Q&A: Garrett Perdue, Naternal

In November, Naternal CEO Garrett Perdue posted a video to Facebook of himself alongside his mother, former Gov. Bev Perdue. “If you were going to spend the day with her … ” Garrett says. 

“With me!” the former governor chimes in, laughing.  

“You would eat a gummy!” Garrett continues. His mother smiles and holds up a little green square—a Lift gummy, he says, which contains 3 milligrams of “my favorite plant extract.” He offers her one. 

“No, thank you,” she says. “It’s before my breakfast. I’ll have one at lunch.” 

The former governor is more than a decade removed from public office. But it’s nonetheless remarkable to see her starring in a cannabis ad—even if it’s her son’s company. 

A lawyer by training, Garrett Perdue became interested in CBD supplements as a way to help his daughter’s insomnia. He said that when he launched Naternal’s parent company in 2018, “our thesis was that we’re going to build a pharmaceutical-grade processing facility five miles from the RDU airport, and we’re going to really do this right. 

“I had no idea how arrogant that statement was,” he said. “The idea that we could do things any better—it was just wildly crazy in retrospect. The idea that the market would value it, and that you would end up with a quality differential, was equally arrogant and crazy.” 

The Assembly spoke with Naternal’s CEO about the realities he’s encountered in the hemp market. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Assembly: Your products are made by other companies in a white-label arrangement. Have you always operated this way? 

Garrett Perdue: We have done this in every way possible, all the way back to 2017. At one point, we had farms in North Carolina run in partnership with co-ops. We would grow select material, we would process it on the farms, we would refine the oils in facilities we control, [and] we would take those ingredients to the finished product. Over time, for a variety of reasons mostly tied to market pressures, we’ve abandoned all of that.

I’ve been told that hemp farming isn’t really thriving anymore. 

I don’t know anybody farming hemp. Like, nobody. Take that for what it’s worth. It’s not significant at this point. As North Carolina increasingly became, you know, unfavorable.

Why is North Carolina an unfavorable regulatory environment? I mean, there is no regulatory environment.

That’s the problem. I would rather have a strict set of rules to know what is necessary for compliance than no rules. By way of example, when you have a plant in a field that tests below 0.3% THC—which, I would tell you, is preposterous on its face. Somebody who knows agriculture will tell you that plants within the same field, plants within five feet of each other, you cannot standardize those samples. The idea that a field is compliant based on a microsample of a specimen is just absolutely preposterous. 

But let’s just start under the presumption that you’ve got 5,000 pounds of a plant material that’s all compliant, and when you pull the oil, the first-run extract out of that plant, physics requires that the cannabinoids concentrate in the extract. That first-run extract is no longer below that threshold. So is that a marijuana product?

By definition, it is. Then every single ingredient or product that has ever existed in this state has gone through a phase wherein it is illegal. That is a massive problem for a business like mine. So when I say that North Carolina’s regulatory environment is not favorable, that’s what I’m talking about. 

The issue I keep coming back to is that, in an unregulated space, consumers are purchasing based on trust—the manufacturer, the products. There’s no backstop. 

[When] we opened our facility in Morrisville, we were processing 2,500 pounds of material a day. I mean, it’s nothing now compared to the big industrial groups, but we were a pretty large-scale ingredient manufacturer at our peak. 

I didn’t have a regulatory inspection of any kind, ever, never—from county, city, none, nothing. Like, we could have done anything we wanted to do.