Baked, for real - Europe's first cannabis bread hits Belgian retailers

M/S Bakery owner Charly Lowy showing cannabis bread mix, Brussels
C/U Cannabis bread before being baked
M/S Decorating cannabis bread
M/S Cannabis bread before being baked
M/S Baked cannabis bread
M/S Charly Lowy shows cannabis bread
M/S Packing cannabis bread
M/S Cannabis bread
SOT, Charly Lowy, Owner of Lowy bakery (French): "The idea came up from the recent discoveries of therapeutic virtues of derivatives of cannabinoids. It has increasingly become a trend to use it as soft a treatment. I studied this seed and I noticed that it also had quite exceptional nutritional qualities. So I thought, let's see what it tastes like, so I tried and it was delicious. So I thought, since it tastes good - I ate peeled seeds we can find in organic stores - I thought we're going to incorporate it in a loaf of bread, finding the ideal dose to have a nice bread, out of the ordinary, tasty and nutritious in ways other breads aren't. Those nutritional qualities are in the fibres and fatty acids."
W/S Cannabis bread before being baked
SOT, Charly Lowy, Owner of Lowy bakery (French): "The other possibilities of finding it now, is that we have a distributor, the Mestdagh group, which distributes this bread via its more than 80 stores in Belgium. We have given them exclusivity because we found them to be quite brave to agree to take this product up for mass retail, although all assurances were given."
M/S Pre-baked cannabis bread
SOT, Charly Lowy, Owner of Lowy bakery (French): "I must admit that at that point were too confident. Meaning, we could buy it [the grain] freely, and that where it's grown, it had the necessary certifications that it was organic, that it didn't contain THC, all that was certified ahead of time. But it wasn't enough for us to sell it, which we didn't know. So we put it up for sale, we got arrested after a month by the AFSCA (Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain) which did its job and found out that the law said any product made from hemp seeds must be previously studied and authorised. So we did analysis on site and had batches certified. And those batches are absolutely useable and authorised."
C/U Cannabis bread
SCRIPT
The Lowy bakery in Brussels is capitalising on the latest food trends as they launch "Cannabread", the first commercially distributed hemp bread in Europe, as seen in footage shot on Thursday.
Bakery owner Charly Lowy points cannabis-based products being used to treat a number of ailments as the inspiration for the new loaves.
"The idea came up from the recent discoveries of therapeutic virtues of derivatives of cannabinoids. It has increasingly become a trend to use it as soft a treatment. I studied this seed and I noticed that it also had quite exceptional nutritional qualities. So I thought, let's see what it tastes like, so I tried and it was delicious," he said.
Legal commercial use of cannabis in Belgium, like in other EU countries, operates under a legal loophole in which hemp-based products containing up to 0.2% of THC are not controlled under drug laws.
However, launching Cannabread was no easy task for Lowy, whose first attempt to market the product in 2018 failed after the Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain (FASFC) stopped its production and demanded authorisations and studies.
After going through the proper procedures Cannabread is now sold across 80 different supermarkets in Belgium and plans to expand production are now underway.