Imbibe 75 People to Watch: Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock of Cann

Before becoming the brains behind the best-selling cannabis beverage in North America, Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock were simply two longtime friends trying to cut back on booze while staying socially engaged. “For Luke and I, alcohol didn’t make us our best selves,” Bullock says. “But what we found with cannabis is it actually made us more ourselves.” Seeking to harness that feeling in a familiar, sharable format, the pair launched Cann, a line of all-natural weed-infused soft drinks, in 2019.

Cannabis drinks have been a tough sell for the average consumer due to unpredictable and sometimes high potencies that, according to Bullock, “thwarted the social potential of the product.” Cann is formulated with a micro-dose of THC and CBD, allowing folks to have multiple drinks in a sitting. “[With] other intoxicants like alcohol and caffeine, we drink them in a micro-dose,” Bullock says. “We didn’t want to change the heuristics people had around drinking. We just wanted to change the [active] ingredient.”

“There’s a bunch of steps that make this really challenging, [but] we wouldn’t be doing this if consumers weren’t screaming and yelling for these products.”—Jake Bullock

Despite the hurdles of online censorship, enduring stigma, and ever-shifting legislation, Cann’s growth from small California brand into a multimillion dollar company has allowed Bullock and Anderson to create a new dialogue in both the beverage and cannabis industries. “There’s a bunch of steps that make this really challenging, [but] we wouldn’t be doing this if consumers weren’t screaming and yelling for these products,” Bullock says.

Ultimately, as entrepreneurs in the LGBTQIA+ community, Anderson and Bullock created Cann to help usher in a new age where every kind of drinker has a place at the party. “We want inclusivity to really be something that folks take to heart as they think about our products,” Bullock says. “We’re evolving from a system where it’s binary—do you drink alcohol or be sober?—to a spectrum of all sorts of opportunities.”

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