This story is part of our coverage on the future of cannabis in L.A. See the full package here.
If you don’t realize the pot-infused personal pizzas from Stoney Slice are technically outlaw pies before you’ve ordered them via text message, it might start to dawn on you when you receive day-of pickup instructions (also by text) that direct you to a curbside location in downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District for a handoff.
Or maybe it hits you when you realize that the matte-black pizza box bears no state-mandated childproof closure or a content label for THC, cannabis’ psychoactive compound. Or maybe your spider-sense starts to tingle at the very end of the transaction. The price, which starts at $25 for a pizza infused with 30 milligrams of THC, strikes you as a little too low to include the assorted state and local taxes that add more than a third to the cost of recreational-use cannabis products in L.A.
If you had more than a sneaking suspicion that something wasn’t 100% legit about the situation, chances are your concerns would dissipate as quickly as the steam off a freshly fired pizza pie once you flipped open the box (“Who uses black pizza boxes?” you might ask yourself in passing) and snap into a wedge of hand-tossed, Neapolitan-inspired-crust pizza as toothsome as any the city has to offer. They would recede to the fuzzy, distant afterthought stage about half an hour later when the high kicks in.
The next day you might even retrace the secret pizza score in your head: the conspiratorial feeling of ordering via text, the handoff from a man dressed in nearly all black, the oddly affordable cost, which you paid via cash or Venmo. That’s when you‘ll realize you have questions that need answers.
For starters, how can pot-slathered pizza and chicken wings be illegal in the same state where cannabis-containing chocolate bars, olive oil and beef jerky are totally legal? Who picks smack in the middle of a pandemic to launch a weed-meets-pizza mashup? And why would a genial, 29-year-old with a wide smile and flour-dusted apron be hustling so hard seven days a week, tossing dough and firing pies (more than 1,000 to date) to establish himself as L.A.’s pied piper of pot pizza, knowing that his entire business model falls outside the state’s regulatory framework?
These questions were rattling around in my head after I spent $55 to score two pizzas (one pepperoni, one barbecue chicken), each dosed with 30 milligrams of THC and a condiment cup of ranch dressing containing 15 milligrams on a Sunday night in late February.
Surprisingly, despite his under-the-radar operation, Stoney Slice’s founder, Kashka Hopkinson, who turned out to be the guy who handed off my illicit ‘za curbside, agreed to answer them. His eight-month adventure in culinary cannabis not only illustrates the Wild West green rush mentality that’s still very much at work in the Golden State, but hints at what the future of the state’s wider cannabis foodie industry could be.
“I initially got into this because I wanted to make a different version of an edible,” he said. “But then along the way I started figuring out that people were craving good pizza, so I decided to give them a quality pizza to eat [along with] a quality high. And during the pandemic, there wasn’t much to look forward to.”
Hopkinson, who has no formal training in the cooking arts (he briefly studied photography at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University), said the seed for Stoney Slice was planted during a two-year stint working as a visual manager at MedMen’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard dispensary, where he saw firsthand the opportunities and challenging regulatory landscape that existed in the state’s freshly legal recreational cannabis market. (Legal nonmedical sales of cannabis in the state, approved at the ballot box in 2016, began in January 2018. Possession, sales and the cultivation of cannabis are illegal under federal law.)
“The edibles space is super-crowded, but it’s crowded in the same categories: gummies, brownies, chocolate. That’s it. It’s all candy,” Hopkinson said. “And maybe beverages, which started to get popular in 2019, but that’s about it.”
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He said that scarfing down THC-infused sweet treats, while effective in generating a buzz, lacks the convivial, communal atmosphere many people associate with the cannabis consumption ritual. “I wanted this experience to be like smoking a joint with your friends,” he said. “I kind of just put my feelers out. I would ask random people, ‘Would you eat an infused pizza?’ And everyone I spoke to said, ‘That’s an amazing idea. Why does this not exist?’”
To be clear, Hopkinson did not invent THC-infused pizza. He knows the story of high-flying, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Stoned Pizza (run by Chris Barrett, a.k.a. the Pizza Pusha), which has been around since 2017, and, closer to home, L.A.-based startup Stoned Oven Gourmet Pizza that, according to a 2014 Los Angeles Times report, was offering 6-inch, 250-milligram frozen pies through medical marijuana dispensaries. (The Stoned Oven Gourmet Pizza’s website lists a phone number that is no longer in service, and emailed inquiries about the status of the business went unanswered.)
What Hopkinson didn’t find in the middle of 2020 was an up-and-running L.A.-based business that offered made-to-order, THC-infused pizza delivered to the doorsteps of Angelenos in the quarantine era.
“First, it’s stoner food,” Hopkinson said about choosing the pot-infused pizza path. “And second, there’s a pizza for everyone. Even if you’re vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free, you can still eat pizza, and I wanted a food that could cross all the categories — dot everyone’s I’s and cross everyone’s Ts — and pizza was it.”
Last August, Hopkinson left his MedMen job, fired up a portable pizza oven, invested in a few sacks of imported flour, a couple cans of San Marzano tomatoes and a whole lot of weed-infused extra virgin olive oil, and launched Stoney Slice out of his downtown Los Angeles apartment.
Hopkinson’s assortment of 10-inch pizzas includes pepperoni, barbecue chicken, and a Nutella- and marshmallow-topped dessert pizza. Each is sauced with 30, 60 or 100 milligrams of THC. (He also offers cannabis-enhanced chicken wings, garlic knots and condiments.) To taste the fruits of his entrepreneurial labors, you’ll need two things: patience and a willingness to stray outside the state’s legal framework.
The first is because he slots 20 orders a night, and the second is because, while selling cannabis and selling pizza are very much legal in California, selling cannabis on pizza is not.
He said the first tickle of an idea came to him in early May of last year, and by June he was experimenting with dough (he settled on one that takes three days to properly proof), as well as sourcing cheese (he found an L.A.-made buffalo mozzarella), researching pizza ovens (he settled on a portable, propane-powered Gozney Roccbox that can crank out a pizza in less than two minutes), figuring out the best infusion method (he settled on mixing a homemade THC-infused olive oil directly into the tomato sauce) and coming up with a distinct but subtle visual identity.
“The customers that we had on Abbot Kinney were lawyers and real estate agents, [and] they wanted discretion,” he said. “So I did a lot of ‘University of Google’ [research] and found out that there’s really no company in Los Angeles that has a black pizza box, so I knew that would be a standout factor.” Printed tone-on-tone in the lower righthand corner of each lid is the Stoney Slice name, along with a tiny, seven-point cannabis leaf that, in passing, could be mistaken for an asterisk.
“That way it’s kind of like if you know, you know,” Hopkinson said. “So I went with that aesthetic. It’s also very me as a person.”
His research also included seeking legal advice. “I spoke with the lawyer in the very beginning because I was scared,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t want to get shut down. I don’t want [to do] something that would be dangerous to people. I want to make sure I’m giving people something that’s healthy, something that’s properly dosed and something that’s safe for them to consume. And the lawyer had no real answers for me. … They asked where I was [making my pizzas]. I explained where I was doing it, and I was told as long as I continued [to work out of a non-commercial, private residence] that would be OK for what I’m doing, although there are no guidelines for it — quite just yet.”
That path, as Hopkinson describes it, is to frame what he’s doing as no different from hiring a cannabis-savvy chef to come into your home and create a catered, THC-infused meal. “There’s no regulation for this particular type of edible,” he said. “They don’t exist. ... My ingredient that I add by request is cannabis-infused oil.”
Despite consistently referring to the Stoney Slice team as “we,” it turns out Hopkinson’s business is staffed by an army of one, and he does every last bit of it himself, from texting menus to handing off deliveries (either curbside in downtown L.A. or to doorsteps within 15 miles).
Search the web for “cannabis chef” and you’ll quickly realize the in-home cannabis culinary experience is neither novel nor particularly secretive, with chefs including Holden Jagger (Altered Plates) and Chris Sayegh (the Herbal Chef) building public, high-profile careers in the space and doing a similar semantic dance.
Rachel Burkons, who cofounded cannabis hospitality consulting group Altered Plates with brother Jagger in 2016, estimated they were doing one or two dinner-party-type events a month before pivoting in 2019 to focus on consulting by helping big brands and cannabis clients make their own on-site consumption a reality.
“Whether it was an infusion or pairing, we were providing the cannabis under the state of California’s gifting regulations, which made it kind of marginally compliant,” Burkons said. “But obviously it becomes transactional, so we always positioned it that we were selling a dinner. We’re selling food and not cannabis. That was a really important piece for us.”
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Sayegh, who launched the Herbal Chef in 2014 and has since built it into a network of regional chefs across the country, echoed that approach, explaining that private clients hosting an event are connected directly with state-licensed cannabis manufacturers, cultivators, extractors and distributors. “Let me be very clear. I have never charged for cannabis in my entire life,” Sayegh said. “All we’re doing is the culinary experience. We’re an event and catering company.”
If you scour state regulations, consult lawyers or talk to the major players in the space, you’ll see where gray areas exist in the culinary cannabis space. The least gray part is the requirement that those engaged in commercial, adult-use cannabis activities are required to have a state and local license. Hopkinson has neither.
“The bottom line is you cannot offer [cannabis-containing] food unless it is in a packaged form and it’s licensed,” said Bruce Margolin, a Beverly Hills-based attorney who has been practicing cannabis law for more than half a century. (He’s also the founder and director emeritus of the L.A. chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.) “There’s no [legal] way to infuse and sell it.”
On the upside, Margolin said that a consumer buying from a business like Stoney Slice or an unlicensed dispensary isn’t going to be charged with a crime. “Consumers are not considered to be violating any law because they bought from an illegal place,” Margolin said, “unless you’ve got some kind of conspiracy going on.”
The Catch-22 is that the state doesn’t offer licenses for that category of food. A spokesman for the Bureau of Cannabis Control confirmed this to The Times in an email stating, “The activity is not currently legal.” He declined further comment.
Altered Plates’ Burkons is less parsimonious in her assessment. “The cannabis-chef concept is a regulatory orphan,” she said. “It is not addressed in the regulations; there’s no path to compliance, really, with the exception of what’s happening in West Hollywood with the on-site consumption lounges.” (That L.A. County city provides for consuming cannabis and food products on premises, although not cannabis-containing foodstuffs prepared on-site. The first such WeHo business, Lowell Cafe, which rebranded as the Original Cannabis Cafe, opened in fall 2019.)
The lack of a statewide path to compliance is one of the reasons Burkons serves as executive director of Crop to Kitchen, a California-based culinary cannabis advocacy group whose policy initiatives include developing a path to compliance for cannabis chefs in the state and expanding the edibles marketplace to include what Burkons calls “live infusions,” the adding of a licensed and compliant cannabis product to freshly prepared food.
The demand for professionally prepared, cannabis-infused meals is there. Sayegh said that a year into the pandemic his business is fielding 150 to 200 inquiries a month seeking his company’s meal-preparation and consulting services from around the globe. He thinks turning those gray areas black and white could make businesses like his boom. “If there were fair and just regulations,” Sayegh said, “I think what we’re looking at is hundreds of millions of dollars in business in ... the cannabis hospitality space.”
Regulatory changes that would give a business like Hopkinson’s a path to becoming fully licensed and compliant aren’t likely to come soon, Burkons said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it is a very high priority with the BCC,” she said. “The BCC is very much bogged down right now trying to stamp out the illicit market and close [illegal] dispensaries that are popping up all over the place. They’re too busy playing Whac-A-Mole.”
Asked for comment, the Bureau of Cannabis Control representative said that there is no timeframe for when or if regulations on cannabis-infused foods might change.
Despite that uncertain regulatory future, Hopkinson decided to launch Stoney Slice anyway. In part, he said, it was because of another lesson he learned during his MedMen tenure.
“You can look at it two ways,” he said. “It’s either going to be the roadblock that’s going to stop you from pursuing [your goal] because it’s unknown, or you can develop something so that when that time comes you’re ready. During the two years I worked at MedMen, the amount of things that changed, that were OK and then weren’t OK, was so vast.”
As an example, Hopkinson pointed to childproof packaging requirements. “At first everything had to be in translucent packaging and sealed. Then everything had to be childproofed,” he said. “So there was a point in time where MedMen had to clear everything out of their stores, and they had nothing to sell because every brand had to repackage everything. You also used to have to take everything out of the store in a bag. It was mandatory, and the bag had to be sealed to leave the store. And then, all of a sudden, that wasn’t a rule anymore. You could just put it in your pocket and walk out. Then, six months later, the rule came back. So I knew that the regulations would always, always be changing. So instead of waiting, I just bit the bullet and did it.”
Hopkinson also felt time was of the essence, and not just because he was combining two of the COVID era’s most popular comforts and delivering them to L.A. doorsteps.
“I knew if I sat back and tried to do the research and try to figure out ways of getting around the regulations — how to get fully licensed — that it would take me forever to even start the business, so I needed a proof of concept,” he said. “Because I know as soon as regulations are solidified someone with the capital and the means is just going to do it. So I’m hoping that I can establish myself in such a way that when that time comes, I can get someone to invest in me, to partner with me.”
Hopkinson knows that being fined or having Stoney Slice shut down is a possibility.
“It would be unfortunate, but — and I’m quoting my lawyer, ‘The BCC has bigger fish to fry,’” he said with a resigned shrug. “This isn’t some big conglomerate with millions of dollars in backing. ... I definitely have something to lose, but there’s something to be said for someone trying to do something new for an industry. It’s a new category that will exist at some point, and I just I want to be the person that made it accessible.”
And if the San Marzanos do hit the fan?
The self-taught pizzaiolo has a non-pot pivot in play that he might be able to fall back on. “I’m actually looking at opening a noninfused, pop-up pizza place,” Hopkinson said. “That way I’ll have the experience of running a pizzeria and knowing what the workflow is like. So when that time does come and the regulations are right, I’ll know how to run [an on-site] business.”
He has found a 1,000-square-foot downtown L.A. space that he hopes to open in June, using the same recipes minus the cannabis and the same matte-black pizza boxes. The name and logo will be altered slightly.
“It’s just going to be the word ‘Slice’ without the ‘Stoney,’” he said. “So if you know, you know.”
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