Hapi Brand Infuses Iconic Rhode Island Food and Drinks with Cannabis

A vast concrete warehouse in Cranston was originally supposed to house hundreds of growing cannabis plants, but instead it stores classic cars. Walk through the space, surrounded by vintage 1960s and ’70s muscle cars, and there’s an entrance to a semi-secret laboratory at the back of the room. A locked door labeled with a bright blue circle, the word Hapi and an upturned grin that combines with the lettering to make the logo look like a happy face, leads to a laboratory. The motto is “Don’t worry. Be Hapi.”

Inside, Hapi owners and shareholders Andrew Irby and Jason Carlson are mad scientists infusing iconic Rhode Island food and drink products like Del’s lemonade, coffee syrup and pizza chips with cannabis. “Our initial plan for this building was, ‘Yea, we’re going to grow.’ But once we got all of our funding, we realized there were already forty-plus licensed cultivators. Today there are sixty-plus,” Irby says. “We made the pivot to extraction only. At the time, it was completely brand new to me so we had to start over the learning process.”

Inside the lab, the high-tech, CO2 extraction machinery looms. The main machine is equipped with intricate glass tubes and beakers. It’s called the Prescott five-liter, wipe film extractor. After winterization, it filters out fats, waxes, lipids, chlorophyll and other plant matter through distillation, while extracting the cannabis oil from the cannabis flowers (or buds), which is then used in edibles.

Back in 2019, Irby traveled to Colorado with partners Dennis Raymond and Tom Mirza to learn about the cannabis extraction process and purchase equipment. At the time, Rhode Island was approved for medical use only, but the partners always had an inkling that recreational licenses would soon be on the horizon in the Ocean State. The partners sourced equipment directly from manufacturers, and underwent a training session right at the facility where their extraction machine was made. At the time, they were also invited to tour various cannabis facilities, where they met Jason Carlson, who was one of the lab supervisors at one of the facilities they toured.

“We got to see from start to finish how our products can look, and the products we’d be able to make. It was kind of like opening the doors for us in the extraction space,” Irby says.

From there, they purchased the machinery and brought it back to Rhode Island right around when the pandemic hit in 2020. At that point, they contacted the lab supervisor they met, Jason Carlson, and asked if he’d be willing to fly to Rhode Island and consult for their business. They eventually asked him to relocate and work for Hapi and he agreed.

Irby had been working in the medical cannabis space for years, but now recreational business is booming with Carlson’s infusing expertise. Hapi started out infusing pizza chips from the Original Italian Bakery thanks to a partnership with the owner Don DePetrillo. “They were a knockout, selling out every Thursday and Friday. The dispensaries could not keep them in stock,” Irby says. “Then the conversation here internally turned to what other brands do you think we can bring in?”

That’s when, in late spring of 2021, Irby went for the big lemons; Del’s lemonade that is. “Sure enough, in forty-eight hours, we had a meeting with Del’s,” Irby says.

Irby and Mirza met with Del’s and they challenged Irby to prove he could infuse their product with cannabis and still have it taste like Del’s.

“From there it took us about four months to get the flavor profile to where I felt comfortable in calling in the team at their lab,” Irby says. “They run a food science lab there, and I invited them to come in and taste the beverage and they said, ‘This is Del’s!’”

The cannabis-infused Del’s beverage is sold in four-ounce bottles that contain 10 mg of THC for $7 a bottle. The drink comes in classic lemonade, pink lemonade and tangerine flavors, available at Solar, Mother Earth, Greenleaf, Aura, Sweet Spots and Rise dispensaries, along with the pizza chips and other Hapi products. Many people ask why the beverage is so small, and not the usual twelve- to sixteen-ounce size of beverages.

The reasoning is clear: “We’re not a conforming style of brand. People expect drinks in this market to be twelve to sixteen ounces, or twenty-four or bigger-ounce beverages. But are you buying this product because of Del’s, or are you buying it to enjoy cannabis?” Irby says. “So wouldn’t you want the smallest vehicle to enjoy it, so you’re not getting bloated like a beer, and you still get the great taste of Del’s lemonade?”

Next up was coffee syrup, and while they couldn’t get Autocrat on board to publicly be their partner in the cannabis space, they were still able to create their own THC-infused coffee syrup using their product. “If you remember the packaging, it’s a little play on it, done deliberately,” Irby says. “Autocrat’s little red bird is the Rhody Red hen. Ours is a cardinal.”

Where will Hapi go next? They’re in talks with Iggy’s to launch a cannabis-infused doughboy in two different sizes, and they’re also trying to figure out how to properly infuse sauce packets from Olneyville New York System for hot wieners.

They’d also like to get involved in the infused carbonated beverage space. They plan to launch a line of cannabis-infused mocktails in December, including a margarita, pina colada, and a cinnamon-flavored drink similar to Fireball.

In the ever-expanding cannabis industry, Irby, Carlson and their other two partners like to be different. “The non-conforming part of business is part of me. It’s also part of Jason,” Irby says.  So when it comes to creating non-conforming cannabis based products that’s why you have the pizza chips and the Del’s. We have a book of ideas we plan to execute in the future. We just need the market to mature to be open to some of these new products.”

And they can see expanding their business to other states where cannabis is legal. Next up are Massachusetts and Connecticut. Cannabis-infused Boston baked beans, anybody?