Xzibit: It’s the Lasagna Ganja Podcast with Mr. X to the Z Xzibit.

Tammy: And I’m your girl Tammy aka The Cannabis Cutie.

Xzibit: A lot of crazy stuff going on in the world, we were having some crazy conversations off camera. How do you think “being accountable” is playing into 2024.

Tammy: I think it’s going to be a huge thing. With everything that went on with Diddy at the end of 2023, it’s just so much stuff happening.

Xzibit: Do you think he’s going to be able to settle out all that stuff, or is it beyond settling?

Tammy: I think it’s beyond, but I don’t know. We are talking about very powerful people and things tend to work out for very powerful people.

Xzibit: We’ll see what happens. But then you got Katt Williams calling out a lot of different people.

Do you think calling people out is a good thing, or is it better to handle things behind closed doors?

Tammy: I think that if you’re going to handle things that way, you need to be prepared for what happens next. Personally, I just like to handle things internally. I just want to love everybody, keep me out of it!

I will say that for 2024, I’m done being so nice to people. I’m always so polite.

Xzibit: Do you think that’s a negative thing?

Tammy: I think it's learned behavior for a woman, but I'm a very opinionated woman. When I say things it sounds much more shocking because I’m a woman.

I’m just done being so nice in 2024. If I don’t mess with you, then I don’t mess with you. I want to be more like you!

Xzibit: Yeah, I’ve pretty much made a living telling people to fuck off! Let’s get to the episode.

We normally don’t talk to a lot of people about cannabis drinks, and that’s because there aren’t many of them. Today we have Dan Wittmers, who is with a cannabis beverage company called Rexis. Is that right?

Dan: We are actually a bio sciences company. It’s been a fun experience for me coming from cannabis and into this industry. We have over 50 different kinds of molecules that we use, cannabis being one of them.

We do a lot of work on the regulated side and on the hemp side. We work with everything from caffeine to kratom.

Xzibit: What is kratom?

Dan: Kratom is actually a plant that is related to the coffee plant. It’s grown in Southeast Asia, and it’s consumed very similarly to coffee. The difference is where coffee comes from beans, kratom tea comes from the leaves of the kratom plant.

Xzibit: There’s a lot of negative propaganda out there about the cannabis industry. What do you say to the people who are against molecular changing?

Dan: We actually don’t change anything, in essence. We work with hydrophobic molecules, which are molecules that don’t like water.

We can talk about how beverage technology has evolved over the years, but it all started with us just taking the oils and putting it into water or other beverages. The issue is that the oils don’t really mix well with water, making it hard to consume.

We figured out how to take those oils and make them more water-friendly, that’s where you’ll hear the term “nanoemulsions.”

We take the molecules and wrap them in something called a surfactant, which has a bitter taste to them by themselves.

Combine that with the cannabis and you have an even more bitter taste. That’s the first problem we come to, people don’t want a beverage that tastes more bitter than coffee.

Xzibit: When I think of bitter, I think of Guinness.

Dan: Beers have different ranges of bitterness among them for sure. As you probably know, cannabis and hops from beer are actually related. They’re like cousins!

So when you have a very hydrophobic and bitter product, the nanoemulsions help it blend into the beverage.

The problem is, the surfactants break down very quickly. The surfactants are like glue binding the product with the beverage, you can use glue but eventually it’s going to break down and wear off.

We’ve seen that the product can degrade up to 30% after packaging just in the first 3 months. It’s very perishable, and by the time the consumer gets the beverage it’s already broken down so much.

When that happens, the oil reforms and it makes it very hard for our bodies to absorb it.

Our company uses a process that we took from big pharma, called co-crystallization.

We use a carrier agent that we fuse together with the molecules, and at that point it can’t be broken apart.

Xzibit: What carrier agent?

Dan: It’s a cocrystal that our CEO picked up. Big pharma uses co-crystallization to improve the bioavailability of their products. We’re doing the same thing with our products.

Xzibit: We’re going to taste this stuff. Tell us about what we have here in front of us today.

Dan: I selected four different, well-known brands that all have a Grapefruit flavor. One of these brands is ours, a private label brand called “Squared.” All four of these are the same flavor, and I’ve hidden their identities so you’re blind going into it.

Xzibit: Oh, so we are about to do a Pepsi Challenge?!

Dan: Right! The input products that we work with are completely odorless and tasteless, we pride ourselves on that. That gives us the ability to build a beverage then infuse, while other companies are building and infusing at the same time.

Xzibit: So basically we are going to try all of these drinks and try to guess which belongs to Rexis?

Dan: Let’s walk through the way I do it. I typically follow the Ganjier Systematic Assessment Protocol. The Ganjier program is where you can learn basically everything there is to know about cannabis, including how to assess flower.

We don’t just say which flower is good and which is shit. We add positive value to all flower, because there is a market for low quality products as well as high quality products. The trick is, as a consumer how can you tell the difference?

We try to bring value to that equation for the consumer. With consumption lounges becoming so popular, it really helps consumers understand what they’re getting themselves into. I apply that same protocol to beverages.

The categories are: appearance, aroma, flavor, and effect.

Xzibit: So let’s get to it. We all have our cups here, how do we start?

Dan: I usually start by taking a look at it to see if I can spot the product being broken back down to oil. Then I’ll sniff it, and you’re hoping that you can’t smell the cannabis. If there’s a strong smell of cannabis, that means the product has broken down significantly.

Next, we take a drink. I usually swish it around my mouth a little bit.

Xzibit: I’m not doing that, because to me it tastes like left out squirt!

Tammy: I must admit that I hate grapefruit. It tastes like poison!

Dan: The reason I chose it is because it’s such a difficult flavor to work with and get right. Most people either love or hate grapefruit. Tammy if you need to quit at any point, just let me know!

Onto drink #2! We are also looking for clarity. See how this is a little bit foggy? That’s the infusion. It’s a little off-putting, but it has a better smell than the first one. It’s a little more pure.

Xzibit: Wow, this one is super watered down! That’s the thing, drinks are hard. I don’t think I’ve ever had a perfect cannabis beverage, hopefully that will change today! Let’s go to number 3, the first 2 were horrible.

Dan: This is a Ruby Rose grapefruit which is why it has this appearance. The smell of it is very powerful.

Xzibit: That’s so horrible! You must love this process.

Dan: I will admit that there are times that I can’t accurately judge the cannabis because I can’t get over the horrible taste of the beverage. Let’s do the last one, and then the big reveal.

Xzibit: Looking at number 4, it’s more transparent than the others. I do see a small lip of oil. It also doesn’t have the strong smell like the others. Let’s try this….

Wow, now that tastes great! Definitely beat the other 3. I can actually rock with this!

Dan: Ready for the big reveal? Number 4 is ours! #1 was CANN, #2 was Rebel Rabbit, #3 was Cycling Frog, and #4 is Squared which is our brand.

Xzibit: To the first 3, you need to fire whoever does your formulations! #4 is great though. I’m glad we did it this way, because I can see that you guys nailed it.

Dan: Yes, our flavor profiles are phenomenal. I knew this flavor was our dark horse, because like Tammy I normally can’t stand grapefruit flavor. But, our grapefruit flavor doesn’t linger in your mouth and it’s refreshing.

Xzibit: I’m very impressed. How long has Rexis been in business and what are your plans for distribution?

Dan: At first, our CEO wanted a regulated business in Cali, but quickly found that it wasn’t going to make him money. Now, we work with licensed manufacturers in legal states and we bring our own equipment into their facility.

We leave everything there except for one piece, which is our secret piece. A tech also travels with the equipment to operate it. When a company is ready to make a powder, we send our tech out with the missing secret piece to their facility.

We provide them with an odorless and tasteless powder that they can either put into their products or they can sell it off to their partners.

Xzibit: So the bonding agent is the “secret sauce” to your operation, right?

Dan: Right. Our CEO treats it like the Coca Cola secret sauce. He gets stuff from different places to make sure nobody knows exactly what’s in the sauce except for him.

Xzibit: You did a great job highlighting where others are failing. I wasn’t trying to insult the other drinks, I was just reacting to what my taste buds were telling me. You’re showing how hard it is to make the beverage taste good AND be effective.

Dan: Right, especially without adding insane amounts of sugar or bitter blockers.

Xzibit: What’s the sugar content in one of these cans?

Dan: Our grapefruit has 2 grams of sugar and 8 calories. Our co-crystal is actually a sugar molecule, so it has a naturally sweet flavor. For that reason we don’t need a lot of sugar.

The thing is, if you’ve ever had another cannabis drink and then you try ours, the difference is night and day. We are trying to raise the bar.

Beverages are such a big part of our lifestyle, so it’s very important that our consumers view it as a normalized option.

It’s also easy to titrate, you can drink a little and then see how you feel. We’ve tailored our product to start working in about 10-15 minutes, similar to alcohol.

Xzibit: You described making your product into a powder. What do you think of the new electrolyte packets that you pour into water? Is that a scam?

Tammy: I think they’re basically liquid salt packets.

Dan: That’s right. Instead of having a salt lick, have a Liquid IV.

Xzibit: So it’s a scam? Because you can get electrolytes from other things like Pedialyte.

Dan: Electrolytes are being put into everything now. We are headed to a world where all beverages will be functional beverages. That’s why we love what we do, we see where the market place is going.

We work with a company called First Person, and they make functional mushroom pills that you can take based on which effect the consumer wants to achieve. The problem is, they taste and smell terrible and they couldn’t get a good finished product.

With our tech, we are able to take 99% of that taste and odor out and give them a pure effect. Now, they have a powder that you can put right into your water to drink without tasting anything.

Xzibit: My sister was telling me about some kind of mushroom coffee? I don’t know about all that.

Tammy: Four Sigmatic? So good for you. You should get on it! Functional mushrooms are like the new medicine.

Xzibit: Mushrooms and I don’t get along! We are talking about functional mushrooms, not psilocybin, right?

Dan: We play there too! We have a psilocybin product that we are currently working on called Voyage, because why would you take a trip when you could take a voyage?

In Voyage we have over 18 different molecules that we have actually fused together, including hemp extracts, vitamins, amino acids, and psilocybin. We don’t put all the different molecules together and mix them up, we actually infuse them all together into one.

When you do it that way, you don’t have to worry about having different levels of each molecule.

Xzibit: Let me get a can of your product Dan, you’re holding out on me! I’d like to enjoy it while we’re talking.

Dan: The cool thing is we’ve tailored our product to have a quick onboarding, but the offloading of our beverages happens within an hour. You can have 2 or 3 of them in a sitting, and by the time you get to #3 the first one has already started wearing off.

Xzibit: I call them Weird Beers. How far away are we from being able to go into a store and pick up one of your drinks, besides a dispensary?

Dan: We’re there, man! Every state is a little different, but the process of getting these into the mainstream is going very well. We’re getting calls from people in the regulated market wanting to go mainstream, and we never thought we’d see that day.

Xzibit: How does your company go to market right now?

Dan: We are about as verticalized as you can get, meaning that we own every stage of the process. The only thing we don’t do is grow and extract the hemp.

We have a canning facility in Florida. We mainly distribute to craft beer companies, and from there they take it to retail stores.

Xzibit: THC products?

Dan: Yeah, hemp-derived THC products.

Tammy: It’s hemp-derived, not cannabis-derived. A hemp plant can only express .3% percent of THC. At .4% it becomes a cannabis plant. That’s the legal definition.

Dan: It’s a bunch of legal paperwork, but inevitably that’s what legalization of cannabis requires: paperwork.

Xzibit: Do you have the capability to make even stronger cannabis beverages? Is the process different?

Dan: Not typically, we can definitely go stronger. We are working to make a beverage enhancer, kinda like a Mio squeeze bottle. For those, we are doing 100 mg in one bottle.

We could technically use a high amount like that in our beverage cans, but if we did we wouldn’t be able to sell them in the mainstream market. The standard is about 5 mg per serving.

In places like New York, they made it to where you have to infuse with a 15:1 ratio of CBD to THC, and the maximum amount of cannabinoids that you can have in the beverage is 25.

Tammy: I don’t think that’s fair. Some people are very sensitive to CBD, and to use that much CBD to combat the THC can be a bad idea.

Dan: I agree. For us, we don’t know where the regulators are even getting these numbers from.

Tammy: CBD can also be taxing to your liver, similar to Tylenol. You have to be careful.

Dan: There’s really no reason why it had to be that ratio. I don’t know why they made the decisions they did. Originally, it was because they were trying to protect children which doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately, we have to play by the rules that have been set if we want to be able to exist in the mainstream market. Eventually, there will be more THC beverages and edibles in retail stores.

Xzibit: We have seen a lot of different approaches to the cannabis business. That being said, do you guys do vending machines?

Dan: We don’t, we’ve never really explored it. It’s a great idea, you should get into it.

Xzibit: I’ve been seeing how everything is morphing. There are some people who just don’t want to go to a dispensary, and I’ve seen vending machines for those people.

Dan: I’ve seen that in the regulated market, but it’s not like I’ve ever seen a cannabis beverage vending machine outside of a 7/11.

Xzibit: But there are places where you could put them legally, such as a California music studio.

Dan: I definitely think it’s a great idea. We’ve seen that our ecommerce and online presence has really caused us to grow and get more cans in people’s hands.

Tammy: I appreciate so many things about your product. The low dosage, the technology, the education your product brings, and I really love that more people are gaining access to these beverages.

No shade to the other drinks, but I would NOT purchase any of those! Yours are delicious though. It’s good because not everybody wants to smoke, so they can enjoy the plant by drinking it.

Dan: It’s especially good for people like me, who are married to a non-consumer. I used to smoke a lot of flower and the aroma bothered my partner. This is a lot more convenient.

The beverage market has a great opportunity to bring new consumers to the plant. We are looking to create plant-based medicines, because we believe that the plants God gave us will help us a lot more than the garbage from big pharma.

With our technology, we use less input for the same effects. For example, in our new energy drink called Morph Monkey, we are using hydro-caffeine which is 5 times more potent than standard caffeine. This means we can use a lot less caffeine to produce the same effect.

That beverage has only 35 mg of caffeine, 3 grams of sugar, and only 9 calories. For us, it’s all about creating “better for you” products. Drinks that provide an amazing experience without requiring you to pour garbage into your body.

Xzibit: I think you guys are onto something great! How can people find you?

Dan: You can find the company at @rexisbiotech on IG, you can follow our Squared beverage brand at @letsgetsquared on IG, and you can follow our new energy drink at @morphmonkey.

We also work with one of the biggest hemp manufacturers in the world, 3CHI. They’re amazing to work with.

Xzibit: Well, congratulations man. I wish you all of the success moving forward.

Dan: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Xzibit: This has been the Lasagna Ganja Podcast, I’m X to the Z Xzibit.

Tammy: And I’m your girl Tammy aka The Cannabis Cutie.

Xzibit: Make sure you guys look up Dan, and I’m going to wait for these drinks to kick in! See you next time.