Joe Salome & Ryan Dills

Joe Salome and Ryan Dills run the Georgia Hemp Company out of Atlanta, and they have been in each other's business since the seventh grade.

They came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about hemp and wellness, and spent the first few minutes on the bus ride that started all of it. Both had just moved to the area. Both were the small kid trying to be the funny one, which meant competing for the same slot in the same group. Salome remembers the gym class arithmetic of it, pick me, do not pick him. Eventually they worked out that the simpler move was to start their own group.

Salome came at the business from marketing. He worked for Moe's and Hair Cuttery, ran his own ad agency for a while building local brands, and named this one to be regional and easy to find, thinking about the regional brands he grew up with. At Kennesaw State his entrepreneurship professors made him swap the word weed for widget in every business plan he wrote, because you could not put an illegal substance on paper. Dills came at it from CrossFit and from years out west, where California had run a medical program since the nineties. Their stores are laid out like bars. No glass cases, products up on a shelf, the customer looking straight at the person doing the consultation. Their CBD oil carries an NSF certification that screens for more than 290 contaminants, which is what lets professional athletes use it without failing a league test.

That certification is why they are the official CBD sponsor of the Atlanta Braves, one of three in Major League Baseball, along with the Georgia Swarm and the Atlanta Gladiators. All of that is recent. Dills points out that nobody called it cool when the two of them were at the Capitol working on access for kids with seizures, or sitting with cancer patients. Salome's own mother went through cancer. She was a nurse, she took the chemo, and she leaned on cannabis hard through the recovery. When Georgia handed out six or eight state licenses, the two of them knew they were neither connected enough nor rich enough to get one, so they went into hemp instead. Their social accounts have been blacklisted and shut down, which left them building the thing in person, at local events, store by store. Dills says Georgia leads the country in people on parole for nonviolent marijuana charges, with over half a million in the system.

Their biggest week of the year is 420, which Salome calls their Christmas. The third Green Hat Classic ran on April 19, with proceeds going to the Kyle Pease Foundation, which pushes people in wheelchairs through marathons and, that fall, an Ironman. The next day Salome threw out the first pitch at the Braves game. Dills wants the branding to carry no lightning bolts and no dark alley. Their stores sit next door to a Starbucks.