Who Is Lazarus Naturals? A Brand File on the Seed-to-Shelf Value House
A Portland original that does the transparency work almost nobody else does — it owns its farm, names its USDA-organic certifier, names its ISO-accredited lab, and runs a public batch portal, all at value prices with a 60%-off assistance program. What holds it to a B: a settled data-breach class action, a settled Prop 65 notice, rough workplace reviews, and several big claims — cGMP, employee ownership, B Corp status — that are currently self-asserted rather than shown.
By The Kind Buds Desk · 12 min read · Updated 2026-07-01 · Official site ↗
Kind Buds Brand Transparency Score
Genuinely elite product transparency — a named ISO-17025/NELAP lab (Columbia Laboratories), a public batch portal, its own Oregon farm, USDA-organic via a named certifier (Oregon Tilth), and an independent best-in-industry transparency ranking — at value prices with a real assistance program. Held to a B by a settled data-breach class action (no adjudication of liability), a settled Prop 65 notice, a 2.4 Glassdoor, a B- BBB with unanswered complaints, and headline claims (cGMP, employee ownership, B Corp status) that are self-asserted or no longer publicly confirmed.
An opinion grade from our transparent 6-pillar methodology, built on publicly sourced facts.
About as good as this category gets: a public batch portal (test-results.lazarusnaturals.com), a NAMED third-party lab — Columbia Laboratories, accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 and NELAP — and an independent Leafreport audit that ranked Lazarus best of the 111 brands it reviewed. The small dock: verification still depends on pulling your batch's COA rather than a per-SKU itemized panel index.
A disclosed, real operation: a 40,000-square-foot Portland production facility the company describes as cGMP-certified. Docked because the cGMP claim is self-asserted — no certifying auditor is named in any public source we found — so we treat it as a claim, not a verified credential.
Best-in-class seed-to-shelf: Lazarus owns its own hemp farm in Powell Butte, Oregon, and its USDA-organic certification comes via a NAMED, USDA-accredited certifier — Oregon Tilth. Docked a point only because the farm-to-SKU mapping isn't itemized product by product.
A named founder (Sequoia Price-Lazarus — no relation to Sequoia Capital), a named legal entity (ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C., a Washington Social Purpose Corporation), and no outside funding rounds on record. Docked because 'employee-owned' is self-asserted with no disclosed mechanics, and the once-verified B Corp status is no longer publicly confirmed.
Real people-forward commitments — a company-stated $20/hour wage floor and a long-running 60%-off assistance program. Docked hard for the employee side of the ledger: a 2.4 Glassdoor rating with roughly 29% of reviewers recommending the company (anonymous reviews, but a consistent signal).
The record has real weight, precisely stated: a data-breach class action settled for $300k with no adjudication of liability, a Prop 65 notice privately settled for $20k (not a court finding), and a B- BBB with two unanswered complaints. The 2019 NBC lead item is heavily caveated (single sample, unapproved seller, disputed as counterfeit, no regulator action) and we weight it accordingly.
Lazarus Naturals is the value brand that vertically integrated: founded in Portland in 2014, it grows its own hemp on its own Oregon farm, extracts and bottles in its own facility, and sells oils, gummies, topicals, and pet products at prices well below the premium tier — with a 60%-off assistance program on top. We ran it through our six-pillar Brand Transparency Score and it earns a B (83/100) — one of the strongest product-transparency profiles we've graded at any price.
The product side is genuinely elite: a named ISO-accredited lab (Columbia Laboratories), a public batch portal, USDA-organic certification via a named certifier (Oregon Tilth), and an independent audit that ranked it the most transparent of 111 brands tested. What keeps it out of the A tier is the corporate side of the file: a settled data-breach class action, a settled Prop 65 notice, rough employee reviews, a B- BBB, and several headline claims — cGMP certification, employee ownership, B Corp status — that we could not verify beyond the company's own word. We'll also disambiguate a couple of things the internet reliably gets wrong about this brand, starting with its founder's name. Here's the receipts-first reality.
The short version
- Our grade: B (83/100). Elite product transparency at value prices, held back by a settled-litigation record and self-asserted corporate claims.
- It names its lab — and its certifier. COAs come from Columbia Laboratories (ISO/IEC 17025 and NELAP-accredited) via a public batch portal, and its USDA-organic certification is through a named, USDA-accredited certifier, Oregon Tilth. Leafreport ranked it best of the 111 brands it audited.
- True seed-to-shelf. Lazarus owns its own Powell Butte, Oregon farm and a 40,000-square-foot Portland production facility — though its cGMP claim is self-asserted, with no auditor named.
- The founder is a person, not a fund. Lazarus was founded by Sequoia Price-Lazarus — no connection whatsoever to Sequoia Capital — under the entity ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C., with no outside funding rounds on record. (The 'Lazarus' rounds on Crunchbase belong to an unrelated AI company.)
- The drag is corporate, not chemical. A data-breach class action settled for $300k (no adjudication of liability), a Prop 65 notice privately settled for $20k (not a court finding), a 2.4 Glassdoor, a B- BBB with unanswered complaints — and a 2021 B Corp certification whose current status is no longer publicly disclosed.
| What the public record shows | |
|---|---|
| Brand | Lazarus Naturals (lazarusnaturals.com) |
| Legal entity | ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C. — a Washington Social Purpose Corporation |
| Founded | 2014, Portland, Oregon |
| Founder | Sequoia Price-Lazarus (no relation to Sequoia Capital) |
| Funding | No outside rounds on record (Crunchbase 'Lazarus' rounds = unrelated Lazarus AI) |
| Hemp source | Its own Powell Butte, OR farm; USDA-organic (certifier: Oregon Tilth) |
| Lab testing | Named lab — Columbia Laboratories (ISO-17025 + NELAP); public batch portal |
| Independent audit | Leafreport: best of 111 brands reviewed |
| Manufacturing | 40,000 sq ft Portland facility; cGMP self-asserted (auditor unnamed) |
| BBB rating | B- (two unanswered complaints) |
| Litigation | Data-breach class action SETTLED $300k (no adjudication); Prop 65 notice SETTLED $20k (private settlement) |
| Sibling brand | Cycling Frog — operated by a separate entity (North Fork Distribution, S.P.C.) |
Lazarus Naturals at a glance — the verified facts
The short version
On the product, Lazarus Naturals is one of the most transparent operations in hemp — full stop. It owns its farm, names its USDA-organic certifier, names its ISO-accredited testing lab, runs a public batch-lookup portal, and was independently ranked the most transparent of 111 brands audited. It does all of that at value prices, with a 60%-off assistance program and a company-stated $20/hour wage floor. That's the substance our score rewards most, and it's why Lazarus posts one of the highest lab-pillar scores on our board.
What holds it to a B lives on the corporate side of the file: a data-breach class action that settled for $300,000 (with no adjudication of liability), a Prop 65 notice that settled privately for $20,000 (not a court finding), a 2.4 Glassdoor, a B- BBB with unanswered complaints — and a cluster of headline claims (cGMP, 'employee-owned,' B Corp) that are currently self-asserted or no longer publicly confirmed. We'll credit the elite parts, state the settled matters precisely, and clear up two name mix-ups that follow this brand around.
Who's behind it? (A named founder — and two mix-ups to kill)
Lazarus Naturals was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2014 by Sequoia Price-Lazarus. The legal entity is ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C. — a Washington Social Purpose Corporation, a for-profit form that bakes a stated social mission into the charter. The company describes itself as employee-owned; we note that this is self-asserted — no ownership plan, percentage, or mechanics are disclosed in any public source we found — so we report it as the company's characterization rather than a verified structure.
One more relationship worth stating precisely: Lazarus has a sibling brand, Cycling Frog — the THC-seltzer line that shares its Pacific Northwest roots. Cycling Frog is operated by a separate legal entity, North Fork Distribution, S.P.C., not by ETZ Hayim Holdings. They're siblings, not the same company, and conflating the two entities would be an error we've seen elsewhere and corrected in our own files.
Lab testing — elite, independently confirmed
This is Lazarus's best pillar, and one of the two or three best lab-transparency setups we've graded anywhere:
- A public batch portal. Every batch's Certificate of Analysis is retrievable at a dedicated results site (test-results.lazarusnaturals.com) — not a buried PDF page, an actual lookup portal.
- The lab is named — and doubly accredited. Lazarus's testing partner is Columbia Laboratories, accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 and holding NELAP (environmental-laboratory) accreditation. Naming an accredited lab is the single thing that turns a COA from paper into verification, and Lazarus adds a second accreditation on top.
- Independent validation. The third-party auditor Leafreport — which buys and tests products itself — ranked Lazarus Naturals the best of the 111 brands in its review. That's not Lazarus's claim; it's an outside audit's conclusion.
One transparency note in the other direction: some retailer pages attach a US Hemp Authority seal to Lazarus products. We could not verify that certification in the registry, so we don't credit it — the credentials above are verified, and they're more than enough.
Seed to shelf — its own farm, a named certifier, and one self-asserted claim
On sourcing, Lazarus does the thing almost nobody in CBD does: it owns its own farm, in Powell Butte, Oregon, and grows the hemp that goes into its products. Its USDA-organic certification comes via a named, USDA-accredited certifying agent — Oregon Tilth — which makes it a checkable credential rather than a marketing word. Owning the farm and naming the certifier is about as strong as a sourcing story gets in this category, and it's why this pillar scores 14/15.
On manufacturing, the company runs a 40,000-square-foot production facility in Portland that it describes as cGMP-certified. Here we hold back a step: the cGMP claim is self-asserted — no certifying auditor or registry entry is named in any public source we found — so we treat it as a claim, not a verified credential, exactly as we do for every other brand in these files. A disclosed, real, vertically integrated operation with one unverified badge: 13/15.
Worth crediting alongside: the 60%-off assistance program — a long-running discount program the company operates — and a company-stated $20/hour minimum wage. Those are mission commitments consistent with its Social Purpose Corporation charter, and they're part of why the value positioning reads as genuine rather than corner-cutting.
The record: settled matters, stated precisely
Lazarus's record is where the grade comes down, and precision matters on every item:
- A settled data-breach class action. Cimino v. ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C. (D. Or., No. 3:23-cv-01185) arose from a data-security incident and settled for $300,000, with final approval in November 2024. Critically: the settlement involved no adjudication or admission of liability — it resolves the claims without a court ever finding wrongdoing. We state it that way because that's what the record says, and we weight it as a real but resolved corporate-security lapse.
- A settled Prop 65 notice. A California Proposition 65 60-day notice (No. 2024-04923) was resolved in June 2025 with a private settlement of roughly $20,000. A Prop 65 notice is an allegation by a private enforcer, and a private settlement is not a court finding of violation — California's registry logs thousands of these annually. Real, minor, resolved.
- BBB: B-, with two unanswered complaints. Not a failing grade, but below the A-range profiles of the best-graded brands here, and the unanswered complaints are the avoidable part.
- Glassdoor: 2.4, ~29% recommend. Anonymous employee reviews — we treat them as a signal, not a finding — but the volume and consistency are hard to ignore for a company with a people-forward public identity, and they're the main dock in our People pillar.
Finally, the B Corp question. Lazarus earned B Corporation certification in April 2021 — that's on the record. But by late 2025, the B Corp branding had been removed from Lazarus's own website, and we could not confirm a current certification in public sources. So we state it precisely: certified in 2021, current status not publicly disclosed — and we do not credit it as a current credential.
The bottom line
In our view, Lazarus Naturals is the best pure product-transparency story in the value tier — attached to a corporate file with real dents. Its own farm, a named USDA-organic certifier, a named double-accredited lab, a public batch portal, an independent best-of-111 ranking, an assistance program, and a stated wage floor: that's the verifiable substance our score exists to reward. The reasons it's a B and not an A are equally specific: a settled data-breach class action (no adjudication of liability), a settled Prop 65 notice, a 2.4 Glassdoor, a B- BBB with unanswered complaints, and a run of self-asserted claims — cGMP, employee ownership, and a B Corp status that is no longer publicly confirmed.
If you buy Lazarus, do what its infrastructure invites: pull your batch's COA from the portal and check the named lab's panel. A B (83/100) — elite where it matters most to the product in your hand, docked where the corporate record earned it. The full methodology shows every point; a verified current B Corp status, a named cGMP auditor, disclosed employee-ownership mechanics, and a cleaner workplace signal would push this file toward an A (see the notice below).
Questions, answered
Is Lazarus Naturals legit?
Yes — and on product transparency it's one of the strongest brands we've graded at any price. Lazarus Naturals (legal entity ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C., a Washington Social Purpose Corporation) owns its own Oregon hemp farm, holds USDA-organic certification through a named certifier (Oregon Tilth), tests through a named ISO-17025 and NELAP-accredited lab (Columbia Laboratories) with a public batch portal, and was ranked best of 111 brands in Leafreport's independent audit. We grade it a B (83/100). The caveats are corporate, not chemical: a data-breach class action settled for $300k (with no adjudication of liability), a Prop 65 notice privately settled for $20k (not a court finding), a 2.4 Glassdoor, a B- BBB with unanswered complaints, and self-asserted cGMP, employee-ownership, and B Corp claims we couldn't independently confirm as current.
Who owns Lazarus Naturals?
Lazarus Naturals was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2014 by Sequoia Price-Lazarus, and operates under ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C., a Washington Social Purpose Corporation. Two corrections worth making explicitly: first, Sequoia Price-Lazarus is a person — the founder — and there is no connection between Lazarus Naturals and Sequoia Capital, the venture firm. Second, Lazarus Naturals has no outside funding rounds on record; the 'Lazarus' rounds that appear on Crunchbase belong to Lazarus AI, an unrelated technology company. The company describes itself as employee-owned, though the mechanics of that ownership aren't publicly disclosed, so we report it as a company characterization. Its sibling brand, Cycling Frog, is operated by a separate legal entity (North Fork Distribution, S.P.C.).
Are Lazarus Naturals' lab tests trustworthy?
This is its strongest area — genuinely elite. Every batch's Certificate of Analysis is retrievable through a public portal (test-results.lazarusnaturals.com), and the testing lab is named: Columbia Laboratories, which holds both ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation and NELAP environmental-laboratory accreditation. On top of that, the independent auditor Leafreport — which buys and tests products itself — ranked Lazarus the best of the 111 brands it reviewed. Named accredited lab, batch-level lookup, and outside validation is the complete set of things we look for. As always, pull the COA for your specific batch before you buy.
What is the Lazarus Naturals data-breach lawsuit?
Cimino v. ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C. (filed in federal court in Oregon, No. 3:23-cv-01185) was a class action arising from a data-security incident affecting customer information. The case settled for $300,000, with the court granting final approval of the settlement in November 2024. The important legal precision: a settlement is not a finding — there was no adjudication or admission of liability, and no court ever ruled that Lazarus did anything wrong. We treat it as a real but resolved corporate-security lapse: it's part of why the Reputation pillar scores 10/15, and it has nothing to do with product quality or testing.
Did Lazarus Naturals fail a lead test?
That claim traces to a single 2019 NBC investigation item, and it needs its full context every time it's repeated. The report involved one sample sold under the Lazarus name that tested positive for lead — but it was a single sample, purchased from an unapproved third-party seller, with no batch number connecting it to Lazarus's supply chain; Lazarus disputed the product as likely counterfeit; and no regulator ever took action over it. Set against what's verifiable today — a named, doubly accredited lab, a public batch portal, and an independent audit ranking Lazarus best of 111 brands — we report the 2019 item as what it is: an unresolved, heavily caveated data point about one product of disputed origin, not an established failure. Buying direct and checking your batch's COA addresses the third-party-seller risk entirely.
How did you research this, and is it fair to Lazarus Naturals?
Every claim is from a public source — the Washington Attorney General's business listing for ETZ Hayim Holdings, the federal court record of the Cimino settlement, California's Prop 65 registry, the company's own COA portal and archived site pages, Columbia Laboratories' accreditations, Leafreport's independent audit, the BBB profile, and Glassdoor. We credited the genuine strengths (its own farm, a named certifier, a named double-accredited lab, the assistance program) and were equally careful with the negatives: the class action and Prop 65 notice are both described as what they are — settlements with no adjudication of liability, not findings — and we corrected two circulating mix-ups (no Sequoia Capital connection; no funding rounds — those belong to an unrelated company). Where the company's claims outran the public record (cGMP, employee ownership, current B Corp status), we said 'self-asserted' or 'not publicly disclosed' rather than crediting or denying them. If Lazarus documents those, we'll update the file — see the notice at the foot of this page.
Filed under Field Notes
Sources & records
The public records this file is built on. Check our work — that's the point.
- 1.Washington State Attorney General — business listing for ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C. d/b/a Lazarus Naturals (the legal entity and corporate form behind the brand)
- 2.California AG — Proposition 65 60-Day Notice No. 2024-04923 (PDF): the private-enforcer notice later resolved by settlement — an allegation, not a court finding of violation
- 3.California AG — Prop 65 registry record for Notice 2024-04923, recording the June 2025 private settlement (~$20k); a private settlement, not an adjudication
- 4.Justia — Cimino v. ETZ Hayim Holdings, S.P.C. (D. Or., No. 3:23-cv-01185), final-approval order for the $300k data-breach class settlement; a settlement with no adjudication or admission of liability
- 5.Better Business Bureau — Lazarus Naturals profile, Seattle, WA (the B- rating and unanswered complaints cited in the reputation pillar)
- 6.Business Wire — 'Lazarus Naturals Earns B Corporation Certification' (April 2021): the record of the certification as of 2021; current status is not publicly disclosed
- 7.Business Wire — company release announcing the 40,000-square-foot Portland production facility described as cGMP-certified (the certification is company-asserted; no auditor is named)
- 8.Capital Press — profile of the company's own Powell Butte, Oregon hemp farm (the seed-to-shelf sourcing graded in the sourcing pillar)
- 9.Lazarus Naturals — public COA batch portal (the batch-level lab-report lookup graded in the lab pillar)
- 10.Leafreport — independent Lazarus Naturals audit (the best-of-111-brands transparency ranking)
- 11.Glassdoor — Lazarus Naturals employee reviews (the 2.4 rating cited in the people pillar; anonymous reviews, treated as a signal rather than a finding)
- 12.Internet Archive — Lazarus Naturals About page as of October 2025, showing the B Corp branding no longer present on the company's own site