How CBD oil gave two Mancs a new lease of life – and a booming business
Dr. Ed is the leading supplier of quality CBD oil in Manchester - sending more than 100,000 units to doors around the world; including those belonging to football and soap stars.
“I’d have a call with a client, and then as soon as the phone went down, I’d think: ‘He probably thought I was a dickhead.’”
Alex McMillan is remembering his life before CBD oil.
It was a time when he worked in the marketing sector, and every move he made was subject to scrutiny.
“I’d put off everything,” he tells The Manc.
“I’d refuse to open emails, I’d delay doing tasks.
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“My self-confidence was at an all-time low, and I didn’t want to go out as much.
“It’s hard to explain unless you have it. But anxiety just made me hyperanalyse everything.”
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Millions in the UK suffer from anxiety. According to the NHS, more than 5% of people in the country are out there right now, struggling to manage the problems that arise as a result of the condition.
Finding a way to relieve symptoms can prove to be a huge challenge.
But, in true British fashion, Alex’s path to recovery began with a bonding session in the pub.
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Pints in hand, Alex talked it all through with his buddy Ed, and with his knowledge they came to the conclusion that CBD oil – a liquid extracted from cannabis – could be a potential solution.
Dr. Edward Jones, who happened to have an extensive background in Neuroscience and numerous degrees from the University of Manchester, whipped up a recipe.
Today, the brand is the leading supplier of quality CBD oil in Manchester – sending more than 100,000 units to doors around the world; including those belonging to football and soap stars.
“Without naming specific names, I can’t believe how far it’s come and the diversity of our customers – from all walks of life.” Alex chuckles.
Now that its health benefits are all but confirmed, CBD oil is rapidly becoming a saturated marketplace.
First and foremost, it actually does what it says on the bottle. And second, it boasts some of the best flavours you’re ever likely to find in CBD oil, according to its founders.
“We use specifically grown Californian hemp which is then processed using advanced techniques with no harsh chemicals or solvent to produce raw CBD oil’ Ed explains.
“We also include added terpenes that give it a great taste. One of the biggest problems with a lot of CBD is that it often tastes awful; many cannot get over the inherently ‘weedy’ and ‘earthy’ taste and terpenes do wonders for the palatability.
“The most successful users of CBD take it every day and experiment with timing and dosing schedules. So if the oil doesn’t taste good, you’re not going to stick to it which is why flavour profile is so important to us.’’
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Happy customers have come flooding back to Dr. Ed after enjoying relief from anxiety; and by tweaking the formula, Dr Edward Jones has found a way to help ease other common ailments, too.
Their CBD oil range has now expanded from anxiety cures to pain relief, insomnia remedies and even PMS problems.
Other oils in the catalogue have also shown an ability to increase users’ libido and their energy levels based in part on the inclusion of other active ingredients alongside CBD.
Cannabis without THC – the part of the plant that triggers a psychoactive response – has acquired growing stature in the medicinal world over the past few years.
Whilst there remains tight regulation on the plant itself, CBD oil has been declared not only safe and legal but even healthful.
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“The rules are that the products have to be produced from hemp that contain less than 0.2% THC, and the final product must contain no more than 1mg of THC” Ed explains.
“Ours have zero THC as detected by our current lab partners.’
“We triple-batch test to make sure there’s no THC in there at all – and also to confirm each bottle contains the amount of CBD we say there is on the label.
“Sting operations among CBD oils are common. Many find that very little CBD is actually in there. But we always make sure there’s exactly the right amount.”
Alex calls their production process ‘fairly simple’, but ‘second-to-none’ in terms of results.
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“All the plants are grown and harvested in California, they extract the CBD and other cannabinoids, turning it into a waxy resin. This high quality resin is then processed by us in different ways to generate our unique product line’’, he tells us.
“It’s pretty simple, it’s just about getting those ingredients right and ensuring our mixing processes are accurate, reliable and clean. ‘’
Dr. Ed CBD has three full time members on the team right now, with numerous other part time support staff but they’re looking to triple full-time staff numbers by the end of the year.
A far cry from the job-cutting stories most businesses are despondently sharing in 2020.
The brand is also aiming to grow throughout Europe with more production plants – increasing distribution and expanding the product range.
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“I’m more confident and I’m a better person to be around since taking the oil,” says Alex.
“It’s just helped so much.”
With six-figure sales since launch, it looks like Dr. Ed’s oil has gone far beyond patient zero.
Thousands with anxiety are suddenly starting to feel a lot better.
Learn more about the products available from Dr. Ed by visiting the company website.
Feature
Speaking with Maggie Rogers before her spellbinding stripped-back set at Gorilla
Danny Jones
Every now and again we’re fortunate enough to get the opportunity not only to see a big name but to experience them in a smaller, more intimate setting for those special one-offs that people go on to talk about for years to come — that’s how we got to see Maggie Rogers at Gorillaon Monday.
Better still, we were incredibly lucky to be offered time to speak with the American singer-songwriter just a couple of hours prior to her all-acoustic set at Gorilla and just before she and her band set off to tour her new album, Don’t Forget Me, which drops next month.
Manchester being the first of these up close and personal pre-album launch shows here in the UK, of which she listed just four, it’s always an honour to be picked for the start or the end of an album cycle but it was immediately clear she had a lot of love for our city.
Arriving in 0161 on Sunday just in time for the Paddy’s Day chaos and to watch the FA Cup final between Man United and Liverpool in a local pub, our conversation started with simply: “That game!”
The interview
After meeting and greeting the line of people already queuing up for the 500-cap Gorilla show, we walked backstage for what ended up being a laid-back chat about live music, relaxing into herself as an artist and an album process that was recorded in a whirlwind five days.
Touching on the upcoming third album and that beautiful title track, Maggie said, “It feels like coming home. In a lot of ways, it’s like a return to a lot of the style of songwriting and production and arrangement that really got me into music in this place when I was like 16/17.
“It just feels really relaxed and my friends keep saying that it sounds like the version of me that they know. I think, after doing this for quite a while, I’m finally relaxing into it.
“I think it’s always been authentic but I think music sort of takes some of the most sensitive and intense people and puts them in really high-intensity situations… It’s not even that I wasn’t being authentic before, I think it’s just that my guard was a little bit up yeah. I was a little scared — I still am, you know, but I think that’s normal.”
Describing how it felt her last LP Surrender had the punchiest and most contemporary rock approach of her music to date, we then moved on to where her style is at currently and the difference between the studio listening experience and live performance.
“I mean, my undergrad was in production engineering but that record was really designed to be played live, especially in a time like the pandemic, where all I was thinking about was coming back to touring and really missing it.
“I got really into British rock and, at least during the Surrender era, I was like fully like in Oasis mode, but you guys are responsible for some of the best music and pop culture.”
Chuffed that she dropped in the Burnage boys so early in the conversation, she went on to say that although she was “discovered in a moment of experimentation” — that old Pharrell meme (yes, that is her if you’ve never put two and two together), her “songwriting has always been the same at the centre.”
“What I love about making albums is the world-building part of it, and I’ve just gotten to build different worlds. I always think about where the albums are designed to be listened to and Heard It in a Past Life was really designed for headphones, Surrender was really designed for stage and this is really designed for a car — like a Sunday afternoon drive”.
As she puts it, the debut was lots of synths, the sophomore was “drums and distortion” and the star of Don’t Forget Me is the acoustic guitar. “There’s definitely different forms of energy”, she said, adding: “but this is more on the stripped side and the whole record was kind of designed as a live album. Almost everything was a first take and this record was made in five days”. Some achievement in its own right.
Credit: Maggie Rogers
Having the most fun on stage
After touching on that internet moment from back in 2016, we then talked about how seeing her for the first time at Victoria Warehouse back in November 2022 (which she described as “so sick” and one of her favourite venues here in Manchester) was the real ‘wow’ moment for us and realising just important it is to see her live. Maggie puts a lot of it down to the band.
“I think that on stage what I love is that it’s different every night. I’ve worked really hard to be excellent at something that I really love and I get to play with some of the best musicians around and my band is just so f***ing talented.”
“It’s sort of like I hope the audience is having a good time too but also if they’re not I’m just having a really good time anyway.” She definitely was too; jumping ahead a little bit, one of our favourite moments from the gig was when she stopped between songs to laugh and say, “I just love playing music”.
She said similar about the creative process this time around too. Although there’s a lengthy newsletter post describing how the album came to be on her Instagram, she summed up it by saying, “Creativity, often comes from some of the most essential and sometimes childish or playful senses.
“Like, it’s called playing music and I think keeping that like sense of playfulness alive is so inherent to keeping my creativity alive, and in the studio making this record I was just having so much fun and was just feeling really playful, so we sort of made a record by not trying to make a record.”
Again, you could see that “contagious joy” she talked about written on her face and everyone else’s.
She was having the most fun and, believe us, so was everyone who managed to get a ticket for Maggie Rogers’ sell-out Gorilla show.
The show
Moving on to the show itself, Maggie said she was most looking forward to playing the likes of ‘Drunk’ which they’ve been doing live for a while now, as well as a track she called “devastating” with just the keys and a guitar entitled, ‘The Kill’ — and she wasn’t lying.
She set up the song by promising “It’s such a jam” with a full band but the stripped-back version fittingly killed us off in the crowd and the same could be said for a lot of the versions we heard on the night. From ‘Begging for Rain’ to an almost ethereal take on ‘Alaska’, you really get to appreciate just how incredible her voice is in this kind of scenario.
Bigging up British and Manchester crowds in particular because we “know culture and [we] care”, insisting, “It’s crazy how important those two things are”, her audience certainly lived up to the billing. She said there’s no “half-assing” it with us and she was right. We were emotional and so was she.
The set naturally closed with ‘Don’t Forget Me and a few teary faces (we didn’t dare film that moment as we wanted to be present) but nothing summed up the night better than when the Manc Maggie fans pretty much turned Gorilla into a congregation for ‘That’s Where I Am’, perfectly harmonising and clapping like a gospel choir.
We’re already looking back on the show and thinking of it as going down as one of those ‘I was there’ moments and we think we speak for everyone when they say they won’t forget the time they saw Maggie Rogers at Gorilla with nothing more than a guitar and her piano player — also incredible, by the way.
Don’t Forget Me releases on Friday, 12 April and we already can’t wait to hear not only how the rest of it sounds but how the tracks we heard sound fully-fledged.
‘That’s Where I Am’ – Maggie Rogers, live at Gorilla (Credit: The Manc Audio)
Featured Images — The Manc Group/Press Image (supplied)
Feature
The Salford deli with the best name in Manchester has a new home — and it’s even more of a hidden gem than ever
Danny Jones
If you’ve ever ventured down Chapel Street in Salford or sat with a pint in Bexley Square, you’ll probably have noticed the shop, cafe and deli space that once sat on the corner.
More accurately, if you know the spot, you’ll likely have chuckled to yourself when looking up at the sign and reading the name above the front door: Deli Lama. Still makes us smirk to this day.
The best-named Wholefoods Shop and Cafe sat as a literal cornerstone of the Salford community for over a decade and was a real favourite amongst locals but has since moved premises, and whilst it is more out of the way than it used to be, it has only reaffirmed Deli Lama’s hidden gem status even more.
Now located in the old Islington Mill just across the road — which currently serves not only as a residential space but as a key cultural hub for creatives and artisans — it’s arguably situated even deeper in the heart and soul of old Salford than ever. You’ve just got to know where to find them.
And that’s where we come in. After initially heading out on a weekend and wanting to enjoy a brew and a bite to eat, we decided to go on the hunt for their new venue and ventured down James Street to stumble across the mill itself.
An unassuming space, to say the least, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s still out of use at first glance, but once you spot the boards pointing you in the right direction of Deli Lama and the other names who have popped up in here, it does feel like you’ve stumbled across the best-kept secret in town.
Walking down the tunnel past the notice boards and the other indoor studios, you emerge out into the quiet little courtyard to find the deli’s new location, with fairy lights in the window and the old still just propped up against the wall as they’ve had little time for finessing — they’re just cracking on.
Although the space might be a little rough and ready in parts, what it achieves is that genuine rustic feeling that so many other trendy new openings attempt to contrive, whilst also carrying over a sense of familiarity from the former venue.
This Salford deli, cafe and Manc wholefoods shop is more than meets the eye. (Credit: The Manc Group)
In the spacious new spot, you’ll find the same cupboard and pantry staples from rice, pasta and pulses to organic fruit and veg, bakery items, preserves, condiments and so on that you would find in the old shop, only now there’s room for more of anything.
There are also shelves of organic tea and coffee, fridges full of chilled drinks, soups and freshly prepared ciabattas, as well as literally the best vegan cookie we’ve ever had. They even make their own seitan.
Looking at the menu itself, as well as a regular rotation of specials, they do vegetarian brekkies that will knock your socks off like the Caribbean scramble, as well as plant-based breakfast burrito that we devoured within seconds alongside a big healthy portion of their chilli bean soup.
Topped with jalapenos, herbs and a lovely dollop of guacamole which thickens up the texture the more you swirl it in, just like when you used to dip your buttery bread into the bowl at home, it was divine and we could have had ladles of the stuff if it wasn’t for all the other customers ordering a portion as well.
Banging vegan sausages.The deli counter.Unreal.Not just the best-named deli in Manchester but some of the best food you’ll find in Salford too.
Speaking of the crowd, you can tell this is a real haven for artisans and the other residents. The mill has stood there for 200 years and as it now boasts apartments upstairs, virtually everyone living and working here has become a regular, with people from all ages and walks of life.
As well as being a quaint little creative corner, Islington Mill is also important in the LGBTQ+ community, with the Islington Mill is Queer audio series recorded here, not to mention serving as a key part of the council’s ‘The Other City’ fund and artist-led community project bigging up Salford as its own entity.
As for Deli Lama themselves, they’re a team of just three led by founders, owners and local couple, Linda and Lincoln, who opened up the original shop 12 years ago but have been set up here since November, insisting they are “much happier at home here” and now starting to regain their rhythm.
Together for two decades themselves, you can tell this isn’t just their livelihood, it’s a passion they’ve bonded over and a way of continuing to contribute to the area that clearly still means so much to them.
It already feels so vibrant and welcoming.Walls full of produce.Credit: The Manc Eats
What this small but incredibly dedicated team manages to do, beyond just delivering high-quality produce, is make every person who steps in the door feel like their best mate and part of the family. We’re not exaggerating when we say they knew everyone’s name in the two hours we spent there.
Even from the cosy little snug where you can sit on an armchair in the window next to some plants and a little poster wall promoting upcoming community events, to the little kitchen just behind the counter, you do get that feeling of being in someone’s home even with the big window and skylight above.
There’s plenty of bustle next door and across the courtyard from the pottery place, needlework studio and tufters also based within Islington Mill, but somehow this place manages to help block out all the business of town just down the road and even outside is relatively tranquil.
We were only supposed to come in for a coffee but we ended up feeling so relaxed we didn’t want to leave and ended up eating twice, buying a takeaway butty and some stuff from the fridge just because we fancied it.
Could spend hours chilling here.Salford coffee to boot.Get the lemonade, trust us.
More importantly, the wholefoods, zero-waste and almost entirely vegan approach means that Deli Lama is one of the most sustainable, sourcing directly from local co-operative Organic North and even eyeing plans to set up their own in the future.
They also cater events and private functions, including a substantial corporate do or two when they can, and might also be making their groceries and food menu available on Deliveroo later this year.
It’s also crucially one of the most reasonably priced cafes and stores of its kind you’ll find anywhere so close to the city limits which, in a cost of living crisis, should never be overlooked or left unapplauded.
Please give the wonderful team at Deli Lama Wholefoods Shop and Cafe in Salford a go — you will not regret going for the short wander to find them and we promise, you’ll fall in love with it just like we did.