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Commercial Hemp: Job Titles
Job titles associated with staffers responsible for sourcing commercial hemp include chief financial officer, director of hemp procurement, vice president of sales, business development manager, director of business development, and owner. Additional details about the research strategy used to supply these titles are detailed below. Full details are available within the attached spreadsheet.
Job Titles
- Keith Botsch is the CFO at Illuminent.
- Drew Schlumpf is the director of procurement at Marquis Energy.
- Paul Wible is the vice president of sales at KifCure, LLC.
- Tony Nasca is the business development manager at Redhouse Manufacturing.
- Cory Garza is the director of business development at Allegiant Pharma.
- Brett Corbin is the owner of King Allum.
Additional Information
- Some additional job titles for purchasing positions include chief procurement officer, chief purchasing executive, chief purchasing officer, commodities manager, and commodities purchasing manager.
Research Strategy
The supply chain within the US hemp market is notoriously sketchy. This is due to various legal confusions and the newness of the regulated industry. Because of the ability to make significant money in an industry that is sometimes under tremendous legal pressures, sometimes companies are much more close-mouthed about the activities within it. For instance, while being interviewed on a podcast, the owner of Hemp Exchange, a prominent broker within the hemp industry, purposefully did not provide the name of a very large and profitable trucking company that transports millions of dollars of hemp, because of these lingering legal pressures. So finding out information about companies that buy hemp from commercial growers in the US market was a bit difficult.
To get past these difficulties the team reviewed top-selling companies that manufacture hemp products to suss out any personnel responsible for buying the hemp in these high-selling product catalogs. Utilizing top or public companies was a strategy used in order to have a greater likelihood that some personnel/buyer details may have made their way into the public domain. We reviewed details for several top companies in the hemp industry. After assessing them for relevancy to this project, many were excluded because they grew their own source (e.g, CW Hemp Inc. and CV Sciences). After identifying some top companies known to buy industrial hemp (e.g., Panacea Life Sciences, Evolution Enterprises, and Elxinol US), the team looked to identify their staff members responsible for the purchases. However, the team found that in our list of companies none had supplied details about the staffers who were expressly responsible for hemp purchases. Some of the companies we looked at include Sulcanna Co, Evolution Enterprises, Panacea Life Sciences, Canopy Growth, Elixinol U, Isodiol International, Aurora Cannabis, Tilray/Manitoba Harvest, Altmeds, LLC, OrganicBiology, Stellar CBD, and Berkshire CBD.
Next, we looked for databases related to buyers and sellers of industrial hemp. We identified three that might have details about its buyers. As this approach ended up being more lucrative in terms of finding actual buyers of industrial hemp, we have listed the findings of these databases and described each approach below:
1. The Illinois Extension, a project of the University of Illinois, created a publicly posted industrial hemp buyer/seller list. The list can be accessed via the Illinois Extension website or directly here. Of the 59 entries on the list, there were 9 potential prospects (buyers or buyer/sellers) representing 6 companies:
*Keith Botsch (Illuminent)
*Nelson Lytle (Lemah Creek Extraction, LLC)
*No name provided (Sulcanna Co)
*Drew Schlumpf (Marquis Energy/Marquis Extraction)
*Amanda Ryan (pHat Bottom Labs, LLC)
*Vicki Hughes (pHat Bottom Labs, LLC)
*Drew Sementa (pHat Bottom Labs, LLC)
*Paul Wible (KifCure, LLC)
*“Joe” (Drift Extracts)
2. The National Hemp Association has a buyers and sellers forum that was accessed publicly. Some industrial hemp experts advise sellers to post on this forum to find buyers. Reviewing this list revealed several potential buyers. However, even though the team went through the entire forum list of 337 posts, similar to the Illinois Extension listing, the forum revealed that the industrial hemp industry has more listed sellers than buyers. Also, please note the many of the buyers posting on this forum had not associated their names with companies and vice versa.
*Cory Garza
*Sean Diesel
*Tony Nasca (Redhouse Manufacturing)
*Jennifer Krivanek (Sierra Cascade Exchange)
*Jess Cudahy (Eighth Revolution)
*Brett Corbin (King Allum, LLC)
*Donald Clayton
*Berkshire CBD
*Adam Byrd
*Stellar CBD
*Dan Cherchian
*OrganicBiology
3. We reviewed the Hemp Exchange but this provider did not have a directory or database of buyers and simply vetted buyers and sellers in order to apply assurances within the currently vulnerable industrial hemp supply chain. Ultimately, to post a directory may have deconstructed its business model a bit. However, the website did hold a few client testimonials. We followed those leads to identify any buyers from which to collect job titles.
*Joy Beckerman
*Peter Grasso
*Amanda DiCosola
*Alex Niswander
By reviewing all of the names and companies that we found above, we were able to identify a few job titles associated with large-scale buyers of commercial hemp within the US. Those names and titles have been detailed above, as well as entered within the attached spreadsheet.