Chris Cooper, CEO of Lucent Botanicals, located in Oakland, Calif., launched the business in November 2018 with his partner, Arnel Alcordo. Cooper has a chemistry background, and Alcordo was a pastry chef at a number of well-known San Francisco restaurants. “We decided to combine our talents and see what we could come up with,” Cooper says. “We found that both of our mothers, in their 80s and 90s, were having a lot of trouble with pain, and were getting unsatisfactory results from normal pain-relieving prescription drugs. We started looking into whether we could help them out.”

As a side note, Cooper’s mother, now in her 90s, only recently stopped milking her goats. “She could not even bend her fingers anymore,” he says.

The initial approach was to look at developing products that contained THC, the psychoactive component in certain strains of the cannabis plant. “We found that THC was difficult to work with because of all the regulations and required licenses,” Cooper notes, “and then we realized that CBD could solve the same problems and reach a much larger number of people. We decided we could turn it into a product after we found CBD was helping family.”