How What You Drink Became a Marker of Your Identity

When Jake Bullock set out to found a new beverage company in the late 2010s, he and his team first had to pay a visit to the mecca: Erewhon, the Los Angeles–based upscale grocery store known for it’s celebrity-branded smoothies and health-forward offerings. It was there that they realized that the beverage industry had not only jumped the shark but had started doing backflips.

“We walked into the beverage aisle, and we were just blown away,” says Bullock, cofounder and CEO of Cann, about that formative field trip. “We would stand in front of it, turning products, being like, ‘Is this real? What the fuck is this?’”

The Cann contingent left Erewhon with a few core ideas that it would eventually bring to the company. One was that people don’t like to drink things that contain ingredients they don’t understand. The other was that their product needed to feel adult, which meant they could play around with refined flavors like cardamom, and leave played-out profiles like grape and orange in the dust. “We were never going to be like, ‘Oh, it’s beer with weed in it,’ or, ‘It’s LaCroix, but with weed in it,’” Bullock says. “That didn’t make sense to us. What made sense to us is, we’re creating a new category, so we have license to create new flavor profiles.”

The company wanted to feel in vogue and party-adjacent without being a buzzkill, and, as Bullock says, they were inspired by the vibrant colors and fun-loving nature of cocktails. The end result was a line of beverages that come in inviting pastel-colored cans and sold in local grocery stores, beverage depots, and at Total Wine.

Cann is in the unique position of being a product with real effects—it gets you high, in quantities of 2, 5, or 10 milligrams of THC per can. Bullock says the inspiration for creating Cann came from getting older and slowly succumbing to the physical effects of alcohol, but still wanting to party with his friends. “Two-day debilitating hangovers, I couldn’t really pull off,” he says. From there, he became determined to give people an alternative to beer, wine, or liquor to bring to the function while still catching a buzz and not feeling subhuman the next morning.