PlusCBD Interview and Tour at Their HQ offices in San Diego
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Hi, Courtney here from Leafreport. We’re here at the CV Sciences headquarters with their brand PlusCBD, and we’re gonna take a little tour. And here we’ll take a look at their office space. And this is the area for customer service and sales.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Hi, I’m Courtney here with Leafreport at the CV Sciences headquarters with Duffy from PlusCBD. How are you today?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
Doin’ well. Nice to meet you, Courtney.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Nice to meet you, too. So would you like to tell us a little bit about your, company and the history behind it?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
Sure. CV Sciences is a company that, that specializes in a hemp extract, and our hemp extract contains CBD. we’re experts in, in getting the oil just right and, and doing it in quality control conditions so that the consumer knows that exactly what’s on the label is inside of the bottle and vice-a-versa. And, we, we’ve been in it since the beginning. We’re one of the first companies. Yeah, we really… We’re there to help pass the farm bill and, and put this product and ingredient on the map.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Very nice. And I see you have, a range of products set up here. Would you like to tell us a little bit about some of them?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
Yeah, definitely. So here you see our products and our labels. And we have a lot of different consumer form factors a- to meet the consumer needs. We have your typical capsules, gel caps. we have liquids, come in sprays or droppers. we have some, recently introduced topical products that allow people to apply CBD to the skin in various areas. And you’ll see one unique thing about our product line is we have different, forms of extract.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
I mentioned that we are an expert in extractions. So what we do is we do our primary extract here. This is our raw formula, and this is right when you CO2 extract from the plant. And it has some CBDA. That’s actually how it’s formed in the plant. A lot of people don’t know this. And this is actually really good for external use and certain particular, health, health, uses for… C- different consumers find this effective. Then once we, we have this oil in the lab we d- we do a process called decarboxylation, and that’s where we convert all the acid form into regular CBD. And so this is our regular strength CBD, one of our most popular, foundational products.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
But as we, as we progressed as a company we realized some people needed a little higher concentration, and so that’s where we came up with our Gold Formula. And we take the green formula and we distill it up a little bit to get a little bit of higher amount of CBD per serving. So that’s general… We use that theme. We have our raw, our regular, and our extra strength, and we apply that to the different form factors, including we also have a gummy product for people that prefer that.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Great, thank you for all that edu- education. And what’s your best selling product, and why do you think it’s such a good product?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
You know, my understanding, and I’m not in sales. I do science. But it’s the Gold. It’s our Gold gel caps. And I think for me, and I know this from, my years in clinical practice, a lot of it’s convenience. You know, you bring the gel caps with you. Y- you know, they’re not messy. Some people, you know, you put this in your purse. They don’t like to have the liquid or others. So, this has been consistently our top selling product, and I don’t actually know if it’s the, the form factor that consumers like so much or the fact that it provides the most CBD.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
but the other i- interesting thing is, this has the lower amount of CBD, but it has the CBDA in it. And some consumers really find benefit from this, and oddly enough I have a few that do morning and evening. (laughs).
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Oh, okay. Very nice. What sets you apart from other companies and brands, and what makes you unique?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
You know, I think a lot of it is our expertise. I mentioned we’ve been in this since the beginning, so we have been sourcing, we have been extracting and formulating since the beginning. We’ve accumulated both the staff expertise, as well as… So I think it boils down to quality. we were the first company that invested in, in doing the scientific work to show that our products are safe for the consumer.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
You know, and, you know, a lot of c- companies have rode our coattails in that, but as a consumer facing brand we felt like our obligation was the consumer. We had to have the data. This is a new ingredient, so we wanted to really emphasize that. so we published the first toxicology studies.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
We then progressed… We’re one of the first companies to pu- wa- we’re in the process of publishing it… We’ve done a poster presentation on a randomized controlled trial. So I think, I guess where I’m going is science. Science is an area that really… Our commitment to science, our engagement with it, has really set us apart.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
very good. And can you tell us about your manufacturing process? Where is your hemp grown? What farming methods do you use?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
So our hemp is grown in the Netherlands, and so it’s, it’s, um… What we did was, in other European countries, the hemp growing industry is very, very mature. It’s been around a long time. They use a lot of, biodynamic and organic farming sources. As you know, here in the US the laws have just changed in the last few years, and so the, the, the farm side of this is still getting worked out… The supply chains, up and down. So we’ve really focused on the European supply chain. We find it very high quality. We start with a certified seed source. We know it comes from hemp. We know what the THC levels are really low. we use that certified seed source.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
We do a CO2 extraction. So that’s a solvent free, clean extraction technique. It allows us to get our, crude extract. I brought some crude extract here. and so you’ll see… I don’t know if the camera can see this, is this is how it first comes out of the plant. This is a straight CO2 extraction. You can see the darkness in there. That’s a lot of the water soluble components. There’s chlorophyll in there. There’s fatty acids. This is a true whole food, whole hemp extract. And this is our raw formula.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
So that’s done through CO2, and then we, gently process it to decarboxylate it. And you can see, it looks, it looks virtually the same, but all the CBDA is turned in to CBD here. But where it gets interesting is we start to distill the oil. And this is our Gold Formula. And you can see what we’re doing is pulling off some of the water soluble stuff so you can c- the chlorophyll which has that deep green goes away. we lose, some of the, the vitamins that are in there that just get extracted out of there. And so you have more of this, the cannabinoids, the terpenes, and the fatty acids.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
And so, once we do this, then we take it to, blending, and we add some, extra virgin olive oil and get it to the right consistency. And then we make our final products.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Wow, great. Thank you. And how do you ensure the product’s quality, purity, and cleanliness?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
Well, for, for those that are not, uh… Pay attention to this stuff all the time. There is a set of rules called Good Manufacturing Practices that are put forth by the FDA. And they have, different ones for food, and different ones for dietary supplements and drugs. And so we follow the dietary supplement Good Manufacturing Practices. And so that’s a whole series of paperwork and testing and documentation. The, the, the word, the word they always us is if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. So we put a QR code on, on our label here. And this is a thing that consumers can use to scan the product that takes you to a certificate of analysis that shows our testing results and things of that.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
So not only do we follow this elaborate scheme to make sure our quality control’s perfect, but we have third parties come in and inspect us. We have two separate third parties on a annual basis that come in as if they were the FDA and do a full inspection, and I’m happy to say that we do very well in those inspections. So that’s how that we ensure that everything inside the bottle is exactly what’s on the label.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
And, in fact, there have been, for those who know Consumer Reports… You know, they’re an organization that just take products off the shelf and tests ’em, then writes a big, long report. And we’ve been in those reports, and we consistently test, match our label claim and get good results. So really happy with that.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Oh, yeah. That’s great to hear. What is your transparency policy?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
Well, I think a lot of it boils down to our QR code. And this is a really valuable tool for c- consumers. Being able to scan right from the bottle to take you to lab-verified information about, you know, the, a third party test, cannabinoid levels, terpene levels, these different components of the plant, and as well as the absence of things. You also want to make sure there’s no contaminants, heavy metals. You know, this is a plant. It comes from the plant. It’s grown in the dirt. And any plant, any herb you buy at the store, any dietary supplement… Plants take in naturally, things like heavy metals and pesticides. And they can be removed in processing, but the important is that they’re tested and verified to not be there. And so that’s one of our big transparency.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
We also talk a lot on our website about our farming practices. We do a lot of tours of our facilities for retailers, other interested people are, who are trying to figure out how. I think you all who are guests got a chance to see our facility. and so that’s really a, a, a core of our transparency practices. We do recognize consumers are very, more and more so just demanding to see right down through the supply chain. So we’re working on more ways to communicate our seed to shelf practices, more video feeds, and things like that so people can get a real look inside of how our products are made.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Yeah, that’s great. It sounds like you make a lot of that information available for users. And what are your recommendations for the beginner user, someone who has heard about CBD and is wondering where to start, is worried about legalities, e- efficacy, or safety issues?
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
Well, good advice is always to talk to your healthcare provider. You know, they are the ones who know about your health and if you have any contraindications, things like that. Just let them know, you’re, you’re, you’re wanting to, to try CBD, whether if it’s, stay healthy, you’ve got some occasional stress, problems sleeping. Let them know, you know, contact us. We have some science we can share. We have our safety reports we can share if the doctor’s a little nervous. but we have a, a saying is, start low and go slow.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
And so everybody responds a little different to CBD. It’s like caffeine, you know. Some people are very sensitive to caffeine. A little bit of caffeine and they’re really jacked up, and there’s other people like me that can drink and go to sleep at night. And CBD, we’re finding, is very similar. Some people notice it, you know, s- s- fairly significantly, or if it’s a very mild experience. And so we, we typically we have very low amounts, you know, two to three milligram servings, and then we have our 15 milligram servings.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
So we always say start low. You know, start with the Green Formula two, five milligrams. See how your body responds. keep a journal, you know, write down if you have trouble sleeping, you know, keep a journal of your sleep and find your sweet spot. And typically, you know, 10 to 15 milligrams is r-, daily, is really where we find people find benefit.
Leafreport – Courtney Quinn:
Well, great. thank you very much for talking with us today, Duffy, and it was great meeting you.
Douglas “Duffy” MacKay – Plus CBD:
All right. Pleasure.
