From handcrafted bouquets to hemp-infused goods, Edible Brands is evolving under the bold leadership of its next-generation CEO.
In March, Edible Brands touched off a media frenzy when the company, best known for creating fruit bouquets, expanded into the hemp-derived-THC marketplace. Headlines ranging from disbelieving to congratulatory blanketed mainstream outlets and the trade press alike. ABC News broadcast “Edible Arrangements Parent Company Now Selling THC.” “Edible Brands … Enters the THC Space” reported Adweek. “Edible Arrangements … Is Now Selling Actual Edibles,” Food & Wine confirmed. QSR magazine, a trade journal for the quick-service and restaurant verticals, announced “Edible Arrangements Gets into Cannabis.” And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the most influential newspaper in Edible Arrangements’ home state (where only limited medical use is legal), declared “Company behind Edible Arrangements Expands into Edibles. Yes, the THC Kind.”
Omni Talk Retail called the move “The Most Brilliant Pivot of the Year.”
But don’t expect to see hemp-infused fruit arrangements delivered to your doorstep anytime soon. For now, Edible Brands will sell a curated selection of products from well-known hemp brands on e-commerce platform Edibles.com. The move marks the company’s second attempt to enter the hemp industry, after launching Incredible Edibles® in 2019 to sell CBD-infused treats within its franchised shops nationwide. At the time, Edible Brands founder Tariq Farid wrote that he learned about the wellness benefits of hemp after trying to “see if anything could be done to protect our brand name from being abused by those within the drug community.”
Edible Brands and its affiliated companies own several trademarks under “edible.” The company’s current chief executive officer and Farid’s daughter, Somia Farid Silber, acknowledged “[intellectual property] protection is very important for us” but said the company’s existing e-commerce infrastructure and supply chain network of 800 independent retail locations across the United States are what brought Edibles.com to fruition. The storefronts and e-commerce platform, combined with the development of partnerships with well-known hemp product brands, makes it possible for Edibles.com to provide infused products to consumers quickly.
“We’re called Edible and Edible Arrangements,” Silber said. “In some markets, we have customers who walk into our stores asking if we sell any hemp or THC products. This is a question that we get in our retail locations. We also see it in our social comments every now and then, so [we were] eager to create that space with Edibles.com.
“It’s important for us that the Edible Arrangements business stays as is,” she continued. “One day down the road we might see a collaboration, but for those customers who are looking for hemp products, they can now shop with us at Edibles.com.”
From fruit skewers to flowers
Edible Arrangements was founded in 1999 in East Haven, Connecticut, after Farid got the idea for the company while working in the back of his family-owned flower shop.
“He was a florist in the ’90s and had seen fruit cut in shapes, fancy fruit displays, and decided to put together a fruit basket at home—fruit that’s cut to look like flowers,” Silber said. “He always does his focus group with my grandmother. He put it on the dinner table, and she said to him, ‘Honey, this is going to be big.’”
In 2001, the company opened its first franchise location in Waltham, Massachusetts. After that, Edible Arrangements continued to grow, expanding its locations until a market downturn between 2017 and 2019 resulted in a double-digit sales decline and the company shed 150 stores, according to reporting by Franchise Times. When the pandemic shuttered nonessential businesses in March 2020, the Edible Arrangements shops were allowed to remain open as essential services and business increased. Franchise Times reported Edible Brands “pushed sales to $587 million in 2020, up 32.7 percent and a remarkable turnaround from an 11.8-percent decline the year before.” The period also marked Edible Brands’ foray into new products such as baked goods and, eventually, CBD products.
“We’ve expanded past fruit arrangements, so although that is the primary category we sell—it’s our highest performer, it’s the heritage product—we also do sell baked goods,” Silber said. “We sell other shelf-stable items like chocolate, and we recently started selling fresh flowers as well.
“So we’ve gone outside of just the fruit arrangements to really a more holistic gifting experience that creates multiple reasons for a customer to interact with the brand outside of just your big-ticket occasions like a first day or anniversary or Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. Our focus has been on amplifying the product offering and the portfolio to create an offering that works for that next generation of consumers. [We’re] very focused on millennials and Gen Z, and we’re seeing a lot of success with that.”
Silber doesn’t believe selling hemp-sourced THC products is taking the company in a controversial direction. “I really don’t think [cannabinoids are] controversial anymore,” she said. “I feel there’s so many products available out there. It’s creating a united front and a platform where everyone can participate and learn more.
“I feel like a few years ago, something like this may have been seen as controversial, but it’s a part of people’s daily life already,” she added. “We’re just a really easy and convenient space where you can shop for these products.”
The company is not without its share of other controversies, however.
Edible Brands is fairly well known for taking legal action against companies it believes use the word “edible” in ways that infringe on its trademarks. A 2020 lawsuit by an association of Edible Arrangements franchisees alleged “self-dealing” and accused Farid of “improperly funding” the parent company’s new CBD venture “with the monies paid by the members and other Edible Arrangements franchisees.” Franchise Times reported the lawsuit was dismissed in the fall of 2020 by a federal judge who ruled the dispute belonged in arbitration instead. In 2024, Edible Brands acquired the domain Edibles.com as part of a settlement after suing the website’s previous owner for cybersquatting.
“We did have to fight to acquire that domain, and there was a settlement early last year,” Silber said.
Reinventing the brand
Silber has worked for her father’s company in some way, shape, or form since the enterprise launched. She began working in Edible Arrangement stores at a young age and has worked full-time for the company since 2016. In October 2024, she was named Edible Brands’ CEO.
“He is a visionary,” Silber said of working alongside her father. “He has a lot of fantastic ideas. I’m very balanced in my approach, and I love to drive the business forward with data. We’ve always worked really well together.”
In a video interview on Fortune magazine’s YouTube channel, Farid said he handed the reins of the company to his daughter after realizing “it comes time to pass to the next generation because the brand has to reinvent.”
According to a statement Edible Brands distributed when it launched Edibles.com, “during her tenure as president, Silber built a robust executive team and a powerful C-suite of leaders in the company’s new headquarters in Atlanta, helping to develop a new brand identity across digital and physical retail locations.”
Silber’s days start with a morning routine with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. One of her recent workday schedules included attending a roundtable discussion hosted by the Young Presidents’ Association, followed by one-on-one meetings in the office with field operations team members.
“I think food is a connector; food connects people and fruit, especially for my family,” Silber said. “My family is from Pakistan. When you’re going to someone’s house, you usually bring fruit with you as a gift, and it was always seasonal… In our house, even now with my two-and-a-half-year-old, fruit is dessert. We enjoy fruit very much… On the Edible Arrangements side, today, it’s more like the everyday staples like your strawberries and pineapple, but we do bring in seasonal fruits in the summertime, so you’ll see kiwi and mango, blueberries, and whatnot.”
When asked if there was an “aha” moment in the connection of the Edible Arrangements name to the word “edibles,” which has come to mean food or drinks infused with cannabis or hemp, Silber said the link has always been there.
“It’s been there since day one,” she said. “I mean, we’re called Edible Arrangements. We acquired a trademark on ‘edible’ and Edible.com in the early 2010s, and Edible is really the short name for the Edible Arrangements brand… We dabbled in the space with a CBD brand that we launched in 2019, but I’d say it was a little too early for us. It was still something that was relatively new for the market. We got in pretty early at that time.
“Since then, we decided it was really important for us to acquire the Edibles.com domain, so we did that last year. We went with the Edibles.com domain as well as 1-800-Edibles. Once we had those decided, ‘Hey, let’s go find the right person to help us build out a really stellar e-commerce marketplace experience that’s rooted in health and wellness.’”
That person was Thomas Winstanley, who previously served as the chief marketing officer for Theory Wellness, an East Coast medical and adult-use cannabis brand. He now serves as executive vice president and general manager for Edibles.com, which so far has partnered with top-tier hemp brands including Cann, Wana, and 1906.
Edibles.com’s goal, according to Silber, is to create “a safe and trusted, reliable space where someone can come and shop for gummies and beverages and learn more about what the products are and how they can help their daily life, and how they can make things a little better for them.”
“If anything, it’s been a very positive response and it’s been very welcomed, which we’re really excited about,” Silber said. “So nothing negative. You know, I feel like there’s so much data out there about how these hemp products can help create a better life for you.”
The idea is to keep Edibles.com within the health-and-wellness sphere, where Silber has some personal experience. She said she struggles to sleep through the night and has tried hemp-derived products to help alleviate insomnia.
“I think, for us, we’re very focused on making sure we’re selling based on outcomes and need states,” she said. “If you go to our website, you’ll see you can shop by what you’re looking for to help you sleep better or get energized or relax. And you’ll also notice the dosage is relatively low. It’s all five milligrams or less. Staying within that health-and-wellness space is really important to us and we’ve seen nothing but excitement, especially from the brands we’re partnering with, since there isn’t a distribution space like this or that can be done at the scale that we have available today.”
This aligns with her father’s vision when he launched the Incredible Edibles CBD-infused brand in 2019. “I’ve always believed you have a choice: You can let the world define something for you, or you can define it yourself. I prefer the latter,” Farid wrote on his Medium blog in 2019. “It occurred to me that rather than let popular culture define ‘edible,’ if I expanded my focus to hemp and eventually other superfoods, I had an opportunity to redefine edible as a verb for wellness. ‘Health, not high’ would become our mantra!”
For Incredible Edibles, Edible Brands partnered with a hemp farm in Connecticut. After the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp that contains less than 0.3 percent THC, many farmers in other agricultural sectors turned to growing hemp.
“Hemp will be the new tobacco of a hundred years ago, when every farm, or many farms, planted five or ten acres of broadleaf tobacco because it was a high-value cash crop,” Connecticut Commissioner of Agriculture Bryan Hulburt told Connecticut Public Radio in 2019. “That was the crop that stabilized the rest of the farm operation.”
But in this century, things didn’t turn out quite that way. By November 2019, NPR reported, many hemp farmers struggled to succeed due to “harvest challenges: erratic weather, a spike in hemp production and a dearth of processors and buyers.”
Flash forward to 2025, and hemp has faced more challenges as states and Congress push to crack down on sales of hemp-derived products. Sixteen states have effectively banned hemp-derived cannabinoids. California has an emergency order in place that prohibits hemp products containing any THC, and the Texas legislature is considering a bill that would impose similar restrictions.
“This is a poison in our public, and we as a legislature—our number-one responsibility is life-and-death issues,” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick warned the state’s hemp merchants and brands during a March 20 news conference. “We’re going to ban your stores for good before we leave [the legislature’s biennial meeting].”
Most hemp bans have focused on delta-8, delta-10, and other synthesized cannabinoids that occur naturally in cannabis and hemp but not in amounts significant enough to make them commercially viable. A growing number of states also are cracking down on hemp-derived THC as well as THCA, a precursor that becomes THC when heated.
After a bipartisan coalition that usually passes a new farm bill every five years collapsed in September, Congress extended the 2018 Farm Bill through September 30, 2025. The most recent proposal for the reauthorization bill, brought before Congress in May, included an amendment that would modify the federal definition of legal hemp by prohibiting cannabinoids that are not “naturally occurring, naturally derived, and non-intoxicating.”
Hope for hemp
Silber acknowledges the uncertainty currently swirling around hemp, but she’s not particularly concerned about potential changes to federal law.
“Look, it’s continuing to change,” she said. “We’re seeing a lot of change in [the market] as we go. For us, we just want to continue to build out that safe and trusted space and [are] also partnering very closely with different groups on the policy side just to make sure we have a voice at the table and we can help influence any policy in a positive way.”
Plans for Edibles.com include eventual vertical integration and launching its own product line. The brand also has signed a lease for a 600-square-foot brick-and-mortar storefront in Atlanta’s foodie-centric Inman Park.
“We’re a unique part of the supply chain because we have this brick-and-mortar fulfillment operation for last-mile [delivery], but especially with our [intellectual property] and our e-commerce prowess, those three ingredients become a real change for the landscape—especially programs like Edible Arrangements or Edible Brands coming in,” said Winstanley. “I think it’s a signal across the industry at large that ‘maybe this category isn’t as scary as we’re looking at it from a policy standpoint.’”
He said the company believes the United States hemp industry will continue to thrive, even if federal law changes.
“We are absolutely hopeful about the future of this industry in this category,” he said. “The way we discuss a lot internally, with trade partners, lobbyists, advocates, we see a very clear bifurcation between low-dose and everything in higher-testing products. And I think our general view is, essentially, we’re not really talking about regulating the plant—the cannabis plant or the hemp plant. We’re really talking about THC policy and THC regulations. And I think that’s a distinction that we find very interesting where, yes, the five-milligram size should be available at more traditional points of distribution while higher-testing products should be available at dispensaries.”
Edible Brands is as leery of outright bans and massive policy swings as anyone else in the industry, Winstanley said, although he admitted he understands legislators’ and other policymakers’ concerns.
“What we do agree with is that the spectrum of products that are not regulated—that you can get in a gas station or that are not tested with a [certificate of analysis]—there is some level of consumer harm,” he said. “But weeding out all the good actors who are trying to play by the regulatory standards … and being too aggressive with bans really creates more space for those bad actors to thrive. Inadvertently, you create a more dangerous market.”
Instead, Winstanley believes there’s a thoughtful way to approach THC policy that will result in a regulated, responsible industry.
“We know consumers’ consumption habits of these types of products are evolving, and part of that evolution is people have more points of entry for this category. We expect that to continue,” he said. “However, we also are very weary of a lot of the challenges right now at a policy level that we hope to help fortify, because we do think there is a reason people are coming to this category. We do think there are very clear health benefits that can support what people need.”
Edibles.com offers only hemp-derived delta-9 THC products, because the company believes that’s the type of product consumers seek.
“I think there is a very clear ask from the consumer, and I think that if you start to mix the message or convolute the message, it becomes [unhelpful],” Winstanley said. “The delta-9 space is really where consumers are looking and gravitating toward. I think a lot of what I’m concerned about is the synthetic supply chain and not having full visibility into where the source of origin is for raw ingredients.
“We certainly think, on the [hemp-derived] delta-9 front, that we’re still just scratching the surface on consumer adoption here,” he added. “This is a very early industry, and I think before it gets more complex than it already is, let’s get this right with what we know works and what people are looking for. Let’s also allow ourselves time to conduct the appropriate amount of research to fully understand what long-term health implications can arise from some of the other designer cannabinoids that are coming out.”
Not for laughs
The day after Edibles.com launched, comedian Jimmy Fallon joked about Edible Arrangements as part of his monologue on The Tonight Show. “I saw that Edible Arrangements is going to start selling actual edibles,” Fallon quipped. “Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel is like, ‘We shouldn’t… Should we?’”
Silber is a fan, but the joke didn’t land with her.
“Look, it’s very serious for us,” she said. “This is not a joke. Jimmy Fallon, he’s a comedian. He’s a funny guy; that’s his thing. But for us, this is very serious. It’s important that we are creating a safe, reliable, trusted environment with these really incredible products, and we want to be taken seriously as we do it.”
