New Jersey’s first legal weed brownie was created by a fine dining pastry chef

When Morristown’s Matha Figaro began her career in fine dining as a pastry chef almost 15 years ago, she didn’t have making history as the creator of New Jersey’s first legal weed brownie on mind.

On Tuesday, April 16, Figaro’s company ButACake will release a cannabis-infused peanut butter and jelly fudge brownie to New Jersey’s adult-use and medicinal marijuana markets. Since cannabis was legalized in New Jersey in 2021, it’s been years in the making for the first true food-based weed edible to hit the dispensary shelves, as until now there have only been oral cannabis products like gummies, tinctures, capsules, and lozenges.

But last September, the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission voted to allow licensed recreational and permitted medicinal manufacturers to expand the categories of their edible products to a wider variety of shelf-stable products, like chocolates, gummies, baked goods, butters, jams, and jellies. The new rules also pave the way for cannabis-infused drinks, however the regulator board maintains no alcoholic weed beverages are allowed for the commercial market.

Before the rule change, no edible cannabis product could “resemble food,” due to initial difficulties of regulating the commercial kitchens needed to safely process food-based cannabis edibles. The loosening of these regulations is a watershed moment for the industry, Figaro said, who went through a 6-month process since last September to be able to start serving weed brownies to the public.

Figaro — a first-generation Haitian-American who’s been baking since her first Easy-Bake Oven at eight years old — climbed the ladder of fine dining through Philadelphia’s James on 8th, South Beach Miami’s LT Steak, and Roots Steakhouse in her hometown. She soon found that her butter cake recipe was something special and founded her own operation in 2016.

Now, she’s the first Black woman-owned edibles brand in the Delaware and New Jersey cannabis markets.

ButACake’s boot-strapped three-person team pour hours of time (Figaro is in at 8 a.m., out at 9 p.m. some days) into handcrafting each brownie in small batches, and while they are are a non-smoking treat for social use — the team is driven foremost by meeting the needs of New Jersey’s medical patients. After all, Figaro’s butter cakes and baked goodies only became cannabis-infused after customers who were medical patients needed an edible alternative to cannabis so many years ago.

Many medical patients who are living through severe ailments frequently turn to non-smoking cannabis products for treatment, according to a University of Southern California Schaeffer study of more than 80,000 purchases in New York’s medical market.

“When I first started ButACake, I wasn’t making edibles just to make and sell them, I was making edibles to help people with specific needs,“ Figaro said. “There’s an industry-wide issue that when adult-use becomes legal, medical gets shoved to the side. As an operator it’s important for me to continue to advocate for medical patients because that’s how I started this in the first place.”

That’s why Figaro hand makes and packs every single brownie that leaves her kitchen, baking no more than 144 brownies at a time as any more than that and the brownies “might as well be as dry as an Oreo,” she said. With medical patients as a driving force behind the business, ButACake’s mom-and-pop attitude branches out into its distribution as well, with the first dispensaries receiving the weed brownie being almost entirely local small businesses. Reporting from local cannabis journalist, Dan Ulloa, shows that a little more than one-third of New Jersey’s cannabis dispensaries are owned by large multi-state operators.

“I’m hoping that I’m not the only one for long,” Figaro said. “I want the door that I just busted open to be followed by tons and tons and tons of operators similar to myself that have amazing products and want to bring them to the legal market.”

New Jersey’s executive director of the cannabis regulator body, Jeff Brown, said of New Jersey’s waivers to allow legal edibles, “This expansion has allowed license-holders and partnering brands to bring new product offerings to New Jersey consumers, where edibles currently make up 14% of all sales, with their market share expected to grow.”

ButACake’s peanut butter and jelly weed brownie is available in single serve packs containing 10mg THC per brownie, the suggested amount for a newcomer to edible weed. However, Figaro said she plans to advocate for regulations to allow higher dosage products, especially for medical patients experiencing severe pain that require more potent cannabis. ButACake’s brownie is fast-acting with an onset of 20 minutes.