Farmer & Chemist

Address: 7719 South Main Street

Telephone: 385-900-8997

Website: farmerandchemist.com

District: Midvale

 

“We wanted a name that could be trusted. We wanted a name that felt very established. Something that would be comfortable for people,” said Farmer & Chemist co-founder Jeffrey Dunn. Farmer & Chemist is a Utah-based wellness company built at the intersection of agriculture, science, and care for the human body. It is rooted in hemp and shaped by the people who came together to create it.

Farmer & Chemist did not begin as a branding exercise or a retail experiment. It began the way many Utah stories do - through relationships, long professional histories, and a small group of founders who each arrived with their own backgrounds, skills, and reasons for being there. All of which continue to shape the company today. Their individual paths are distinct, but together they form the foundation of what Farmer & Chemist has become.

The word ‘comfortable’ matters here. In Utah, the topic of cannabis-adjacent products still carries baggage for many, and the team at Farmer & Chemist built their business around addressing that stigma with clarity and care. What they sell is hemp-derived cannabidiol products - tinctures (drops under the tongue), gummies, topicals, and pet products - formulated with specific cannabinoids and dosed intentionally. Their emphasis is not on hype, trends, or miracle promises, but on helping a person understand what they are buying, what it can realistically do, and what it might interact with in regard to other medications.

At the center of the company are pharmacists - people trained to think in medication terms, not lifestyle buzzwords. Jeff Dunn came to the table with a family background in pharmacy that shaped his understanding of precision, responsibility, and trust. Raised around the rhythms of a profession where those values mattered every day, he watched both his father and grandfather build careers as pharmacists. “I am a third generation. I kind of grew up in that space.”

The original spark for Farmer & Chemist began years before the store opened, during a period when regulations and public perception around hemp were rapidly shifting. For Jeff and his colleagues, the concern was never about chasing the next big thing. It was about preventing an industry from turning into something reckless and confusing for the public. “We came together as professionals, and decided there is a better way to do it,” Jeff said. “We wanted to educate people on appropriate use, the pros of CBD, the cons of CBD, how to use it, what to look for, and really treat it like the medicine it is.”

Jeff originally thought about medical school, drawn to the public policy side of healthcare, but his path ultimately led him into pharmacy and managed care - the world of clinical decision-making and benefits that quietly shapes how healthcare is delivered to hundreds of thousands of people. It was work rooted in regulation, evidence, and safety, and it became the lens through which hemp would later be viewed at Farmer & Chemist.

Jason, Jeff’s brother, runs the retail side of Farmer & Chemist day to day. He is grounded, personable, and quick to connect the work happening in the store back to his family’s history. Jeff and Jason’s grandfather and father ran an independent pharmacy that formed part of the brothers’ childhood landscape, a place where the lines between business and family life were often blurred. Jason eventually took on the family business himself, running the independent pharmacy for decades before the modern realities of retail pharmacy became too punishing. Shrinking reimbursements and relentless pressures made it increasingly difficult for Millcreek Pharmacy to survive. “Retail pharmacy… it can suck the life out of you,” he said.

What did not disappear was the family’s philosophy of how a customer should be treated. Jason still measures his work in human terms - listening, guiding, and making sure someone leaves feeling better than when they arrived. In the store, that can mean helping a customer understand the difference between a topical and an edible, explaining why products for sleep are formulated differently than those for pain, or reminding someone that “it is not one size fits all.” For Jason, the goal is not simply to sell a product, but to care for the person standing in front of him.

To understand what Farmer & Chemist is trying to fix, it helps to understand what most customers walk in believing. Many people use “CBD” as a catch-all term, but the team is quick to explain that CBD is only one cannabinoid among more than 100. Their formulations focus primarily on CBD, CBN, and CBG, chosen, they say, for sleep, anxiety support, and anti-inflammatory properties, respectively. They also emphasize that hemp-derived products are required to stay below a federally defined THC threshold. In their words, this is not recreational marijuana. It is hemp, with products that must remain under 0.3% THC.

The company name itself is not clever branding. It is literal. Products are built from the farm through formulation and retail, with hemp sourced from farms in Utah and Oregon, then developed alongside chemist Blake Smith, who is spoken about with reverence in the room. “This guy knows more about the industry than I would dare say anyone,” one partner said. “He is not, and we are not, just in this to make money.”

Jeff’s longtime professional partner Doug Burgoyne came from the same healthcare world. The two met at Intermountain Health in 2001 and built careers side by side for decades. Their shared experience reinforced a simple truth - even the best science fails if people feel intimidated or confused. Education, not persuasion, became the guiding principle.

To support that mission, the team created a podcast, You, Me, and CBD, as a way to translate complex topics into language a regular person can actually use. As one of them joked, the goal is not to be boring, and it is not to hide behind jargon. It is to keep bringing the conversation back to what they see as the heart of the work - safe products, honest education, and a relationship between customer and professional that does not feel transactional.

That philosophy carries into the physical space as well. When Danell Murdock entered the picture, the challenge was not just branding, but credibility. Raised in Salt Lake City and trained at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena and University of Utah, Danell had spent her career helping companies earn trust through design. When asked to help brand a new hemp-based company, she responded with realism. “It was a twenty-page proposal, and it was massive,” she said. Somewhere in that honesty, the conversation shifted. “The conversation kind of turned from, ‘We are a startup’ to, ‘Well, do you want a partner?’”

What she designed on Main Street in Midvale reflects that mindset. The space is calm, familiar, and understated. “We moved into a gas lamp look, to give some authenticity,” she explained. “We wanted something that felt comfortable for people.” Antique pieces, soft colors, and a layout built around conversation reinforce the idea that this is a place to ask questions. “The whole idea was to just feel very clean, but very comfortable,” she said. 

 As the business grew, Steve Murdock, Danell's husband, stepped in to anchor operations. Raised in Salt Lake and trained in economics at the University of Utah, Steve brought experience from retail, high-tech sales, and years working alongside Danell at her company, Design of Today. His role focuses on the details customers never see: compliance, product development, and keeping the business steady as regulations and expectations shift.

In the end, Farmer & Chemist is not trying to be a trend-forward wellness shop. It is aiming to feel like a modern version of something older - a place people go when they are hurting, tired, overwhelmed, or simply curious - and where the answer is not a shrug or a sales pitch, but a thoughtful conversation grounded in testing, dosing, and the realities of the human body. “We had a sign in our old pharmacy forever,” Jason said. “Through our doors walk the finest people on Earth, our customers.”