It’s a small factory running at full speed in Saint-Geours-de-Maremne, in the Landes. Charlotte on her head, Christelle Colin, marketing manager for Chanvres de l’Atlantique, guides us to the company’s workshops. It was launched in 2015 by Vincent Lartizien, a former professional surfer, but at the time of our visit he was in Paris “to go see the farmer partners”informs the marketing manager.
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In parallel with the debate raging around CBD flowers, and while the Council of State has just suspended “provisionally” the decree which prohibits their sale in France, the hemp sector is developing at high speed in France. . Food, textile or construction, the plant is used as a whole and certainly not for smoking. The company The Atlantic hemp thus works directly with about fifteen farmers every year throughout France. They produce the raw material: 100% organic hemp. The plant is used as a whole, from the root to the leaves, including the stem and the seeds. “Thanks to the sheller, we will free the seed from its shell to reveal the kernel inside.explains Christelle Colin. It is to be sprinkled in salads.” No risk of being “stoned” by eating them, she reassures: “there’s no THC in it.” Tetrahydrocannabinol, the mind-altering substance in cannabis, must not exceed 0.2% in hemp according to regulations.
Hemp is easily available, explains Christelle Colin. There is hemp in your salads, therefore, thanks to the seeds in particular, and in the plate of the little ones with “shells for your children”hemp in your cupboards with “pesticide-free t-shirts“or hemp to make you beautiful with “a day or night cream for the face, natural and organic cosmetics”.
The company also offers CBD. “We offer CBD oils but we don’t make flowers at all because the legislation is very complicated. And that it remains a very vague subject”, says the marketing manager. The company does not seem to want to take this turn: “Not on the ‘to smoke’ aspect, that’s for sure. Our DNA is to nourish, health. And that would be in contradiction.”
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The strategy is working, the business is doing well. The Saint-Geours-de-Maremne site has around twenty employees, and the workforce has more than doubled in recent months. A move is planned soon, at the end of the street. A new, larger plant to meet demand, built “partly made of hemp concrete”. It’s solid, like the hemp sector in France, our country is the leading producer in Europe with nearly 18,000 hectares cultivated in 2020.