Martine Carlina, Mum’s Original Hemp Products Regina, Saskatchewan

A classic commercial for Remington shavers once featured some guy you’d never heard of named Victor Kiam. But in the early 1980s, his oft-televised testimonial became the catchphrase of a generation and made him a household name.

“I liked it so much, I bought the company!”

You could say that Martine Carlina pulled a “Kiam”.

Hired as marketing director for a Vancouver start-up firm that wanted to put together a brand of hemp foods, Carlina found that she loved the product so much she bought them out and moved operations to Regina — the nation’s base for organic growers. Everything seemed to line up to introduce hemp as a food. Make that a superfood!

Part of a family of ancient grains (including kamut, salba, and flax), hemp offers a complete protein, plus fibre and a wealth of healing properties. Carlina’s Mum’s Original line of certified organic hemp and flax foods is a nutritious complement to any diet, replete with essential fatty acids, including heart healthy omega-3's and rare GLA (Gamma-Linolenic Acid). Mum’s products are more than healthy ingredients. They offer a way to reconnect with our diets by looking more carefully at what we eat.

“Hemp has really epitomized this vision of whole foods,” says Carlina. “We’ve really lost touch with our food. We’ve been in a pill-popping culture since the '50s when we stopped cooking, opting for convenience. We literally stopped taking responsibility for our own health and well-being, thinking it was being taken care of for us.”

Carlina’s association with all things hemp goes back to the years before government legislation allowed farmers to grow it, back when the durable and versatile plant was tainted by its association with marijuana.

A dozen years ago, living on Bowen Island, Carlina explored the idea of turning hemp into high fashion, and put her plans into practice by opening Wild Roots Trading Company, a little retail outlet that, she says, dealt with the beauty of hemp.

Wild Roots soon opened in Vancouver where it attracted a steady clientele of mainly thirty-something women, drawn to hemp clothing that was strong, weather resistant, environmentally friendly, and, well… perhaps just a little bit trendy.

“You know, hemp was perceived to be ‘dirty’, but the women (customers) weren’t offended by it. It was the guys who always cracked the jokes (about hemp).” Carlina soon joined marketers Wiseman Noble, running tradeshows heavy on hemp fashions in the late '90s, all the time lobbying Ottawa to accept hemp as a viable crop choice for farmers.

“Two months after our second show, hemp became legal to grow,” says Carlina. “You could say that hemp was really legalized in Canada based on fashion.” When Carlina arrived in Regina seven years ago, Mum’s was run out of her garage. It now boasts a 5,000 sq. ft. facility.

The Prairies seemed an appropriate location for an agriculturally based product, already set up for post-harvest seed cleaning and milling. What Carlina hadn’t anticipated was the naiveté of the farmers to hemp.

“I was dealing directly with growers who had never grown hemp,” she recalls. “As we were building markets for hemp foods with consumers, we were also educating growers on growing it and that was a little bit of a challenge. We thought we had one job and as it turned out… we had two.”

A walking billboard for the benefits of a diet bolstered by Mum’s Original, all that superfood in Carlina’s system must be giving her a superhuman boost. How else would you explain the myriad of projects she has on the go?

Not merely content with having conquered the world of edible hemp, Carlina started her own magazine (www.organiclifestyles.ca); created her own new brand of organic specialty olive oils (www.carlinascucina.com); and is now working to develop and produce cooking videos for other companies.

Her vision is to inspire others to take control of their health by putting them back in touch with the food they eat, while at the same time dispelling the myth of convenience. "It seems to me that convenience got us into this mess and now it’s time to get back into the kitchen and rediscover how simple and tasty a healthy good meal can be."