Farm to Flow: Trace Femcare and the Future of Hemp Fiber Tampons

About this episode

Claire Crunk discusses the challenges faced by Trace Femcare in obtaining FDA approval for their hemp fiber tampons.

This week on the Hemp Show, Claire Crunk returns. She is the founder of Trace Femcare, the worlds first hemp fiber tampon. Her first appearance on the podcast was in 2023. Her company was just a few weeks away from their initial product launch. All they were waiting for was final approval from the FDA. She assumed then that things would be easier than they ultimately turned out to be. On this episode we find out what happened with the FDA and how the agency's request for an additional study was a major setback for Trace. What the FDA wanted from Trace was an exhaustive extraction study and mass spectrometry analysis, which would take 12 months and cost 150 thousand dollars. "So that's 12 additional months of operating expenses of runway added to the company as well. So it's not just a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It becomes, you know, four hundred thousand dollars," Crunk said. Ultimately, the company could not overcome the burden and Trace was forced to sell its assets. The story of Trace and Claire's battle with FDA is one of the story lines in the documentary film One Plant , which has finished production and is seeking a distribution channel now. But when the film…

People in this episode

Host: Eric Hurlock

Guest: Claire Crunk

Topics covered

• hemp fiber tampons
• FDA approval
• Trace Femcare
• product launch
• challenges in business
• documentary film

Keywords

• hemp
• tampons
• FDA
• Trace Femcare
• Claire Crunk
• documentary
• business challenges

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Trace Femcare, FDA

Books & works: One Plant

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