Who Is Happi? A Brand File on the Seltzer That Broke the Grass Ceiling

Happi got the hard part right and left the easy part undone. The hard part is verification: naming an accredited lab, publishing a full contaminant panel, and shipping a product that tests at what the label says. Happi does all three, and we know because we pulled the COA and read it. It even names the co-packers who fill its cans, which is close to unheard of in THC beverages.

The easy part is telling you who the company is. Happi's site never names its legal entity; we traced it through the SEC, where Happi Co., a Michigan corporation, has left a genuinely interesting paper trail (a ~$2.89M Form D and a first-of-its-kind crowdfunding round). Add a 2021 trademark suit whose outcome was never disclosed and a total public silence on the 2026 ban, and you get a 79: one point off a B, with the gaps all fixable by disclosure rather than by re-engineering anything.

The brand was founded in Michigan by Lisa Hurwitz, a former chief marketing officer at Grassroots Cannabis (one of the larger multi-state operators before its acquisition), together with co-founder Joe Reynolds. Both founders are public and verifiable, and Forbes profiled the company's Michigan dispensary launch in 2022. The corporate entity is Happi Co., a Michigan corporation, and it is unusually traceable for a private brand this size, because it raised money in ways that leave federal paper: SEC filings under CIK 1814941 show a Form D reporting roughly $2.89 million raised, and in 2023 the company ran a Regulation Crowdfunding round on Wefunder that its own announcement billed as the first by a cannabis beverage company, the 'grass ceiling' break in our title.

One more identity check, because this name is crowded: Happi the seltzer is at happihourdrink.com. The domain happi.com belongs to an unrelated cosmetics trade magazine (Household and Personal Products Industry), and Happy Dad (the seltzer), Happie, and Happi Hemp are all different, unrelated businesses. This file concerns the Michigan beverage company only.

This is where Happi earns its score, and we held it to the same primary-evidence standard we hold everyone to: we didn't take the 'lab tested' badge on faith, we pulled a COA from the company's public test-results hub and read it line by line.

• The lab is named and credentialed. The report comes from Anresco Laboratories, an independent lab accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 by ANAB under certificate AT-1551. A named, accredited lab is the single biggest thing that separates a verifiable COA from a decorative one, and most THC drink brands (including some we've graded) never name theirs.
• The panel is full, not potency-only. The COA covers cannabinoid potency plus pesticides, heavy metals, residual solvents, and mycotoxins. Potency-only 'testing' is the category's favorite shortcut; this isn't that.
• The numbers are honest. The Glow 5mg can we checked tested at 4.77mg of delta-9 THC against a 5mg label, inside a five percent tolerance. Under-promising by a quarter of a milligram is exactly the direction you want a dosed intoxicant to miss in.

Happi doesn't own a plant, and it doesn't pretend to. What it does instead is the next best thing on a transparency scorecard: it names who makes its drinks, market by market. In Michigan, production runs through Highway Horticulture. In Minnesota, where Happi arrived in early 2023 with a launch announcement, the partner is Chill State Collective. In Texas, it's Bayou City Hemp working with Houston brewer 8th Wonder.

To see why that matters, compare the category norm: most THC beverages are made by contract co-packers the brand will not identify, so the actual manufacturer of the thing you're drinking is a trade secret. Happi's regional model exists because THC can't cross state lines, and rather than bury that supply chain, the company discloses it. We can't inspect those partners' facility credentials from here (that detail isn't published, and it's why this pillar is an 11 and not higher), but 'here is who fills our cans, in each state' is a sentence most of Happi's peers refuse to say. The thinner story is upstream: the hemp's origin and the extractor behind the THC aren't disclosed, which is what holds the sourcing pillar to a 9.

The clean parts are searched, not assumed. We looked for and did not find any FDA warning letter, any FTC action, or any recall involving Happi or Happi Co. In a category where those records are common, verified absence is a genuine positive, and it's most of why the reputation pillar scores 14.

• The trademark suit. In November 2021, litigation was filed involving Big Beverage, maker of 'Happy Hour' branded drinks, over the Happi name. A complaint is a set of allegations, not findings, and here the record simply stops: no public disposition of the case was located. We don't know how it ended, so we say so, and we count an undisclosed outcome as an open item rather than a strike.
• The silence. As the 2026 federal hemp law is written, containers are capped at roughly 0.4mg of total THC, and every Happi SKU exceeds it (the 5mg can we verified sits at more than twelve times the cap). Peers like Wynk have published 'we're not going anywhere' statements and visible contingency plans. We found no public statement from Happi about the ban at all. Silence isn't a plan, and it isn't the absence of one either; it's just silence, and we note it.

In our view, Happi is the drinks brand that proved the product and skipped the paperwork. If your question is 'is what's in this can what the label says, and who checked,' Happi gives the best answer in the tier: a named ISO-17025 lab, a full contaminant panel, and a COA that reads 4.77mg under a 5mg label. If your question is 'who is this company, how did its lawsuit end, and what happens to it in November,' the answers are 'see the SEC, not the site,' 'undisclosed,' and 'no comment found.'

That's a C (79/100), one point off a B, and the path up is all disclosure: name the entity on the site, show the microbial panel, and say something about the ban. The full methodology shows every point, and if Happi closes those gaps, we'll update the file (see the notice below).