Who Is Mood? A Brand File on the 'Pick-a-Feeling' Hemp Giant

Mood is a company you can largely identify and a product line that is genuinely lab-tested — but it asks for more trust than it gives back on one crucial question: who actually makes the gummies? That gap, plus a difficult 2024 and an unresolved lawsuit, is why a hugely popular brand lands at a C rather than higher.

Credit where due: the legal entity is traceable, the founders are named and public, the funding is clean (bootstrapped, no outside investors), and the COAs come from real, named labs. Those are the marks of a real company, not a fly-by-night. The deductions are specific and fair: it won't name its manufacturer or document GMP, its sourcing and full-panel testing have gaps, and its record includes a large layoff and a serious unproven legal allegation. We'll walk each one.

Mood operates under Smoking Leaf Holdings, LLC, formerly known as Mood Product Group LLC — names that appear in the company's own terms and in court filings, and the entity was formed in 2022. The co-founders are David Charles (CEO, a performance-marketing veteran based in Austin) and Jake Antifaev (CMO, who has prior experience in the Canadian cannabis industry). Both are public, named, on-the-record people — a transparency positive.

Operationally, Mood is a bit scattered, which is normal for a fast-scaling DTC brand: fulfillment has run out of Oklahoma City, leadership and legal nexus sit in Austin, Texas, and there's been a quality-assurance presence in North Carolina. We list its exact state of LLC registration as not conclusively confirmed from a primary filing — Wyoming is indicated but we won't print it as certain.

This is where Mood costs itself the most points. The company describes a hybrid model — an in-house kitchen for some edibles (it cites a food scientist with a PhD on retainer), plus outside "cannabis processing partners" and "50+ small American farms." It also states it "partners directly with a cGMP manufacturer."

On testing, Mood does better. It publishes third-party Certificates of Analysis on product pages and a dedicated COA hub, and — importantly — it names the labs: ACS Laboratory (a DEA/CLIA-licensed lab), New Bloom Labs, and Marin Analytics. Naming real accredited labs is genuinely good disclosure. The weaknesses are consistency and findability: the panels presented aren't uniformly full-spectrum across every page, and there's no searchable batch-number database, so matching the COA to the exact jar in your hand is harder than it should be.

On sourcing, Mood says it works with "50+ small US farms" and ships from Oklahoma, but — like most of the industry — it does not name those farms or states. Independent reviewers have also flagged refined-sugar additives in its gummies, which Mood doesn't hide but which counts against a "clean formulation" read. We credit the testing, dock the sourcing.

On the funding question readers worry about most, the record is reassuring and clear: Mood appears to be bootstrapped. Crunchbase shows no funding rounds and no outside investors, and the founders have described self-funding the launch. Revenue figures the founders have cited in interviews (tens of millions, with bigger projections) are unaudited founder claims, and we treat them as such rather than as verified facts.

Mood runs US-based operations, which we credit — but 2024 was rough. The company laid off about 120 employees in Oklahoma City, confirmed by a WARN notice filed in September 2024 (note: 2024, not 2025, despite some misdating online). Mood didn't publicly state a reason; trade press framed it against a tightening state-by-state regulatory climate for hemp THC, but that's journalistic context, not a company statement, and we don't present it as one.

Headcount figures vary widely by source and date, and Mood doesn't disclose its employees-versus-contractors split. Its Glassdoor rating is about 3.9/5 — but from only a handful of reviews, which we weight as low-confidence rather than a clean endorsement. We found no evidence of overseas labor.

We're going to be unusually careful here, because the responsible thing and the legally correct thing are the same thing. In 2024, a supplier/distribution dispute (A Distribution Co. v. Mood Product Group LLC, in North Carolina Business Court) produced a set of claims against Mood. Among them was a serious allegation that Mood altered or falsified lab-test reports (COAs) before republishing them.

This is exactly the kind of item our method is built to handle: a material lawsuit dings the "courts & controversies" sub-score because it exists and is unresolved, but it does not reduce Mood's lab-testing score, because we do not score an unproven allegation as if it were true.

Regulators: we found no FDA warning letter, recall, or agency action against Mood. Worth stating because searches surface an FDA delta-8 letter to a company called "Hippy Mood" — a different, unrelated company in Pennsylvania. Don't let the name fool you; it isn't this Mood.

Customers: mixed, depending on where you look. Mood's BBB rating is A+ (though not BBB-accredited), and its Trustpilot is strong (~4.7/5 across hundreds of reviews) — with the caveat that the company responds to and manages those reviews actively. Independent aggregators paint a rougher picture, with scores in the 2.7–3.4 range and recurring complaints about customer service, shipping, and potency consistency. As always, we average across platforms rather than quote the most flattering one. Plenty of customers are genuinely happy with the breadth and the discreet shipping; others have had service headaches.

In our view, Mood is a real, traceable company with genuine lab testing and a catalog that's hard to beat for sheer variety — but it asks you to trust it on the one thing it's least transparent about: who makes the product. If you value selection and you verify the COA for your specific item, plenty of people buy from Mood happily. If your top priority is knowing exactly who manufactured what you're consuming and being able to verify a GMP certification, Mood doesn't yet give you that, and a brand like 3Chi does.

The unproven lawsuit allegation is real and worth knowing, and it's also just that — unproven. We've graded Mood a C (71/100) on what's verifiable today, and we'll update it the moment the verifiable facts change. The full, public methodology shows exactly how every point was earned and lost.