The company will offer four different cannabis-infused seltzers—Black Cherry, Blood Orange, Grapefruit, and Raspberry Apple—and will also offer two beverage enhancers (flavorless and lemon-lime). Each 12-ounce seltzer contains a blend of 3 milligrams of THC and 2 milligrams of CBD while the beverage enhancers contain 4.5 milligrams of THC and 3 milligrams of CBD per serving (20 servings, 150mg total), according to the company.
Good Feels says all its products are manufactured with infinitely recyclable glass bottles in a carbon-neutral facility powered by 100% renewable energy. Furthermore, the minority-owned cannabis brand says it purchases 25% of its materials from cannabis businesses with social equity or economic empowerment license types.
“I started this company because there was no solution to my problem,” said Jason Reposa, founder and CEO of Good Feels. “I had to create my own solution. We took an aggressive approach to launch these products as quickly as possible so that people can have access to them. They really are revolutionary in that the innovation didn’t exist, so we had to create it. I needed to create something for myself, and I knew if I did, others would love it as well.”
The “problem” for which Reposa sought a solution was his own personal health challenges. Reposa says he developed temporomandibular joint disorder—otherwise known as lockjaw—in 2019 due to stress from selling his former company at the time, combined with other life events.
“I was on a liquid diet, basically. I couldn’t open my mouth an inch,” Reposa said. “Typically, it’s attributed to a lot of inflammation, and the mechanics of my jaw just weren’t working correctly. I went to the doctors, went to the dentists, [and] I got a needle in my head—they were squirting into my temple to relieve all the inflammation—and it wasn’t really working. And like many people in my situation, as a last resort, I was like, there’s got to be a different way.
“So, I found cannabis and I was like, ‘This actually really works,’ but I didn’t want to smoke it,” Reposa adds. “That was the biggest thing. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite to my kids.”
With that in mind, Reposa said he also didn’t want to turn to edibles, which, in his opinion, are traditionally “a bad experience.”
“It’s just not a good experience,” Reposa said of cannabis edibles. “I don’t want to wait an hour to feel anything, and then after that hour go have a panic attack in my bed all cuddled up with blankets and not talk to my kids and hope they don’t come and knock on my door. Also, I didn’t want to be on a six-to-eight-hour journey because I don’t have time for that. If I take an edible and it doesn’t hit me the right way based on my body’s chemistry in that moment, then I could potentially be out of commission for the next six hours, and I just didn’t like that idea.”
With smoking and edibles non-starters in Reposa’s pursuit for pain relief, he turned his attention to beverages. But he didn’t find an answer for his ailment in the existing market, so his self-described “curiosity-driven” personality led him to seek his own solution.
While Reposa had a vision of the cannabis product he wanted to create, his background is in technology and, therefore, he admittedly was green to the cannabis industry.
“I’m not from the traditional market in any sense, so I approached it with a fresh set of eyes,” Reposa said. “I had to learn all the science, I had to learn all the chemistry, I had to learn the plant, the biology, all that stuff.”
That was one challenge. Another was learning the process of creating a cannabis-infused seltzer.
“I ended up reverse-engineering some of the formulations and determining the core ingredients that I would need and the specific surfactants and the emulsifiers that I would need to be able to accomplish something like this,” Reposa said. “So, I developed my own IP (intellectual property) and I was like, ‘This is actually pretty good.’ It was better than what was in the market, at least in Massachusetts, and so I was like, ‘Maybe there’s something to this.’”
Reposa ultimately developed a cannabis beverage that helped relieve the pain he felt from TMJ—and he was able to do so with his own at-home cultivation, which became legal when Massachusetts legalized cannabis in November 2016.
“I was just medicating myself with my own home grow,” Reposa said. “I did all the processing myself, I did everything seed-to-sale, you might say, for myself. I built a bottling machine. I just worked backwards until I was like, ‘Okay, this is the step that I have to start with.’”
And just as Reposa was finding relief and overcoming one challenge, he was immediately met with another when he was laid off from his job at the beginning of 2020.
“Well, maybe this is my next venture,” Reposa said he remembers thinking at the time.
However, Reposa’s idea was pushed to the backburner as the pandemic threw the world for a loop at the start of 2020. Like many, Reposa said he took time during the onset of the pandemic to assess what he direction he wanted to move next.
It was then, during the pandemic-induced shutdowns (and the occasional boredom that came with them) that Reposa picked up the idea again.
“I was in my house with everybody else and just being like, ‘Now what do I do?’” Reposa said. “I was like, I have this idea, I want to do it, but I don’t have a name.”
And then, Reposa says, the company name came from an unexpected source.
“My mother-in-law suggested the name Good Feels, and I was like, ‘Huh, that kind of encompasses it all,’” Reposa says. “It’s not Canna-Feels, it’s not Drinks Company—it was just Good Feels. That’s the embodiment of what we’re trying to get across: it tastes good, it feels good.”
From there, Good Feels was born. By August 2020, Reposa signed the lease on Good Feels’ facility in Meadway, Mass., and the company was off and running.
After originally planning to launch Good Feels in August 2021, the company first had to sort through a series of supply chain challenges, as well as Massachusetts regulations, leading to some paperwork delays.
In due time, however, Good Feels officially launched in February 2022.
With Good Feels still in its infancy, Reposa says he’s excited for what the future holds while noting the company’s focus on “controlled growth.”
“It's all [about] quality control for us,” Reposa said. “We don’t want to go to 120 dispensaries overnight, and that’s because we have to feel out our own equipment also. We couldn’t support that on day one and we don’t really want to disappoint anybody. We’re always trying to put our best face forward. All the products that you see in the dispensaries have been quality controlled at this point. We want to make sure everybody has a really good experience.”
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