Who Is Cycling Frog? A Brand File on Hemp's Most Vertically Integrated Name

Cycling Frog earns the top grade because its parent does the hard, expensive, transparent thing: it owns the supply chain. Lazarus Naturals grows the hemp on its own Oregon farm, extracts it on-site, makes the products in its own cGMP plant, uses naturally-occurring delta-9 instead of converting it, and shows its work with per-batch reports from named accredited labs. Our score is built to reward exactly that kind of verifiable, end-to-end openness — and almost nobody else in these files can match it.

It's a B rather than an A because of soft, off-product signals: a weak Glassdoor, a settled data breach, a settled private Prop 65 notice. We'll credit the integration fully, mark the real negatives honestly, and clear up the several "Lazarus" and "Frog" name-collisions that could otherwise produce a false statement.

Cycling Frog and Lazarus Naturals share one owner: ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C., a Washington Social Purpose Corporation (a real, verifiable state filing), founded in 2014, with operations centered in Portland, Oregon. It's led by a named, public founder and CEO, Sequoia Price-Lazarus (listed as the company's governor on the state record), who previously made THC distillate in Washington's medical market before pivoting to affordable CBD. Cycling Frog launched around 2021–22 as the company's THC-beverage brand.

This is the heart of the grade, and it's unusually well-documented:

• It owns the farm. Lazarus bought a former cattle ranch in Powell Butte, Central Oregon in 2018 and grows its hemp there.
• It extracts on-site. Cannabinoid extraction happens at the farm (chilled-ethanol/closed-loop), not at an anonymous third party.
• It makes the product itself. Finished goods are produced in Lazarus's own ~40,000 sq ft cGMP facility in Portland — a genuine "seed to shelf" operation — and the company states plainly that Cycling Frog is "made exclusively with hemp from… Lazarus Naturals farms." So the integration isn't just the CBD parent's story; it explicitly covers the THC-beverage brand.
• It's a certified B Corporation and grows a USDA-Organic hemp crop.

The one honest gap: the cGMP certification is third-party audited, but the brand doesn't name the certifying body, and there's no public FDA-facility-registration database to confirm that piece. Minor caveats against a manufacturing transparency story that is, flatly, the best in this series.

One technical point deserves its own spotlight, because it's a genuine safety differentiator most buyers never hear about. A large share of the hemp-THC market sells cannabinoids made by chemically converting CBD into delta-8 (or other novel cannabinoids) — a process that can leave reaction byproducts if it's done sloppily, which is exactly why the unnamed-lab brands elsewhere in these files are a concern.

Cycling Frog explicitly does not do that. It uses naturally-occurring delta-9 THC extracted from hemp (kept under the 0.3% dry-weight threshold), and says so clearly, contrasting it with CBD-to-delta-8 conversion in its own educational materials. Sourcing the cannabinoid from the plant rather than synthesizing it removes a whole category of contamination risk — and pairing that with named-lab, full-panel COAs is about as clean as hemp-derived THC gets.

Cycling Frog's testing matches its supply chain:

• Named, accredited labs. COAs come from Columbia Laboratories (Portland) as the primary partner, with ProVerde Laboratories also cited — both ISO/IEC 17025-accredited. Naming the lab is what lets you actually trust the report.
• Per-batch lookup. Every can/package carries a batch number and QR code that pulls the specific COA — real traceability, not a generic PDF.
• Full panels (potency, pesticides, heavy metals, residual solvents, microbials) against a recognized cannabis monograph standard, plus an in-house QA step during manufacturing.

As with any brand, we'd encourage a buyer to actually scan their batch — but the infrastructure here is exactly what the strongest brands provide, and far beyond the "we test, somewhere, by someone" norm.

Cycling Frog isn't flawless, and the reasons it's a B not an A are worth stating plainly — but notice what they are not: there's no FDA warning letter, no FTC action, and no recall (we checked the databases; the names appear nowhere). The negatives are softer and off-product:

• Workplace reviews are weak. Lazarus's Glassdoor sits around 2.4/5 across dozens of reviews, with recurring management complaints — a real signal we weight in the People pillar.
• A settled data-breach class action. A 2023 suit (Cimino v. ETZ Hayim Holdings) over a data breach affecting ~42,000 people settled for $300,000, with final approval in late 2024 — a resolved matter, but a real one.
• A settled private Prop 65 notice in California over THC warnings (the company denied violation), and a polarized Trustpilot (~2.7) driven mostly by shipping and customer-service complaints rather than product quality.
• Two 2020 employment lawsuits whose dispositions we couldn't confirm — we note them as filed allegations, nothing more.

On the other side of the ledger, Lazarus runs a widely-praised assistance program (steep discounts for veterans, people with disabilities, and low-income customers, with tens of thousands enrolled) — a genuine, sourced positive that speaks to how the company treats its customers.

In our view, Cycling Frog is the brand to point to when someone asks what hemp-THC transparency is supposed to look like. It owns its farm, makes its own product in its own cGMP plant, uses naturally-occurring delta-9 instead of converting it, and backs all of it with named-lab, per-batch COAs and a B Corp certification. That end-to-end visibility is rare, and it's exactly what our score is built to reward — hence the top grade. The things keeping it from an A are real but off-product: workplace reviews and settled civil matters, not safety or testing.

If you buy Cycling Frog, you can do something you can't with most of this category: actually verify it — scan the batch QR, read the named-lab full panel, and know where the hemp was grown. A B (82/100), our highest, for the most transparent supply chain in the series. The full methodology shows every point; tighter workplace marks and a clean civil slate would put this into A territory (see the notice below).