Arcadia Biosciences and Archipelago Ventures announce strategic partnership with Vivion Specialties

Arcadia Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: RKDA), a leader in science-based approaches to enhancing the quality and nutritional value of crops and food ingredients, announced on Monday a new partnership between Archipelago Ventures and Vivion Specialties, Inc. (VSI), a North American specialty ingredient supplier. VSI will serve as Archipelago’s North American distributor, managing the stateside marketing and sales of sun-grown Hawaiian hemp ingredients in key markets like food and beverage, human and pet nutrition and personal care.

Established in 2019, Archipelago Ventures is Arcadia’s joint venture with Legacy Ventures Hawaii to cultivate and extract high quality hemp and hemp derivatives on the islands. The new partnership between Archipelago and VSI is based on the companies’ mutual goals of providing ethically cultivated, genetically superior hemp-based ingredients that have been rigorously tested for purity, offering customers transparency and peace of mind. VSI is known for its proprietary VivAssure^® purity validation process, which tests every ingredient and provides a detailed Certificate of Analysis of their contents.

“When it comes to hemp and hemp-derived products like cannabidiol (CBD), ingredient transparency and quality control are a high priority for discerning retailers and shoppers,” said Arcadia CEO Matthew Plavan. “With VivAssure, Vivion Specialties has pioneered a new and rigorous standard for the testing and certification of hemp ingredients. What’s more, Vivion is an experienced specialty ingredient supplier with a network of 18 sales regions in the U.S. and Canada, making them an ideal partner to distribute what we expect will be the first Hawaiian-grown, Hawaiian-extracted CBD ingredients available in North America,” he added.

Archipelago’s Hawaiian hemp products will be marketed as meeting VivAssure product quality standards, validating that they are free of over 950 pesticides and contaminants, 24 heavy metals and a variety of microbial organisms, and contain the precise tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content and CBD profile listed.

“For more than sixty years, Vivion, Inc. has prioritized providing customers with the highest quality product ingredients across the food and beverage, human and pet nutrition and personal care markets,” said VSI CEO and Founder and Vivion, Inc. President Michael Poleselli. “Through our partnership with Archipelago and Arcadia Biosciences, a leader in hemp innovation, we’re applying these capabilities to one of the most exciting and in-demand new consumer product categories: hemp-derived CBD.”

Archipelago and VSI’s VivAssure Hemp-based ingredients are expected to be available for sale to North American food, beverage, pet and supplement manufacturers later this year.