East Fork Cultivars and Peak Extracts Unite
East Fork and Peak Extracts Unite
East Fork Cultivars is thrilled to announce that we have officially joined forces with our longtime partner Peak Extracts.
“This perfectly matched union boosts East Fork’s cannabis braintrust, and greatly expands the range of our in-house product-making capabilities,” said East Fork CEO Mason Walker.
“While East Fork will continue to work closely with other product makers, and values those partnerships, it’s exciting to diversify the types of product experiences that we can offer the communities we serve.”
Peak’s Founder, Katie Stem, added, “It’s an exciting moment for both companies. Our values and capabilities are just so synergistic that I see only great things ahead for us as a collective.”
A Crafty Combination
As independent, family-owned companies with aligned values, East Fork and Peak are strategically banding together in a time of increasing commoditization and corporatization of the cannabis industry.
“Together, we strengthen both of our businesses and increase our ability to help people improve their wellbeing with superior cannabis therapeutics,” Mason pronounced.
“We can offer a craft alternative to the multi-state corporate domination that is happening in cannabis,” Katie explained, while Mason chimed in, “We’re even craftier together!”
Close collaborators since 2017, combining forces was an intuitive evolution for the two brands.
Both companies were founded through intensely personal experiences with medicinal cannabis, and an emphasis on health.
Both have specialized in developing products with a diversity of cannabinoid ratios to provide different therapeutic effects, with a particular focus on CBD-rich and low-THC options.
And both share an ethical emphasis on stewardship of community and planet, including commitments to regenerative cultivation and sourcing, pesticide-free production, and development of plant-based vegan products.
A Fuller Spectrum in Leadership
This energizing step further diversifies East Fork’s leadership teams as Katie joins the company’s ownership, Board of Directors, and management team as our new President.
With the addition of Katie’s expertise, women now represent 40% of East Fork’s Board, and the company is approximately 40% women-owned (comprising three of its six largest shareholders).
This welcome evolution maintains continuity in Peak’s proud history as a woman-owned company, and progresses East Fork’s goal of improving diversity at every level of the organization.
Katie also adds queer representation to East Fork’s executive team, further increasing the dimension and community connections of our organizational perspective.
The Peak Story: An Oregon Original
Distinguished by its carefully curated single-cultivar products, Peak Extracts has produced award-winning cannabis products in Portland since 2014 (originally in the medical market). When Oregon transitioned to an adult use market in 2016, Peak was one of the first edibles processors licensed by the state.
Peak’s first product to debut was their beloved line of gourmet dark chocolate bars – each variety featuring one standout cultivar from a single source. East Fork was an early collaborator, contributing fan favorite single-sourced cultivars such as ACDC Cookies to Peak’s repertoire of bars (and boasting our llama logo co-branded on the packaging).
From the beginning, the values and cultivation practices of farms have been of utmost importance to Peak in selecting their cannabis and chocolate sourcing, which is why they proactively partnered with East Fork from their early days onward.
Peak’s focus on sustainability, environmental impact, and the medicinal benefits of cannabis has always meant a superb alignment with East Fork’s similar philosophies and practices.
Peak Chocolates: A Therapeutic Favorite
Similar to East Fork, Peak’s founding mission was to harness the therapeutic powers of cannabis for patients in need. The goal was to offer Oregonians a custom-tailored edibles experience, with reliable consistency in both dosage and effects.
As a medical cannabis patient managing symptoms of her Crohn’s disease, Katie developed her chocolate sourcing and methodologies over years of very personal trial and error. This included honing specific extraction techniques that retain as many naturally present terpenes, flavonoids and nuances of the original flower (the cannabis “terroir”) as possible.
Combining the carefully extracted single-origin cannabis oil with high quality 70% dark chocolate couverture, Peak’s bars are vegan, gluten-free and rich in antioxidants. They are also very allergen-friendly – in addition to being a vegan facility, Peak’s manufacturing space is fully gluten-free and nut-free (except for coconut).
And because of Peak’s focus on a safe, effective, and trustworthy experience for medical patients, all of its products are double tested for purity, uniformity and potency.
Peak’s Rescue Rub: An Iconic Topical
With a successful chocolate following, Peak soon expanded their product type to include more therapeutic modalities.
Katie’s background as a licensed Chinese Herbalist and practicing acupuncturist naturally led to the development of Peak’s acclaimed topical balm, Rescue Rub.
As an herbal medicine provider since 2010, Katie has treated many patients for a wide variety of injuries and pain types. After Peak was formed, she created the formula for Rescue Rub by incorporating cannabis oil into a topical herbal combination that was written more than 2,000 years ago for addressing blunt force trauma and inflammation.
The other herbs in the formula synergize with cannabinoids including THC (a known analgesic), CBD (an established anti-inflammatory), and other the cannabis components to create a stronger topical that is absorbed faster into body tissues.
Later – and sourcing from East Fork’s hemp side – Peak developed CBD-dominant formulations of Rescue Rub salve and lotion, including full-spectrum, isolate-based, and CBDA versions. These offerings were equally well received.
Peak Extracts: Terroir-Rich Oil
At the beginning of 2018, after years of development, Peak debuted their vaporizer cartridge line (including CBD-rich cultivars) to definite acclaim.
DOPE Magazine praised Peak’s “superior techniques,” and famed cannabis connoisseur Warren Bobrow praised Peak’s “tantalizingly authentic cannabis terroir”. Writing for Forbes, Bobrow proclaimed, “Peak Extracts are without a doubt, one of the finest oils I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing.”
Peak’s proprietary extraction process, using only naturally present elements, was designed to deliver a unique, full-spectrum cannabis experience. Named Terp-Lock™, the meticulous CO2 extraction process that Peak created includes carefully optimized parameters that keep the terpenes and flavonoids intact from the original source flower.
Using Terp-Lock™, the oil in the average Peak cartridge yielded around 10% single-source terpenes – much higher than the industry average.
Peak’s commitment to superior cannabis extraction and painstaking care to preserving the plant’s full spectrum is a perfect pairing with East Fork’s scrupulous cultivation philosophy.
Growing Together
Merging the Peak Extracts and East Fork organizations adds substantial new abilities for both, and opens the door to compelling possibilities.
Peak’s products gain access to in-house sourcing, including the ability to grow specifically for particular products, while East Fork gains access to in-house manufacturing capacities, including on the state-licensed cannabis side of operations.
Our combined capabilities give both product lines more control over the consistency of their product-making factors, as well as an expanded reach that allows us to develop brand new offerings together.
East Fork remains a farm-based organization, and because farming has innate risks we’ve worked diligently to build resilience through diversifying our range of operations.
Integrating Peak’s operations with East Fork’s accelerates this effort for us, acting as an expanded buffer to market stressors while still keeping the farm at the center of what we do.
We’re energized and inspired by the pathway ahead.
