Quality Meats Moves into Brand Ownership with THC Beer Herb Light
The founders of independent creative agency Quality Meats have spent their careers creating and building brands for clients. Now, they’re putting their own expertise, capital and reputations behind one of their own.
Herb Light is the agency founders’ first consumer product: a non-alcoholic, lager-style beverage with just 1mg of THC. The launch marks Quality Meats’ first move beyond traditional client work and into creating, funding and building an owned brand from the ground up.
The idea emerged from two shifts reshaping the beverage industry. The percentage of US adults who report drinking alcohol has fallen to an all-time low of 54%, according to Gallup, while interest in non-alcoholic and THC beverages continues to grow.
But the founders saw a gap between the two categories. Non-alcoholic beer can recreate the taste and ritual of drinking without delivering a buzz, while much of the THC beverage category is built around higher doses and fruit-forward or botanical seltzers. There were few options for someone who wanted the familiar taste and social experience of a light beer, with no alcohol and just a little THC.
Which is exactly what Herb Light was created to deliver.
“The main reason this product exists is because I wanted it selfishly just for me,” says Herb Light co-founder and Quality Meats co-founder and co-CCO Gordy Sang. “I like drinking beer, but I don’t like feeling hungover, and I like some cannabis, but I don’t want to be higher than balls. So I went and made a drink that I can keep drinking all day in social settings, where I have a pathological need to constantly have a drink in my hand that I can continuously pour into my face.”
Herb Light applies the familiar logic of light beer to cannabis. Its lager-like taste and feel, paired with just 1mg of THC, gives consumers an immediate mental shortcut for understanding the product.
“Everyone on earth knows what a light beer is, and how you can drink more and feel the effects less than a regular beer, and a lot of people love light beer taste,” says Herb Light co-founder and CEO Jon Schiff. “So we’re leaning into that math as a mental shortcut, but instead of a little alcohol, it’s no alcohol and a little THC.”
That light-beer logic extends across the entire identity. Herb Light’s name, packaging and marketing were designed to feel like relics from the 1980s, when lower-alcohol, more sessionable beers were becoming a familiar part of American drinking culture. The brand imagines an alternate timeline in which THC beverages existed alongside the iconic light beers of that era - and explores how Herb Light might have solved the same drinking pain points then that it does today.
“We all know THC drinks didn’t exist in the ’80s. But it’s fun to imagine if they did,” says Brian Siedband, Herb Light co-founder and Quality Meats co-founder and co-CCO. “So every aspect of this brand is leaning into basically an alternate timeline where it did. And how it would have solved the same pain points back then that it does now. Which is completely absurd but reinforces the light beer-ness of it all.”
Quality Meats brought that fictional history to life through retro packaging, original jingles, vintage-inspired commercials and actual family photos from the 1980s that have been digitally altered to include Herb Light, making it appear as though the brand was there all along.
The three launch films borrow the visual language and familiar tropes of vintage beer advertising, then collide them with modern drinking habits and a healthy serving of AI insanity. Each concludes with a musical invitation to 'head on down to the low-high hills.' One film follows a man with a family history of alcoholism who wants a THC beverage that won’t leave him 'high as a giraffe’s balls.' Another features a woman who wants to avoid waking up with 'woodpeckers jackhammering her brain.' The third centres on a former cannabis user who worries today’s products might turn him into a 'panic goblin.'
For Gordy and Brian, Herb Light required going far beyond creating a name, identity and campaign. They identified the market opportunity, developed the positioning, invested their own capital and assembled the team needed to turn the creative idea into a commercially available product.
To bring Herb Light to market, they partnered with Schiff, with whom they previously launched Chicago food, juice and smoothie concept Real Good Stuff Co. Together, they assembled a team of beverage-industry veterans that includes award-winning brewmaster Jacob Sembrano, head brewer at Cruz Blanca and former head brewer at Goose Island Brewpub.
The go-to-market team also includes BrightBev, led by former Molson Coors executive Jeff Agase and former Revolution Brewing CMO Doug Veliky.
Herb Light is beginning by 'owning its backyard' in Chicago before expanding into additional markets. The beverage is currently available at Foxtrot Market and bottle shops, bars and restaurants across the city, including Beer Temple and Slugger’s Bar & Grill. It is also available for direct-to-consumer shipping in most states.
The team is currently in conversations with regional Midwest distributors to expand Herb Light’s availability across on - and off - premise locations throughout the Chicagoland area.
For Quality Meats, the launch represents a shift from building equity exclusively for clients to creating an asset of its own - and experiencing first hand the financial risks, operational realities and growth pressures its clients navigate every day.
This time, there’s no client on the other side of the table. Quality Meats is the agency, the founder and the brand owner. And it’s inviting everyone to head on down to the low-high hills.
