Aiming to offer consumers and retailers “transparency and efficacy”, Adam Pritchard launched Skip Brands Ltd to the UK market last summer.
But the serial entrepreneur sees Skip’s moment to gain traction in retail as now, following the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) recent call for CBD brands to reformulate products in line with its recently lowered acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 10 mg.
“Now the playing field is beginning to be levelled,” Pritchard told NutraIngredients. “The question is, how are retailers going to react, that is going to be critical.”
The drinks are stocked in Home Bargains stores nationwide and the company is currently in talks with several other major retailers.
Pritchard noted the CBD soft drinks market has grown 51% in the last year, with functional drinks driving this.
“There has been 25% value growth of functional drinks and just 2.1% value growth for other soft drinks in the UK in the last year (IRI, May 2025), so this is a very important category for retailers,” he noted.
From pomegranate to hemp
After cutting his teeth in the FMCG world by founding and selling the successful pomegranate juice brand Pomegreat, he joined the online shop Love Hemp as shareholder and chief commercial officer from 2017 until exit in 2019.
He then watched the industry from a distance while the Novel Foods regulatory process played out.
When the Food Standards Agency (FSA) announced its lowered ADI in October 2023, signaling a need for major reformulations, the entrepreneur sensed an opportunity to disrupt the market and he started to formulate products alongside a cold-pressed hemp oil manufacturer.
Working closely with Kent Scientific Services, which works for Trading Standards, he formulated a three-strong range of drinks.
The drinks — available in elderflower and mint, peach and ginger, and lemon and basil — boast 5mg CBD, 17% juice content, with an RRP of £1.49-£1.69 per can.
Pritchard confidently claims they have tested the finished drinks to confirm the CBD content.
“We also test the oil prior to being made into our proprietary water-soluble powder, and the powder itself before dispatch to our UK soft drinks manufacturing partner.
“Due to our being a UK-based business with an all-UK supply chain, we adhere to levels of transparency and efficacy.
“We are late to the party with a CBD drink brand and the investment we have made into this cold pressed ingredient is much higher per mg than the cost of CBD isolate. But I believe that to have a great brand you have to have a great product at its core, and a great product has to be everything it says on the tin…or the can.”
Pressed, not extracted
The majority of CBD supplements and functional food and drink contain CBD isolate extracted from the plant, usually using solvents, which is a novel process, and this is why those products fall under the Novel Foods regulations.
The FSA’s public list of CBD products currently going through the Novel Foods process and allowed on the market has been closed to new entries since June 2022, largely preventing NPD in this space.
Whereas cold-pressed hemp uses mechanical pressure to extract oil from the plant, which is not novel.
“We don’t use solvents. We use olive oil and water and it’s a pressing of the whole plant. And we source from UK approved hemp plants where the THC level is around 0.000001mg – essentially nil.”
Pritchard explained this method preserves more of the plant’s natural profile and research suggests this method can offer consumers better health benefits as a result of the ‘entourage effect’, whereby the plant’s cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids, fatty acids and chlorophyll work synergistically for enhanced benefits.
“Not found in isolate based products; the entourage effect is the synergistic effect of multiples of compounds found in hemp, working together, producing a sum that is greater than its parts,” Pritchard said.
