EXCLUSIVE: 22nd Century Group Announces Franchise In Global Specialty Hops Market

22nd Century Group Inc XXII announced its entry Monday into the global speciality hops market.

What Happened: 22nd Century Group is a leading plant biotechnology and intellectual property company focused on improving health and wellness through plant science.

The company says it will provide unique and significant competitive advantages to commercial partners in the sector. The addition of hops, a critical input for the $500-billion global brewing industry as well as a growing source of medically important molecules, expands the company’s total addressable markets to an estimated $1.3 trillion.

22nd Century Group is establishing a subsidiary in the Netherlands to open new revenue opportunities in hops, as well as serve its existing tobacco and hemp/cannabis plant franchises through an expanded global footprint.

What's Next: The company said it plans to leverage its existing know-how with tobacco and hemp/cannabis plants to create  proprietary hop plants.

The traditional methods used by virtually all plant breeding companies today take more than a decade to create a new hop plant variety. 22nd Century Group says its approach can reduce this development time to two years.

The company says it is approximately six months into its initial two-year hops development cycle and expects to monetize the hop plant varieties and intellectual property with upfront license fees beginning in 12 to 18 months.