After several decades spent globetrotting in pursuit of tea, the Harney Brothers decided to build their next business a little bit closer to home — as in their own backyard.
The Millerton, N.Y. facility that’s home to Harney & Sons, the second-generation family tea business in which Paul and Mike Harney have spent a combined 30-plus years, is now also the headquarters for The Hemp Division, a standalone vertically integrated grower and manufacturer that has steadily and quietly expanded since going online in 2019. Having debuted as a showcase for CBD-infused varieties of Harney & Sons’ loose leaf and brewed iced teas, the brand is currently rolling out its first non-tea drink, the flavored sparkling water line Spark.
Despite its fast growth, The Hemp Division is still in its early stages: after launching the company in 2018, the 7,000 hemp plants seeded across four acres in Millerton only started growing last year. On an agricultural level, working with hemp allowed the Harneys the chance to nurture and harvest the crop themselves, rather than, under normal circumstances, traveling internationally to the tea’s origin. After New York began issuing hemp growing licenses in 2018, the brothers seized on the opportunity to both enter a burgeoning market and leverage their existing experience and infrastructure to create a vertically integrated operation. With land to grow on, an in-house team to help with production design and its own distribution fleet to move finished products, the barriers to entry were enticingly low.
“On the tea end, we’ve never feared widening the net, so that same philosophy carries over to the other side,” said Mike Harney.
In designing the core product lineup of infused teas, the company has made dosage a central part of its messaging, and not just from the apothecary-style labels and text splashed across the bottles. The range of offerings — from Focus (5 mg) to Rise (25 mg) — reflect both CBD’s versatility as an ingredient, but also the challenge that brands face in creating clear and unique use occasions for infused products; Siesta (18 mg) and Rest (15 mg) suggest similar functions, as do Refresh (8 mg) and Rise, despite the latter containing over three times as much CBD as the former. Glide (20 mg), Cruise (25 mg) and Recover (22 mg) round out the roster.
The Hemp Division’s loose leaf teas are notably different from their RTD counterparts, despite in some cases using the same SKU name. The loose leaf version of Focus, for example, contains 20 mg of CBD. Others include Calm (9 mg), Center (8 mg) and Chill (16 mg), all sold in boxes of eight sachets each for $8.
While the SKUs may be named to help consumers have a simple point of reference, the blending of the drinks reflects the more nuanced craft of its formulation. The amount of hemp is tied to both functionality and flavor through terpene profile: some, but not all, use a broad spectrum hemp extract that contains a wider array of terpenes, and the company has even begun experimenting with adding hemp leaves to the drinks themselves. In terms of how consumers will actually feel, the balance of CBD with caffeine and other adaptogens, such as ashwagandha and MSM in Recovery, is also important. For the bottled version of Focus, the brand found that just 5 mg of CBD was needed to achieve the desired result, thanks to high caffeine levels in the blend of yerba mate and yapoun.
“Because we promote (the tagline) ‘Find your own path’ with products that have different amounts of CBD in them, we thought that it was pretty important to go in that direction as opposed to being vague about what’s going on,” Paul Harney said. “There’s a nice wide selection to appeal to different people.”
The Hemp Division’s ready-to-drink lineup is expanding beyond tea with Spark, a hemp-infused sparkling water line that’s lightly sweetened with fruit juice. With Harney’s established credibility in loose leaf tea doing much of the heavy lifting for its bottled drinks, Spark, which is packaged in 12 oz. aluminum cans, instead offers a path into the growing premium sparkling set in natural retailers and in e-commerce. Each contains 20 mg of CBD and is sweetened with fruit juice and puree, with Orange Mango (15 calories) and Tangy Lime (4 calories) being the two flavors. The suggested retail price is $45 per 12-pack.
Despite the broad variation in CBD content per SKU, all items are line priced at around $5, with Paul Harney noting that he anticipates that to go down as CBD supply grows and becomes less expensive to source. But having control of distribution through its own DSD system in New York City had allowed The Hemp Division to scale and build purposefully rather than under pressure. Perhaps most importantly, there’s literally more room for The Hemp Division to grow: the company currently holds licenses to grow, process and test-market CBD products in New York, and the brothers say the Millerton facility has ample capacity to hold more raw material.
“It’s a natural fit with our existing retailers,” Paul Harney said. “There aren’t a lot of accounts that didn’t have some cross-pollination between the two.”