COVER STORY: COSMIC EDIBLES CEO LAUNCHES CO. WITH MONEY FROM TRUMP

Kevin Harris, Cosmic Edibles CEO, Launches Cannabis Company with Money From Trump's The Apprentice

Kevin Harris launched his California edible company, Cosmic Edibles, with money he earned from being CoExecutive Producer of Donald Trump’s hit television show The Apprentice. Patrick Ian Moore

After six seasons, Kevin’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and he wanted to not only have the time to care for her, but also to give her clean medicine that he could both trust, and that he knew would help her cope during her recovery. He also conquered his own personal battle with melanoma. Edibles Magazine sat down with Kevin recently at the Cosmic Edibles kitchen in Los Angeles for this infused interview.

Edibles Magazine: You have a very interesting story and background we want to share with everyone. First off, you were heavily involved with the popular TV show The Apprentice. Can you tell us the story of how you came to be involved with The Apprentice.

Kevin Harris: Well, I was in the television business already. I started in the film business and production and somewhere along the line in my career I met Mark Burnett, who was doing Survivor at the time. I started doing a show called Eco Challenge with him, great show. Then at some point after doing two of those shows, Mark said, “Hey, I’m putting together a ‘Survivor in the City,’ show with Donald Trump. Do you want to come out to New York and put it together?

I said, “Okay.” So I went out to New York and met Donald and helped formulate the show. We basically figured out what the show was, built the whole thing, with Donald, came up with the challenges. And then launched it. Initially, we did kind of structure it like ‘Survivor in the City.’ But then we quickly learned it wasn’t that, and it was quite a different beast in itself. Initially, the whole “Fired” thing we didn’t even have as part of the creative, that came naturally as we had the first board room with Donald.

EM: What was your original title?

KH: I was Co-Executive Producer.

EM: Oh wow. So you worked very closely with Donald Trump. KH: Yeah. Yeah. It got to a point where, after about halfway through the first season, we determined that just one single person needed to produce him. Because he would use crew members to get what he wanted, when it was different than something we needed or wanted. So I would just 100% exclusively manage him, almost entirely, from picking him up at his apartment, to going to set, to going over what he was going to talk about during that scene that we needed, who did what on the challenges, what the status was, where we were. I shadowed him almost the entire time.

EM: How many years did that go on?

KH: I did 6 seasons, so that’s 3 years pushing 4. Then I backed off from it at that point. My contract was up with Burnett's production company. But I did the first 6 seasons in the field.

EM: What was that first year?

KH: I first met Donald in 1999, and then we shot in 2000. I think it aired in 2001 or 2002, somewhere in that range is when we launched. That's when it just blew up. The first season, still… I think our finale had 40 something million viewers, which is astronomical for television. 10 million viewers is a lot right now, so 40 million is crazy.

EM: We went back and re-watched the first Season in preparation for this interview, with Omarosa and Sam.

KH: Do you like Sam?

EM: He's an entertaining guy and he was featured in a documentary about Donald Trump recently.

KH: He was doing the push ups with the plant vase that he dropped. He didn't last long. He told me afterwards, he knew he was going to go soon, so he started making it memorable. That was his whole thing. He was like, “You know what? I’m gonna make this the best… I know I’m going soon, so I’m gonna start having fun with this, cause I want people to remember me.”

KH: Yeah, in a way. I mean, they’re not taking them as much as we are. But yeah, we casted characters, we casted A-personality people who we felt would wear it on their sleeve, and their emotion in the moment would actually come out. We tried to do a casting episode once, and it just did not work. A lot of the techniques to figure out if somebody will, what we call ‘Lay on the Sword,” or whether actually somebody’s going to fight, it’s not quite so straightforward. So when we were asking the questions in casting, they were kind of unorthodox, and the whole thing didn’t look great.

EM: You said you worked on the Martha Stewart one as well?

KH: Yeah. I was.

EM: How different was that than the Donald Trump?

KH: Well structurally, it was exactly the same. Outside of we kind of made it instead of business chops we kind of made it creative chops in a sense. So the people that we cast into it had a little bit more of a creative sense to them. You know chefs, artists and stuff like that, whereas the Donalds contestants were real estate people, bankers, you know his kind of thing. So outside of that and the fact that you know Martha kind of wanted to be a little bit softer, instead of the board room we would call it the conference room. Just little things.

EM: And they’re pretty different personality types

KH: Donald is Donald is Donald. It’s always what I’ve said. Cameras turn on it’s the same guy, cameras turn off it’s the same guy. He never really had this switch for television, where Martha did. So Martha would do and say things off camera that were golden nuggets for us, but yeah the minute we turn on the camera Martha turned into Martha Stewart every time. It was a little more challenging to produce her actually than it was Donald.

EM: Was there a point during The Apprentice that you had a good idea that Donald Trump wanted to be President.

KH: No there was not really a point where I thought he would run, I think however he wanted the power, but I don’t think he wanted the job is my opinion. He never talked about it much, I mean there was always jokes about running for President and what not. I think he kind of played with it early on a few times, but it was mostly for the promotion is my guess. And I think this one might have started that way, I think it might have started as a promote-able thing to do, because he’s pretty good at that stuff.

EM: Your time on The Apprentice ended when?

KH: 2006, roughly.

EM: Oh, okay.

KH: I mean for producing, I think I came off the front line around that time, ‘05 or ‘06.

EM: And how did you get into doing cannabis cookies?

KH: Well basically my mother in a sense. I was still out producing shows after The Apprentice and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I kind of at the time understood the benefit of cannabis and when a loved one is going through chemotherapy and all the ups and downs and the crap you have to deal with. You kind of almost think of anything and I wasn’t a big consumer at the time, but I just knew there were benefits to it. So I just said, “You know mom you should try some cannabis, I can get you an edible if you need and you know see if it helps.” So I bought her some gummies. I got my medical card and went down and bought her some gummies and she loved them. So that’s when I kind of was like alright let’s see what I can do to make these better. A friend of mine said,'' Well your cookies are pretty good, why don’t you do something with that for her? You know, make some cookies for her, I mean she likes those.”

EM: So you were already making cookies?

KH: Yeah I was. I mean I’ve been baking the chocolate chip cookie since I was probably 8 or 9. A long, long time.

EM: Oh wow.

KH: Yeah it’s my grandmother’s recipe and I just took it at some point and became the family cookie maker. The first time I made the recipe I actually screwed it up, but it was better. Everybody loved them better than grandma’s original recipe. I messed up some of the ingredients that I used. So then I just kept with mine because everybody loved that and I made that for 40 years. Same one, just over and over and over again. So whenever we had a family thing, everybody would be like,”Oh is Kevin making cookies?” Then when I was 12, I was making cookies for the family thing.

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Edibles Magazine™ Issue 62 KH: So then I decided you know what, let me try to figure out how to put cannabis into these cookies. It was quite an ordeal. The first few that I was sending to my mom were probably not the best, but they had the cannabis in it to help her.

EM: And it helped with your mom?

KH: Yes, she loved them! She still, to this day, uses them, mostly though with CBD now. Just for her I got CBD. We do have them, but we just don’t sell them much, a CBD cookie. So I put 25mg because she played with the milligrams for a long time and 50 was her golden spot. So two of these cookies a day and she loves it. It replaces her narco in a sense, sometimes she still needs the narco because the pain is intense. She says about half the time she reaches for the cookies now.

EM: How is she now?

KH: Fine. She got through it, she fought it and beat it, had some other medical problems that started, it was a touch and go time. She was battling breast cancer and then a couple days later had a stroke. So that sidelined her, then she had to put off all the treatment on the cancer because the stroke trumped that. No pun intended. So yeah, but she got through it all and she got back probably ninety-eight percent of all of her function.

EM: Oh great.

KH: Yeah, yeah. She was treated really great in the hospital.

EM: You said you had your own battle with cancer?

KH: It was melanoma and 10 years ago - beat it before it took me - but that also had a lot to do with exiting The Apprentice.

EM: What led to it being taken into the actual cannabis space?

KH: After my mom’s treatment she said you should do this for more people than just me. So this kind of opportunity to help others and create something amazing in the cannabis business was very appealing, I said to myself, you know maybe I’m going to take a swing at it. I was really interested in this UCLA study on using cannabinoids instead of painkillers and the study was based there because it had to be privately funded, it couldn’t be federally funded. So there were a lot of companies who were presenting donations in order to try to help that. I just figured the timing was perfect, and it’s something I had to do. That’s kind of what started it. Then you get into the whole business thing and I have an economics degree.

EM: In addition to your degree in economics do you feel like your time with Donald Trump and producing The Apprentice taught you more or new things about business that you have been able to use?

KH: I think so. I learned a lot from him, he’s very shrewd. I’ve learned some things not to do and some things to do. He’s the iron fist business guy. He throws his fist and does that [slams the table] and it’s crazy. I did learn leverage and understanding information is power. Whoever you’re negotiating with, if you know what you’re talking about, you have a much better chance of succeeding. I did really learn quite a bit from him, business wise. He treats his staff, some of staff members have worked for him for 30 years, you can’t keep people for 30 years unless you treat them well, it’s just not gonna happen. He does have a lot of positive business traits, that worked well for him at the Trump organization and despite some failures it still did pretty well. It was relatively successful.

EM: Did you learn anything from Martha Stewart that you’ve used in your edibles business?

KH: No, I wish. Clearly I wish I could’ve had her try my cookies. But no, it wasn’t even a blip on the radar. Martha was a much more challenging person to learn from because she’s much more, not reserved, but hard to crack in a sense and that was my forte, cracking hosts, celebrities.

EM: She was out of prison?

KH: Yeah she had the anklet on.

KH: So she could work outside of her home for 40 hours a week at that time and we would use all 40 hours basically.

EM: People do get a little more guarded after they’ve done time. That’s not unusual.

KH: It’s not.

EM: That kind of brings us back to, now the cookies have been, they’re vegan.

KH: Yeah, yup and that part of the process of doing that was to make them better for my mom. So in that whole process of a year, prior to launching, I literally made a list of all the ingredients and said, what do I need to remove to make these dose-able every single day because I know my mom is going to want to eat them every single day.

EM: Right.

KH: That’s when I decided to go down to bite size, but still keep the doses in there, so this way you can eat them every single day without a cookie this big after a month, a cookie everyday, that’s 30 cookies in 30 days. That’s a little nuts. So it was part of the reason I went down in size and then….

EM: Going vegan?

KH: I made the list of all the ingredients and said what can I remove? I said I can take the sugar, I want to cut it in half right away. I know you still need sugar to maintain what I was going for, which is a fresh baked, traditional flavor cookie. It wasn’t a lot of the substitute sugars you could use and they work just fine, but it didn’t meet what I was going for, which was the traditional. I knew I still had to have sugar, so I just bought the best I could buy organic straight up cane sugar with not a lot of processing to it, which does help, they don’t bleach it. There’s a lot of cleanness to just straight up cane sugar. I tried to replace it, I just didn’t want to. The eggs and the butter seemed like a very natural thing to remove. At the same time, I was working on preservation.

I knew that if I stacked her with 100 cookies, in a few days they would get stale. Fresh cookies only last for a short period of time. That was another reason to start removing those things. It got to a point where I looked at the ingredients and said oh wow, this is all plant based, everything in this. As long as I was using

vegan ingredients going in, it’s a vegan cookie going out. That’s kind of how I got into it. You know I’m not a big meat eater myself, so it was an accomplishment to get to a cookie that still tasted like a fresh bakery cookie that is fully vegan.

EM: Then it helped with the shelf stability?

KH: Yeah, by removing the things that went bad, we were able to stretch it out for months. Then I started using some different ingredients, different syrups and stuff that helped with the moisture. We’re using a rice syrup right now and it works really well with keeping the moisture in the cookie. I mean it’s not a secret as we do put it on our packing. Obviously how much we put in and how we do it is our own little formulation of it.

EM: You guys were able to develop a way where you know every single cookie’s dose?

KH: Yeah it took us a long time. We hit some misdosings in our early levels.

EM: Yeah that happens.

KH: You have to be really careful with that and there’s a lot of steps you have to take in the actual making of the cookie to ensure you’re hitting your potencies. We spend a lot of time there, that’s definitely our bottleneck, the oven isn’t even our bottleneck. It’s the creation of the dough ball.

EM: Let’s go ahead and talk about the aesthetic a little bit. Cosmic Edibles? How did you come up with that?

KH: So originally we were rocket edibles. Our legal team at the time, they did a whole lot of research to figure out what kind of risk we had. There was a Rocket edible in Colorado, that wasn’t operational, but they still had the trademark now. The lawyer suggested that we rebrand right away, just so it’d cost us a heck of a lot less now than further in the game and they could easily come after us and have a case. At that point we made a big list of names. It was actually my son who came up with Cosmic and I just loved it. I was hammering on and he said you should just name it Cosmic and it was just basically over at that point. My son didn’t even know what type of business I was starting.

EM: It’s a great name.

KH: Then when we developed the little tubes we made. I wanted, since they’re soft cookies. It’s recycled packaging, so when we made them, the craft is recycled paper. What I did is, I found the smallest cookie scoop I could possibly find. It took me, I mean I probably went through 20 or 30 cookie scoops. You know the little hand scoop things.

Then I made a ton of cookies on the smaller ones, the smallest ones I could find to try to keep the consistency. After doing that and measuring them and analyzing the formulas long enough, I came up with the average size of what the cookie would be, which is what turned out to be this size here. This way when the cookie goes into them, they stack. There’s no movement, so when you throw them in your car or your bag, you’ll still end up with intact cookies in the end. That’s the reason why we tubed them as opposed to bag them. We have this bag Edibles Magazine™ Issue 62

that actually goes down inside too.

EM: So then the bag inside is the childproof compliant packaging?

KH: Yeah, you can have multiple packaging, just one of them has to be compliant at some point.

EM: Where are they available right now, that’s California only?

KH: California only, yeah. Focusing mostly on the Southern California market right now. Just because we distribute all of our own cookies, we manage all the accounts, we do all the in-store promotions and everything all from this facility, so the further out we go, the more that was stretched. We’ve decided to really focus on this market here because it’s massive in Los Angeles, all the way down to Orange county and all the way up to Santa Barbara. That’s our market right now. We’ve had a lot of interest in other markets that we will expand to eventually once we get this one stable. If you visit our website, there’s a map, that we keep pretty much current, with what shops we’re in. Plus if you go to our social media, we put fresh drop indicators on there, basically when we drop fresh cookies we’ll put it on our social media.

EM: What’s the social media handle?

KH: @edibles_cosmic, but you can also search just Cosmic edibles and we’ll pop up. Which is a funny silly story too when we started as Cosmic Edibles. I realized that by searching edibles, so if someone was just going into instagram and searched the word edibles, if I had it as cosmic edibles we were further down, if i had it as ‘@ ediblescosmic’, we were higher. So I switched it. So were initially ‘@ediblescosmic’, but then instagram deleted our instagram account twice. So the first time they deleted it we were ‘@ediblescosmic’, second time they deleted it we were ‘edibles.cosmic’ and now we’re sitting on the third one which is ‘edibles_cosmic’. The reason I just kept adding them was that we already had it in print. All the old prints, if you still search them, we still come up even with the underscore. So you don’t have to put the underscore, but yeah we’re @edibles_cosmic basically.

EM: So what’s next? Anything on the horizon?

KH: Well we will expand to some other products eventually, but we really wanna make this. Once we, not conquer, that’s a bad word, get out much much bigger on these cookies, the base product, our cookie line, is selfsufficient and running itself, then we can start adding layers of other products to it. We’re gonna have some new flavors. Obviously this next holiday, we’re probably going to have a holiday cookie. We’ve tried it before, but the

regulations make it a little more difficult to have special edition cookies. The national holiday season is long enough that you can necessitate doing a special cookie for that. So we’re probably gonna do that. We’re putting out our content, which we’re gonna do a lot of fun things with cannabis content. Most likely if we get off onto some other tangents, we’ll just keep it ,keep it our brand which is high quality premium edibles and products, and keep it intact. Make sure that we remove all the bad items out of it and re-develop them.

EM: We have a lot of readers and listeners from outside California, but anyone visiting California with a valid ID can find these in Southern California.

KH: Yes they can. We’re definitely looking to expand, we’ve already started looking at some of the other states. Just initially to see where licensing is much easier and also partnering with people that could make them for us in those other states.

EM: Do you think there’s any point where our current president is gonna try these cookies?

KH: I don’t know, Donald - you want some?

EM: That'd be cool.

KH: I don’t know how the heck you’d get cookies into the president. It has to go through a massive process right? Like it’s crazy. They bring their own chefs, they bring their own food...

EM: And they get a secret service guy to try one first to make sure. It’s legal in DC.

KH: Ultimately it’s not far fetched to say, the money that I made on The Apprentice, I’m using to fund this. You could squeeze that even tighter and say Donald Trump, I mean he owned the show. The Apprentice is half his show, so I worked for him. Technically he was my boss and I produced that show for him and I got paid for that, but from him.

EM: Right.

KH: And here I am using that money, he may even be proud of it, I don’t know. It’s a good business.

EM: I think that’s the quote that we’d use to get his attention: if he funded your edibles business.

KH: It’s not that far-fetched because I’m definitely using the money I made from The Apprentice to do this.

KH: I’m self funding it all, I have no investors. There’s some partners who have small percentages, who did sweat equity for me initially, finances, stuff like that I couldn’t get my head around.

EM: Any final thoughts on The Apprentice, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart?

KH: I’m a registered Democrat, no matter what I tend to lean that direction. I’ve always said to myself that Donald Trump’s organization is a dictatorship, he made all of the rules and the decisions period. A lot of things came out of the organization and promotional things that probably shouldn’t have happened because no one was willing to say ‘no’ to him. Like he made a water and on the label, it was all red and orange. He asked one day if I liked it, it was called ‘Trump Ice’, if I liked the label and I guess I was the only one to say no because I said,” It’s red, it feels like it’s hot water. I don’t want to drink– should be blue or something so I can feel like it’s cold.” He said,”It’s ice.” I said,” I know, but it’s red!” I think most people just said,” Yeah! That’s great!” I knew by committee, he’d had a hard time, he doesn’t operate like that. He’s making a decision, period. Would he take consultation? Maybe. But ultimately, he would do what he wanted to do, period. I knew it would be a struggle because that branch of government is only one part of our government and he had to work with the other branches. To me I thought that would be the biggest struggle that he would have, he’s not the type to operate in a democratic government. I guess there’s a lot of things that are happening that prove that point.

EM: Any thoughts about what he’s said about cannabis having potentially some medical benefit.

KH: I don’t know, I try to keep up with what he’s saying about the cannabis business now that it affects me. I’m not sure he’ll mess with it. I think he’s got a pretty negative train of thought about it, just based on being around him so much. I can’t imagine he’s completely behind it, I think he understands that if somebody has a traumatic medical problem, you’d do anything you can for them. I think that’s where he sees the benefit of cannabis, is for that specifically. I think he truly still believes that people using it recreationally, is not good and I can’t imagine he would support any kind of that. He doesn’t even like alcohol. He’s adamant against it. We'd have wrap parties and I wouldn’t drink anything until he left because I just knew he’d look down on you if you were drinking in front of him, so I never did. He’d only stay an hour and then he’d bail anyway. I’d have time to have a couple more beers you know.

EM: Cool, that’s funny. Well, he signed the Farm Bill, which had the hemp clause in it and that was beneficial to hemp cultivators. (Also, he may not have read the whole thing.)

KH: I think he gets a lot of pressure from other Republicans in this arena, is my guess. I think he was a Democrat at one point and I think he has some heart in him. I just said that on a podcast, like totally, I rewatched it and basically talk him up because I did witness him writing checks to troubled children organizations and stuff like that. I physically witnessed that stuff. He pulled over one time to help somebody that was stranded in their car, in his limo going to New Jersey. They were stranded on the turnpike or whatever, so we pulled over and helped him. EM: You shared with us a story the other day about Martha Stewart making you a latte, can you tell us that story again? KH: The cappuccino? We had tasks basically every single episode and I had a list of them. I was sitting with her at her house going over the episodes we were gonna shoot and getting her feedback and her opinions. We’d go back and change them based on more insight to her world. At some point, while we were having this discussion, she says to me,”Kevin would you like a cappuccino?” I’m like,”Yeah, sure. I love cappuccinos, I'll have one.” I was thinking to myself that she would call out helpers or workers and say give me two cappuccinos. She literally stood up, the cappuccino machine wasn’t far from where we were sitting. We were at her dining room table and you could see it. She gets up and tells me to continue and walks over to the cappuccino machine and starts making me a cappuccino. I’m like, I’m about to get a Martha Stewart cappuccino, a real Martha Stewart cappuccino. She brought it back to me and hands it to me and I was in heaven, thinking to myself, oh my god this isn’t some little Martha Stewart cappuccino mix that you buy at the store and put hot water in it. This is a Martha Stewart cappuccino. That was the best cappuccino ever. EM: Well, thanks so much! We’ve been talking to Kevin Harris of Cosmic Edibles. If people want to learn more, see the store locator, see what products are available. What’s your website? KH: www.CosmicEdibles.com. You can also see the Instagram link on there. It has all of our shops, all of our products, all the ingredients. Everything is on there, all the information you need. You can subscribe to our newsletter, which we haven’t done one yet, but we’re gonna. It’s just one of those things. We’ve picked up quite a few, from the bottom where you put your email, I’m surprised, out of the blue. We’re going to start utilizing that and sending information that way.

EM: Very cool, thank you so much for talking to us today. KH: Of course it’s my pleasure.

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