'We are telling an authentic story about wellbeing with our CBD products'

Hands-on experience working on California hemp farms helped Eoin Keenan see potential of CBD products.

Given that it has been his passion project for the last 12 years, the least revelatory moment of our interview comes when Dubliner Eoin Keenan admits that he always wanted to start a hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) brand.

“I’m not a lawyer, doctor or scientist, but I was an obsessive and I was a consumer,” says the founder of Goodrays, the British functional wellness brand.

“I thought CBD and the mental wellbeing benefits could disrupt soft drinks, alcohol and nicotine in the right types of format and ultimately the future would be in beverages.”

Keenan has been an early industry leader since 2013 when he studied at Trinity College Dublin, suffered with stress and anxiety and became an insomniac.

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Having been offered prescription medications, Keenan was also recommended to take CBD as a natural solution and purchased some hemp leaves ground up in olive oil from a Dublin apothecary. He kept a journal, took it for 30 days and by then was sleeping eight hours a night.

In his last year he completed a dissertation on CBD policy before heading straight to the US and Canada. He planned to stay for two months, purchased a car in San Francisco, made a makeshift bed in the back and drove to Humboldt County, California, a major hub for cannabis growth.

Keenan, who met his now wife in the US, ended up staying for two years running hemp farms with different families and learning from the cultivators providing the consumer goods business.

By now he knew his career would involve CBD. In 2017, he moved back to the UK and set up a regulatory advisory firm, Prohibition Partners, which helped to get CBD and medical cannabis legalised in the UK a year later.Goodrays' founder saw a gap in market for a credible, science-based CBD brand passionate about wellbeing.

Two years on and Keenan was scouring the supermarket drinks aisles and realised only water would make him feel better. The Goodrays concept was born. “The drink format was number one for me,” says Keenan. “It had the potential to truly take CBD mainstream.

“It feels like the category is now exploding but actually consumers were crying out for healthy drinks before it was disrupted. It is long overdue.”

Human studies on the efficacy of CBD show positive effects on stress, sleep and anxiety when consumed in doses above 25mg. The Irish businessman went through around 20 iterations working with ex-Diageo developers, with a science-backed 30mg in Goodrays' products.

Keenan said last year that “people are nervous about CBD and think it will get them 'high' – it doesn't.” Six months ago, Goodrays took off its CBD ‘does not get you high’ strapline from its cans as consumers tune further into the benefits.

Story Continues

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Keenan says: “We are taking advantage of two major trends: on one side you have 74% of consumers who are looking at how diet affects their mental wellbeing and 48% of consumers who are trying to reduce alcohol intake.

“We’ve always had a big challenge trying to educate people that you can actually drive, operate heavy machinery and it doesn’t make you intoxicated in any way.

“I expected when we launched to get kickbacks from people that we were selling drugs. I have not received a negative complaint since we started. We aren’t doctors but people are stating that we have filled a gap and are telling an authentic story about wellbeing.”

Keenan refers to an Ipsos study last year which revealed that mental health has overtaken cancer and obesity as the health problem Britons most worry about.

Meanwhile, the seal of approval from retailers is underpinned by partnerships with Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. After year one, Goodrays supplied Waitrose seven products across three categories.The UK CBD market is set to reach £1bn by year-end and full regulatory authorisation expected in 2026.

“We’re not about ultra-high performance, we are about making people 5-10% better and have a better routine,” says Keenan, whose company sells CBD cans, oils and gummies.

London-based Goodrays, which employs 18 staff, has doubled revenues and profitability in each of the past three years and Keenan says it will sell “tens of millions of cans” this year. The company anticipates releasing full revenue figures for the first time next year.

Since launching in 2020, Goodrays has received £9.2m in investment, including funding from Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody and TV couple Tess Daly and Vernon Kay, as Keenan looks to bolster its functional drinks range.

Keenan, who admits to drinking up to three “broken cans that no one else wants” per day, has also hired Ben Dando, former international head of canned water brand Liquid Death, to become Goodrays’ new CEO.

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“It has been a game changer,” says Keenan. “There’s no job description you can follow for being a founder. It’s a crash course and you have to surround yourself with people much smarter than you.”

With the UK CBD market projected to reach £1bn by year-end, Keenan says Goodrays, which is the premium leader but behind Trip as the UK's top CBD drinks brand, is only “scratching the service” of consumer reach. In the US, market penetration is set to triple over the next three years.

Keenan may be a CBD obsessive, but he does get a dose of reality outside of the business world when he returns home to his wife, who runs campaigns and communications for survivors and the bereaved of Grenfell Tower.

“When I come home complaining of how many cans we have sold that day, she reminds me of the bigger things in life,” says Keenan.

Behind the brand: Goodrays founder on…

Growing a brand

Having this cross over to being a passion project has helped keep me so engaged and in love with the work. It is persistence, constantly being adaptable and maintaining entrepreneurial braveness so we don’t rest on our laurels.

Growing a team

The people who take a punt on you have to have that balance between loyalty and meritocracy. Having high standards, a rigorous hiring process, bringing in the right people and losing some of your ego to listen to them as a strategy is one of the best things we have done.

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