Meet Marc Narrie

How Buddha Beans Started

The brand began on a 2017 trip to Portland. Marc was visiting a friend whose father roasted his own coffee on a hot-air popcorn maker, the kind that costs twenty dollars at a thrift store. Over a weekend the father walked Marc through the basics: green coffee, first crack, second crack, cooling, resting. Marc went home with a popcorn maker, a bag of unroasted Colombian, and a question worth pursuing.

For the next year he sold non-infused specialty coffee at San Diego farmers markets while finishing his MS at San Diego State. The roasts got better. The bag count grew. By mid-2019 he had what he needed to test a thesis that the rest of the category had skipped: take the cannabinoid coffee idea seriously as coffee first, infusion second. The first CBD line shipped that summer. The first CBG-infused coffee in the US market followed before the end of 2019.

By late 2019 Buddha Beans was in roughly 90 retail accounts including cryotherapy clinics, grocery stores, and independent cafes. The VoyageLA profile from October 2019 captured that stage. High Times had already run the story earlier that summer, with Hannah Ward profiling the brand and quoting Marc on what made the cup different: "You can drink it and still feel good, you're not jittery, you have more of a focus."

The Los Angeles Pivot, and Why He Kept Going

Marc grew up in Culver City and Buddha Beans came home in 2020, into a roastery on National Blvd a few minutes from where he had walked to school. The Culver City News write-up captured the full-circle moment: seeing Buddha Beans on the shelf at Jackson Market, the local store he had shopped at since he was a kid.

The years that followed were the hardest stretch the cannabinoid coffee category has seen. The first wave of brands had attracted bad actors. Spray-on hemp oil. Vague "hemp extract" labels. No batch traceability. A 2020 FDA round of warning letters confirmed what careful buyers had already suspected: many products were under-dosed, over-dosed, or contained THC at levels the brand had sworn were zero. The shakeout that followed in 2024 and 2025 took out most of the larger competitors. The brands built on novelty did not survive the cup test once the novelty wore off.

Buddha Beans kept going because the underlying product was specialty-grade from the start, the ZenFusion process delivered a more consistent dose than the spray-on alternative, and the cap table stayed clean enough for the brand to move quickly when distribution shifted. There was no committee to convince. Marc decided, Marc shipped, the next batch went out.

Marc's Path, Year by Year

Credentials and Background

Marc is a Culver City native who left for college, came back, and built the company from the same neighborhood. Two degrees frame the operator: a liberal arts undergrad that taught him to write and a master's program in San Diego that taught him to run a project end-to-end.

The Roasting Craft

Most cannabinoid coffee brands are not specialty roasters. They are CBD companies that bought a packaging line and contract-roast a generic commodity bean. Marc is the opposite operator. He learned to roast first, then learned cannabinoid infusion, and built Buddha Beans so the coffee would clear the SCA 80+ specialty grade as the floor, not the ceiling.

That order matters. It is the reason a Buddha Beans Colombia tastes like a careful Colombia: dark chocolate, walnut, a clean acidity. It is the reason the Ethiopia drinks like an Ethiopia: stone fruit, bergamot, a tea-like body in the cup. The hemp infusion is layered on top of bean character that was already worth drinking, instead of masking a flat commodity coffee with novelty.

Direct-Trade Origin Program

Direct-trade sourcing means Marc maintains the relationship with the importer and the farm, instead of buying a blended commodity coffee from a generic broker. That visibility into picking, drying, and storage is what makes the mycotoxin testing program possible and what gives him the option to reject a bad green lot before it ever lands at the roastery.

The ZenFusion™ Process

ZenFusion is the proprietary infusion method Marc developed to bond cannabinoids to the bean during the roast rather than spraying hemp oil onto already-roasted beans. The competitor approach (post-roast spraying) produces uneven dose distribution: the first cup brewed from a fresh bag carries a different concentration than the last cup, because the oil pools at the bottom. ZenFusion introduces broad-spectrum hemp extract at a specific point in the roast curve, the bean's cellular structure absorbs the compound, and the post-roast bag is uniform from top to bottom.

The variance is measured, not asserted. Each batch is sampled at three points in the roast lot (top, middle, bottom) and each sample is potency-tested independently. A passing batch holds cannabinoid concentration within plus or minus 8 percent across all three points. The variance figure appears on every certificate of analysis on the lab results page.

Press Appearances

Marc has been profiled and quoted across cannabis trade press, lifestyle outlets, and small-business publications since 2019. The full file lives on the Buddha Beans press page, with links out to every original source and pull quotes ready for citation.

For the complete press file, including pull quotes and direct links to each source, see the Buddha Beans press page.

Speaking, Press, and Contact

Marc takes interview, podcast, panel, and conference requests on specialty coffee, cannabinoid infusion, the ZenFusion™ process, the 2018 to 2025 CBD coffee category shakeout, direct-trade green coffee sourcing, and CPG operations through a category contraction. He responds to press inquiries within one business day.