SAN ANTONIO – Industrial hemp with less than .3 percent THC can be cultivated and regulated in Texas and local business owners are now utilizing the plant in creative ways.


What You Need To Know

  • Drinks made from juicing hemp leaves

  • Leaves used are technically plant waste

  • Owner says demand for hemp drinks is high

The owner of Famous Juice Company, Amos Lozano, has taken the by-product of the raw hemp plant grown in the Texas Hill Country to create a special cocktail that aims to treat many ailments without getting the purchasers high.

Twice a week at ReUp station, a vegan community store in San Antonio, Lozano buys local fresh fruits and vegetables to make a variety of juice concoctions. Since industrial hemp started growing in Texas, Lozano decided to create a special drink using the plant’s raw leaves.

"It all just made sense to me," said Lozano.  "Yes, we should be offering raw cannabis juice, but the problem was in order to offer that, you need to have access to fresh leaf."

"We had to select the exact strains we were going to grow, so we have four specific strains that we selected that represent the different plants out here and we had to tell them exactly how we were going to grow, where we were going to grow, how much we were going to grow," said Jennifer Ruple with Pur Isolabs, the company that supplies Lozano with leaves for his hemp-based drinks.

Since Lozano began juicing the leaves, demand for the hemp drink has kept him busy in the kitchen while cutting down on waste.

"This foliage is normally like a waste product for a lot of these farms, and so that's something we can turn into a nutritional food product and reduce their waste too at the same time, so it's pretty cool," said Lozano.

Famous Juice Company hopes to keep its new drink product in stock while demand continues to soar.

"You can use the hemp seeds that are high in nutrition as great source of protein and then the leaves are just like any other leafy green," said Lozano. "They're really high in folate and magnesium and all the trace minerals and nutrients that are in other leafy greens but with the unique benefits of having cannabinoids which other plants don't have."