SuperCharge! Uses cannabis like a boost of wheatgrass. Raw cannabis leaves are a new $2 upgrade at SuperCharge! and are available in a smoothie, in a cold-pressed juice or frozen into an ice cube.
“Traditionally, cannabis has been bred to produce high THC,” said Chelsea Mayton, founder, and owner of Wisconsin Cannabis Cultivars. The types Mayton grows have high CBD, which is the compound that people say has medicinal value for a wide number of things, from epileptic seizures and depression to nausea, muscle pain, and tumors.
The founders of SuperCharge! Say that the flavor of raw cannabis leaves is bitter and vegetal, but in a SuperCharge! smoothie ($5-$7) the flavor is relatively unnoticeable.
It’s also not an immediately powerful dose of medicine. Raw cannabis needs to build up over time, “so give it two or three days if you’re using it regularly to start to see effects,” Mayton said.
“We had a customer come in for the fourth time, and she was saying yesterday that she can tell the difference,” said juice bar manager Cassie Armstrong. “She feels better.”
Since the state released its Industrial Hemp Pilot Research Program, hundreds of farmers like Mayton have applied to cultivate or process hemp. The laws are still relatively shaky; for a few weeks in May, the state Department of Justice said that the sale of CBD oil was illegal, only to go back on the decision a few weeks later.
Business owners are taking advantage of the moment. Two new mall kiosks called Highly Edibles 608 and 608 Hemp opened and both are selling CBD oil, water, and other products. Both are owned by Mike McGee, a former Milwaukee alderman.
Mayton, a longtime gardener, got into growing cannabis in 1996 after her father passed away from leukemia and she learned that cannabis “probably would have saved his life,” she said. In 2015, she moved to The Dalles, east of Portland, Oregon, to learn more about growing cannabis.
“There’s a lot of farmers who may grow three or four different crops, have different animals, and they’re trying to diversify to make some extra money,” said Jamaal Stricklin, SuperCharge!’s director of sales. “She’s specialized, it’s her only crop.”
Running this new business has been challenging, Mayton said, in part because the regulations vary between the state and federal governments and misinformation about what cannabis actually does is widespread.
“Legalities are always changing,” Mayton said. “You have to keep watching what the government is doing. It was hard to obtain seeds.”
Mayton’s longterm goal is to sell her cannabis products, like fresh leaves infused in coconut oil, directly to consumers at a market stand. She could be a tenant in the future Madison Public Market, for example.
SuperCharge! likes working with her cannabis, Stricklin said, because “it’s adding to that small incremental lifestyle change” in the same way that microgreens do.
“What SuperCharge! does is increase knowledge of the subject, so that when it comes down to voting or being informed, they can say we got some information from SuperCharge!,” Stricklin said. “I don’t know if it’s easy for us to pivot to selling a bunch of weed. It’s more important to create awareness of CBD, THC, cannabis and what those things are … what hemp is, what you can do with it.”
“As more and more states legalize recreational cannabis,” Stricklin said, “until we go back and overturn some of the drug convictions that have been a plight on African-American males age 15 to 30 until we do that, I won’t be satisfied. There are social ramifications … that’s a really big deal.
“Helping people is one thing, but you’ve got generations of people that have been thrown away.”
