With the somewhat recent legalization of cannabis across the country, many people have started to see it for more than just recreation. People have begun to see the benefits that cannabis can have in their day-to-day lives, and one of those groups is athletes. More and more athletes have begun to use cannabis to aid in after-training recovery. We talked to Angelina Blessed, a Muay Thai fighter founder of Blessed Edibles, a cannabis edibles line targeted towards athletes about her company.
Why did you start the business?
Blessed Edibles was started out of necessity for me. I was learning about how to recover as a martial artist and Muay Thai competitor. For years I was never given the knowledge that recovery was just as important as the training itself. I was also watching all the champion fighters at a gym called Siam No.1 use cannabis before they would train, and that didn’t make sense to me at all.
So, what I did was I started making butters for myself and smoking cannabis. This was after 12 years of professional training on a stringent diet and being very healthy. However, my body was slowly breaking down because doctors offered me pain pills, and didn’t want to use those. I also didn’t want to smoke because of the adverse effects. So, I started making edibles, and through trial and error, we came up with a great process.
How does it feel to launch something during a pandemic?
I started Blessed edibles in what we now call the legacy market. In 2015 the area was still very grey, and 2017 , cannabis was legalized. So in 2019, we sign into our first legal market. Then 2020 rolled around and that stopped the whole process for us. So, we still have been trying to get the products into the OCS and across Canada, but the pandemic has slowed down everything for us and made us wait another year to launch our products. The pandemic stopped all of our progress or else we would’ve been in the market a year ago.
Who is your target demographic?
We are absolutely dedicated to the athletic market, the professional sports training market, but blessed edibles really can be for everybody. It is a legal market product, so the most we are going to be able to have is 10 mg of THC in any package. That is a very different package than our old 100 mg chocolate bars. Now, we know that the restrictions will lighten up, and we will be able to do more things like that in the future.
I’m excited to introduce and educate a whole new world of people to edibles and safely be able to do that.
How have athletes responded to your products?
People have always been stoked about our brand. We have always been more about talking about the milligrams and about how to properly medicate. We’re all very excited, but we’re all tired of waiting at this point too. So we’re excited about getting products on the shelves, and we can start to do our jobs. We could’ve launched a year ago, but education in taking edibles is something I feel is very important.
So, we really wanted myself and the other founders in the stores to be in the stores to introduce it to the stores. The pandemic means we can’t have face-to-face time with people. So, it has stopped us. I’m really excited to just be in the stores and help people on a day-to-day basis.
What are your hopes for the future?
Hopes for the future would be to launch Blessed across Canada, then to hit Thailand and help with the legalization work in Thailand. Then, I will move forward with training with the best athletes in the world, but I think that will be between Toronto and Thailand for sure. We’re ready to go, and we’re ready to launch products we’re prepared to help the world heal.
Despite most industries taking a big hit during the pandemic, the cannabis industry has seen tremendous growth. In July 2020, licensed marijuana stores sold more than $231 million in products which was actually a significant 15 percent jump from the sales in June of that year. With gyms hopefully opening up again soon, we might see more and more people looking for less used methods of recovery from their workouts, which might feel a little harder than they did before the pandemic.
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Author: Matt Filart, Toronto, Canada. If you have stories to share kindly email: – filartmatt@gmail.com
