Dana Thompson is the founder of Heti, which means "home" in the Dakota language. (Credit: Shelly Mosman)
Her New Line of Drinks Is Inspired By Nature
Dana Thompson, who built the celebrated Owamni restaurant, is now turning her attention to functional beverages. Her social-impact brand, Heti, also plans hempcrete housing.
Dana Thompson traces her Dakota bloodline through her mother, and she has a vivid childhood memory of picking blueberries with her mom near a river’s edge in Northern Minnesota. “She was teaching me about how our ancestors would collect them through their growing season, and wind dry them or smoke dry,” she says, “and how they were packed with antioxidants and vitamins.”
Today, Thompson has taken that Indigenous knowledge of traditional plants and love for natural flavors like cedar, maple and wild bergamot and turned them into Heti, a health-conscious brand of low-dose THC beverages. The name itself means “home” in Dakota. That works on many levels, she explains, as not only do the drinks “transport you to a place in nature,” but once the 15-month-old company is profitable, it will dedicate a portion of proceeds to building affordable, climate-friendly hempcrete housing on tribal lands.
Heti represents a first foray into consumer packaged goods for Thompson, co-creator of the James Beard Award-winning Owamni restaurant in Minneapolis. Owamni is known for showcasing Indigenous foods and culture. The sleek modern restaurant, perched above the Mississippi River, excludes ingredients brought by European settlers (such as wheat flour, cane sugar and dairy) and features a majority Native American staff.
Thompson, who has a background in branding and marketing thanks to an 8-year stint at Target Corp. early in her career, was instrumental in Owamni’s growth. She professes to love “looking at P&Ls and balance sheets” and “optimizing any efficiency that we can find.” While at Owamni, she gained culinary experience, too, before exiting in 2023.
“One of the biggest pleasures I had was working with the team there to create an incredible mocktail list,” she says. “It was really fun to start thinking about the Indigenous ingredients of North America, the flavors and the functionality of those ingredients.”
Thompson spent many years researching Native health and wellness, including how culturally relevant foods impact a person’s DNA sequence as it’s formed. At Owamni, she had anecdotally noticed how customers with Native ancestry often seemed to find healing in the eatery’s menu. While historical scars run deep – Thompson’s own grandfather attended a forced-assimilation boarding school – she and others believe access to Indigenous ingredients can help restore some of what was lost.
Two years ago, as she looked for new opportunities, Thompson realized she could bring her unique background to the “exploding” functional beverage market – non-alcoholic drinks are expected to grow to $30 billion by the end of 2025 – and address an “unmet need” in the marketplace.
“I wanted something that resonated with what the people I know were asking for,” she says, especially women who wanted to relax with something other than wine. Too many of the cannabis beverages that have come on the scene since Minneapolis (and other states) relaxed marijuana laws were off-putting, she thought. “In fact, they tasted like weed. They were very inelegantly marketed. They were packed with sugar.”
Instead, Thompson researched how to create something low-dose – just 3 milligrams of THC per can – and began developing gluten-free products that celebrate natural ingredients and contain no refined sugars. “River Path” features the blueberry and rosehip she remembers from early hikes with her mother. “Meadow Cat Nap,” more like a tea, blends wild mint, lemon balm and dandelion leaf.
Her favorite is “Woodland Edge,” which contains two tree species (cedar, held sacred by many tribes, and maple). “I think of it as Champagne bubbles at the forest edge,” she says. “I want to raise awareness about the beauty of these plant relatives that we have.”
Since she started her self-funded lean operation – aside from herself, Thompson has a fractional CFO and one person who helps with social media – she has “blasted through” about 22 pallets of product, or roughly 55,000 cans. She sells through a variety of channels, including online and in stores via distributors. She is currently raising a seed round, and expects to raise a Series A and B in coming years. “We’re on track to scale to over $3 million in revenue within the first five years,” she says.
But perhaps most rewarding of all, Thompson says, will be the social-impact piece, once her startup becomes profitable.
Heti products are derived from “big bushels” of hemp, and once distilled down, the waste usually goes to landfill, she says. Thompson wants to use it instead to make hempcrete bricks. “It’s an absolutely incredibly efficient insulator in both hot and cold climates,” she says. “It absorbs carbon in the atmosphere.”
She hopes to use hempcrete for housing projects on the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska, where her grandfather was born. “There’s a huge housing shortage,” she says, forcing many to move to Sioux Falls or Omaha – “which are lovely cities,” she says, but “it separates them from their families, from their culture, and it’s not good.”
Meanwhile, Thompson is enjoying building a brand from the ground up, similar to her experience at Owamni. “Unfortunately for me, I get my identity from the things I create,” she says with a laugh. While learning the ropes in the beverage industry hasn’t been easy, “I just know that [if] you grind and make good decisions and learn from your mistakes,” she says, “it’s going to turn into something amazing.” ◼️
In this 2022 video, we share the startup story of Owamni restaurant in Minnesota. (Credit: Sue Williams)