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Won the High Times Cannabis Cup title for strongest topical CBD product in 2014
A leader in the CBD world in the early days but has since faded into the background
Browns Botanicals was named the 2014 winner of the High Times Cannabis Cup — the world’s largest international cannabis festival held each November in Amsterdam — for its CBDemu Topical Oil. What happened to this company since its success in 2014 and where can you purchase the award-winning topical formula today?
Browns Botanicals launched as the good-guy cannabis brand. Environmental sustainability and charity contributions were a large part of the brand’s identity. Browns Botanicals strongly believed in holistic plant medicine and wanted its products accessible to everyone that needed it by offering discount codes to first responders, government employees, disability, and low-income earners.
Browns Botanicals used locally sourced hemp for its extract, but we couldn’t find any information about the farm or third-party lab testings for its products. Since the brand’s purchase in 2015 by Zappy, the company has gone off the radar.
Browns Botanicals held the title for the strongest topical CBD product in 2014 by the High Times Cannabis Cup, but its products are no longer available.
Browns Botanicals was known for its leadership in the early days of the CBD industry. The company no longer has this reputation.
Even at the height of its popularity, Browns Botanicals did not list technical data regarding its products and had no certificates of analysis for any of its products.
Browns Botanicals’ website is no longer running, and it appears the company has disappeared entirely.
The cannabis industry is a Wild West marketplace. With the rise of CBD’s popularity in the health sector and the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill in the United States, a flood of CBD companies have entered the market.
There’s a lack of regulation in this new industry allowing for companies to market snake oils and even contaminated hemp products as a health supplement.
Our mission is to hold these CBD companies accountable for the products they sell and educate consumers about what CBD can and can’t do.
Here, we conduct an in-depth review of the 2014 High Times Cannabis Cup Winner, Browns Botanicals to determine whether this company delivers on its promise to offer one of the most potent CBD topical ointments on the market.
Where is the company now since the 2014 Cannabis Cup? Is it still a reputable brand?
Browns Botanicals was founded in 2014 and based its ethos on a plant-medicine approach to therapy with an emphasis on environmental sustainability in manufacturing, packaging, and even delivery. To make the brand even sweeter, Browns Botanicals donated 10% of its profits to charity.
In the same year of its launch, Browns Botanicals was named the winner of the High Times Cannabis Cup — the world’s largest international cannabis festival held each November in Amsterdam — for the Best Non-Edible Medical Product.
The best hemp is grown organically in the United States, where we maintain high standards for organic farming.
Because hemp is a bioaccumulator, it absorbs compounds from its growing environment — the good and the bad — faster than it can break them down. This means if the hemp crops are grown in a contaminated environment trace amounts of harmful compounds can end up in the final product.
We couldn’t find a hemp source for Browns Botanicals, nor could we track down any third-party lab results for its hemp extract.
Third-party lab tests detect for these contaminants in the extract and will reveal the hemp’s composition in terms of cannabinoids and terpene profile.
While third-party lab testing is not mandatory for all states, it has become a standard in the industry. Customers want to know the hemp they’re purchasing for health and wellness comes from a reputable hemp source.
We can’t find any Browns Botanicals products on the web today, but we’ll dive into its once best-selling and award-winning product, the Browns Botanicals CBDemu topical oil.
Cannabis sativa is a versatile plant. You can smoke it, vape it, bake it into food, and even apply it directly to the skin.
People who have arthritis — a degenerative autoimmune disease that causes painful inflammation in the joints — found that topical CBD treatments improved mobility and reduced pain without evident side-effects.
CBD topicals allow the user to control where they receive the benefits of CBD instead of having it dispersed throughout the body. It’s best suited for muscle and joint pain, inflammation, and reducing the appearance of scars. These formulations can come in massage oils, lotions, salves, creams, gels, and even transdermal patches.
Browns Botanicals’ topical CBDemu oil claims to use the power of phytonutrients and science to help alleviate localized pain.
This formula incorporates a mixture of emu oil, virgin cold-pressed coconut oil, and high concentrations of CBD to create a unique product with enhanced antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. Emu oil is derived from adipose tissue — commonly known as “body fat” — from a particular subspecies of emu indigenous to Australia.
Not exactly the most appealing substance, but it’s good for you.
The natural oil is rich in antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids. In Australian aboriginal culture, there is a longstanding tradition of treating skin conditions with emu oil.
On its own, emu oil is incredibly effective at treating skin ailments.
It’s a natural anti-inflammatory, it enhances the skin’s ability to absorb moisture, and it heals wounds and reduces the appearance of scars.
Another benefit of emu oil is it doesn’t feel greasy on the skin. It’s one of the rare natural oils that can penetrate deep into the layers of the skin quickly.
It’s widely used in cosmetic products and healing creams for conditions such as eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, rashes, and cold sores.
When the brand first launched, we liked Browns Botanicals’ foundation of holistic plant medicine in its formulas along with environmentally sustainable practices in manufacturing, packaging, and shipping.
Browns Botanicals was the “good-guy” company that donated proceeds to charities and were formulating products that would make a difference in one’s health and quality of life.
The company is no longer active.
Browns Botanicals was purchased in 2015 but Zappy, a vertically integrated cannabis company in Florida.
CEO Mike “Zappy” Zapolin was hoping to shift gears in his company to focus more on CBD formulations to address ailments such as insomnia, chronic pain, fatigue, narcolepsy, and anxiety. With the acquisition of Browns Botanicals, Zappy was off to a good start. But it appears as though the business has since slowed down.
The website has been “under construction” for months now, and it’s difficult to find online retailers for the Browns Botanical line anywhere.
We discovered that Mike Zapolin is currently focused on film-making and building internet brands online, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Zapolin is considered a “pioneer” in the domain name industry.
He purchased domains such as music.com, beer.com, computer.com, and creditcards.com and sold them to the highest bidders.
When this “marketing guru” purchased an already budding cannabidiol nutraceutical company that had just been named the winner of the Cannabis Cup, people expected both Zappy and Browns Botanicals to grow dramatically — especially considering the legalization of marijuana in several states and Canada over the past four years.
The website zappy.com is committed to exploring spirituality, religion, and psychedelics with gurus and celebrities from around the world, without any mention of Browns Botanicals. There’s no mention of it on Zapolin’s other social media platforms, either.
It appears as though Zapolin has abandoned his 2015 mission.
When the former Browns Botanicals was on the verge of acquisition, co-founder Bryan Fixelle shared his excitement about the opportunity:
“[it] will allow us to rapidly expand the existing Browns Botanicals product line to help patients all over the world. Our products are a perfect fit with Zappy’s mission of healing people with products that are good for them and good for the environment.”
Four years later, and Browns Botanicals’ presence has almost diminished entirely. It leaves the community wondering what happened.
Browns Botanicals sounds like the type of company you’d root for based on its ethical business practices and its strong focus on environmental sustainability.
In theory, the CBDemu oil checks out. Browns Botanicals believes in the benefits of the cannabis plant’s natural phytonutrients and components. Unfortunately, it has been next to impossible to source this product or any other from Browns Botanicals since its acquisition by Zappy.
Instead, it seems as though Browns Botanicals has disappeared altogether from the cannabis industry.
