The Daily Telegraph - 27.08.2019

W

hen Rebekah Hall

is asked about her

line of work, she’s

become used to

raised eyebrows.

“People don’t

expect me to be talking about

cannabis. I’m a middle-class white

woman,” says Hall, the founder of

drinks business Botanic Lab, whose

soft drinks are infused with CBD, the

non-psychoactive compound found

in the cannabis plant.

Interest in CBD, also known as

cannabidiol, is exploding, with

hundreds of products flooding the

market in the past year as the

compound is shown to alleviate

health problems from anxiety to

chronic pain.

Hall, 38, is riding the ups and

downs of the cannabis market, with

ambitions to become the first person

in the UK to make a million from

CBD. She hopes her CBD tea will

become an alternative to a glass of

wine after work. Her products are

already stocked by Harrods,

Waitrose and Ocado, and she has her

sights set on Marks & Spencer.

“I totally want to be the queen of

cannabis,” she says.

We meet in her converted

warehouse office in Shoreditch,

east London. Hall, who grew up in

Somerset with an IT worker father

and a mother working in

sustainability, spent a decade in the

City, working as an accountant and

investment banker, before growing

restless.

“I looked at my bosses and I didn’t

want to end up in the glass office

doing that job for the rest of my life,”

she says. “I turned 30 and thought:

‘Unless I give it up and start from

scratch, I’ll never do it.’”

After running through a couple of

ideas, Hall decided to quit and open a

health drinks business, sensing that

the UK market was far less

developed than that in the US.

Botanic Lab came into being in

2014, with the aim of making “drinks

that do something”, using

ingredients like ginseng for immune

system support and turmeric to fight

inflammation. Hall says she was

always keen to develop a CBD

product, but was waiting for the

public to be “ready to accept it”.

The turning point came last

summer with the case of

Billy Caldwell, the 12-year-

old boy with a severe form of

epilepsy that can be

treated with medical

cannabis. His plight

caused public

perceptions of the drug to

change drastically,

leading to Sajid

Javid, the home

secretary at the time, to

issue a licence allowing

doctors to prescribe medicinal

cannabis oil in the UK. “We brought

out our product within four months

of that,” she says.

CBD helped the company to grow:

today, it employs 10 people, and is

expected to pull in £3.5 million of

revenue this year. There is still much

more room to grow, including for

Hall’s salary, which is still far below

what it was in banking. She says one

casualty of the business is her Net- a-

As medicinal oil takes off, Rebekah Hall

tells Helen Chandler-Wilde how she plans

to be Britain’s first CBD millionaire

The woman

who brought

cannabis

to Waitrose

Porter shopping habit.

Dutch Courage, the company’s

main product, contains 5mg of CBD

per 250ml. Hall describes it as a

“social lubricant” like alcohol: a way

to shrug off nerves without the

hangover. “It might be before a big

meeting when you’re feeling nervous,

it might be the end of work when you

want to wind down, it might be a

drink with friends when you’re

chilling out,” she says. Hall herself

enjoys it regularly.

Dutch Courage is just one of a

dizzying range of CBD products

launching in recent months, from

hummus to hand cream; the Centre for

Medicinal Cannabis, a think tank,

estimates that it will be a £1 billion

industry in the UK by 2025. Even

Coca-Cola has announced that it is

developing a CBD-infused beverage.

Hall calls it “cannabis 2.0”: the drug

is shedding its image as a source of

teenage rebellion and is set to become

a premium wellness product.

Although she imagined Botanic

Lab’s customers would be health-

conscious young professionals, there

is also interest from those in middle-

age and approaching retirement.

“One thing that’s interesting is the

amount of CBD sold to golf clubs,” she

says. “They’re often slightly older,

Riding high: Rebekah Hall says women should not be ashamed of wanting to make money; right and left, Botanic Lab products

FEATURES

Book now Women Mean Business Live

The event will

bring together

over 500

business leaders

and

entrepreneurs

for a day of

action, debate

and networking.

For more

information

please go to

telegraph.

co.uk/events/

event/

women-mean-

business-live

Sadie Frost

Entrepreneur

Victoria Derbyshire

Presenter

Tina Brown

Media Entrepreneur

Samantha Cameron

Fashion Designer

Asma Khan

Chef and Owner of

Darjeeling Express

November 5

2019

rs

ng.

with joint problems and they need a

good swing.”

Hall sees this mainstream

acceptance of CBD as the first step on

the road to full legalisation, which

she thinks will happen in “five to

eight years”. She thinks this will be a

great thing for the economy, but also

for the many patients who could

benefit. “From a therapeutic

perspective, there are people who

rely on these products, who need to

know that they’re getting good

consistent quality.”

Hall says she will expand her

cannabis business as regulation

becomes more accommodative, and

would release a drink containing THC,

the compound in cannabis that gets

you high. “Whatever your views about

legalisation, we’re fully committed to

cannabis as a plant.”

But until full legalisation happens in

the UK, the murky legal status of

cannabis makes the industry

something of a Wild West. The

compliance teams in big brands are

wary of touching it, says Hall. “Big

retailers have a huge reputation to

protect. And their lawyers have no

idea what they’re talking about.”

There are two schools of thinking

about the legality of her own product:

“If you read the letter of the

[European Commission’s] Novel Food

directive, our product is legal, if you

interpret it it’s not.” The ongoing

confusion makes this at times a risky

business: Botanic Lab’s website was

shut down for three months by the

American company that handles its

online payments, after it

thought she was running an

illegal company. “We’re

creating a product where you

don’t know if you’re

going to be able to

sell it tomorrow. My

shareholders have had

to be pretty

supportive.”

Nervousness among big

companies leaves a cottage

industry of small producers left

‘CBD is being sold to

golf clubs, to older

people who need a

good swing’

Highs and lows

The growth of CBD

£1 billion The

estimated value

of the UK CBD

industry by 2025.

250,000 The

number of

estimated

cannabidiol

consumers in

the UK in 2018,

up from 125,000

in 2017.

50+ Number of

conditions that

CBD is thought

to treat.

99 per cent The

increase in sales

of products

containing CBD

in 2019,

according to

Wowcher.

100+ Number of

cannabinoids in

cannabis, of

which CBD and

THC are just two.

to pick up customer demand. This is

made possible by the fact that CBD is

considered a “novel food” by the

Government, so its regulatory

oversight is not as tight as if it were

sold as a medicine.

This adds to the stress that Hall is

already under as an entrepreneur.

She croaks her way through our

interview because of her “Ibiza flu”,

caught from a break on the island

with a friend during which she

worked every day from nine until

six. It was the closest thing she’s

had to a holiday in the five years

since opening Botanic Lab. As you

might imagine, she’s rather steely:

one of her team tells me she’s “a

horror” with negotiations.

But however stressful life is, you

would have to prise the business

from her dead hands. She’s tired of

women building a business only to

delegate the “numbers” to a man: “If

you don’t have your head round the

numbers, it’s not your business.”

She has a problem with other

female stereotypes, too. “The

rhetoric towards women that you

can have it all is bulls---. It’s one of

the biggest poisons that is holding

women back.” She says she chose

running the business over focusing

on her private life. “I am single,

childless and proud,” she says. “I

probably wouldn’t have been able to

do what I’m doing had I had

children in my 30s.”

She is hoping to inspire other

women to be honest about what they

want. “When women are asked

‘What’s your goal?’ they say ‘I want

to change the world and make

people’s lives better’. Those are all

very worthy goals, but my primary

goal is to make money. And I’m not

ashamed of it.”

PAUL GROVER FOR THE TELEGRAPH

The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 27 August 2019 *** 21
RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws