceana partnership, the Röst brand will include coffee products containing some level of CBD, while the Cosmic Terp brand will feature coffee products containing terpenes, compounds found in nearly all plants that are generally used as aromatic and/or flavoring in the cannabis retail industry.

“This category is a huge opportunity for Oceana, and Bhang’s position as a market leader in the cannabis space has allowed us, as a supplier of fair trade and organic coffee beans, to be active in this new emerging market,” Oceana Coffee Founder Scott Angelo said in the announcement from Bhang. “We are extremely excited to be working with Bhang to bring these new and in-demand products to market.”