MAKING GUMMIES EASY | Sarah McLaughlin and Melt-to-Make have taken the stress out of manufacturing gummies for cannabis companies across the globe.
When Sarah McLaughlin joined the founding team of a CBD startup in 2018, she dreaded the task of formulating the company’s gummies.
Despite her previous experience in food science and product formulation, she knew gummies would pose a considerable challenge — and also be a critical piece of the company’s success or failure.
What she didn’t know was that the expertise gained through deep research — and some trial and error — into formulating and manufacturing gummies would ultimately overtake the CBD products themselves as the company’s primary business, turning Melt-to-Make into a global success and a key partner for many of the industry’s top edibles companies.
“We really came to understand what the challenges were and what people were struggling with,” says McLaughlin, a board-certified dietitian in addition to being Melt-to-Make’s vice president of products and R&D. “That made us really good at helping people, because we’ve lived through it ourselves.”
Melt-to-Make created a variety of gummy bases designed to simplify the process of manufacturing infused edibles, while improving the quality of the final product. State regulations forced the Massachusetts-based company to shut down the CBD side of its business, but that may have been a blessing in disguise. Melt-to-Make, which started in 2019 with a single client down the road from its headquarters, now has clients in more than a dozen countries, including every U.S. state except Idaho, and has doubled sales and tripled its production over the past year.
In some ways, Melt-to-Make is a modern equivalent to Hershey’s Chocolate in its early days. When most candy companies were manufacturing their chocolate from scratch, Hershey’s began selling wholesale chocolate and letting clients handle their own product development. Melt-to-Make is similar, providing gelatin and pectin bases to clients that handle infusion, flavoring and colors, making it easier to scale.
“They can focus on all of the things that make their gummies great,” McLaughlin says.
McLaughlin’s early research into gummies made her an expert troubleshooter. One of the first problems she had to overcome was gummies that looked wet and felt sticky, leading her to learn more about water activity and denaturing gelatin.
The lightbulb moment came with the realization that many companies struggled with consistency, dosing and shelf stability, among other challenges, even as gummies came to dominate the cannabis edibles landscape — accounting for more than 70% of the category’s total sales according to industry reports. In addition to strong consumer preference, gummies are ideal for companies looking to scale: they don’t need to be individually wrapped; they have a long shelf life; they’re easy to manufacture once companies have a good formulation; and they don’t melt like chocolate or stick together like hard candies.
Melt-to-Make has slowly expanded its product lineup with a pectin base, a plant-based alternative to traditional gelatin gummies, as well as sugar-free options that don’t rely on alcohol sweeteners or artificial flavors.
“I think the growth in this industry is going to be people who care about the ingredients and consuming something that they feel is safe,” McLaughlin explains.
However, despite Melt-to-Make’s rapid growth, McLaughlin says there are no plans to move into other edibles form factors.
“Right now, we’re kind of taking the Apple approach where we’re going to do one thing and do it really, really well,” she says. “I think the only way we would ever move into another product is if we could come at it with the expertise and the knowledge that we’ve been able to approach gummies with.”