Meet The Queen Of Legal Weed

Can a 58-year-old former insurance executive build the first national marijuana brand? With these gummies, she just might.

- Maria Aspan

Nancy Whiteman still mourns those candied, spice-dusted almonds. “They were so good. They were so stinking good,”she sighs longingly. And so stinking hard to make—legally.

Because Whiteman, the unlikely co-founder and co-owner of the most successful specialized candy business in Colorado,didn’t stop with the curry powder and sugar and salt. She also dredged those almonds through syrup infused with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

After all, that’s what her seven-year-old company, Wana Brands, makes: treats that can get you really, really high. The Boulder-based business, which Whiteman runs with her ex-husband, ended last year as the best-selling purveyor of marijuana-infused edibles in its home state of Colorado, according to industry data firm BDS Analytics.

Whiteman may have begun her legal-pot career rummaging through weed-extraction videos on YouTube and testing recipes in a kitchen that was “one step up from an Easy-Bake oven,” but Walter White she is not. Nor is she even Mary-Louise Parker’s Nancy Botwin, the housewife-dealer of Weeds. A 58-year-old mother of two, Whiteman presents as more sales rep than druglord: russet hair in a sensible bob, a sly sense of humor tucked beneath a Northeastern reserve, and the professionally tidy business casual of someone who started her career in suits. “Whatever your stereotype might be of somebody in the marijuana business, I’m probably not it,” Whiteman, a former insurance marketing executive, wryly acknowledges. “I think a lot of times people are just surprised.”