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Austin Business Spotlight

Hometown Hero went to court for Texas — and gave $610,000 to veterans along the way

A veteran-founded company that started as two people in a home workshop, grew into one of the country's best-known hemp brands, and spent the last few years fighting — in courtrooms and at the Capitol — to keep legal cannabis legal for Texans. Here's why they're worth your support.

By the Austin Gallery editors · June 10, 2026

We started this Austin Business Spotlight to do one thing: point you toward the real people doing real work in and around this city — and get out of the way. No corporate logos, no private-equity roll-ups. Just Austinites building something worth knowing about. We could not have asked for a better first subject, and the timing is almost too good: Hometown Hero launched on June 10, 2015 — eleven years ago to the day.

From a two-person workshop to all 50 states

Hometown Hero began in 2015 as a small, hand-built operation. When the 2018 Farm Bill federally legalized hemp, co-founders Lukas Gilkey — a U.S. Coast Guard veteran — and Lewis Hamer went all-in. Today the company is vertically integrated: it grows hemp on its own Texas farm, then manufactures and confects everything in-house at a GMP-certified facility in Austin. Its products now sit on shelves in roughly 7,000 stores across 49 states. It has landed on the Inc. 5000, won High Times Hemp Cup awards, and been covered by the likes of the New York Times and CNN. But the part that made us want to write this isn't the growth chart.

$610,000 to veterans — with the receipts

Gilkey's service is the reason the company gives the way it does. Since its founding, Hometown Hero has donated a portion of its profits to veteran causes — and unlike a lot of “we give back” marketing, they publish the running total and name the recipients. As of this writing that counter reads $610,000 and counting. A sample of where it has gone:

That includes service-dog programs (K9s For Warriors), mortgage-free homes for wounded veterans (Operation Finally Home), and psychedelic-assisted healing research (Heroic Hearts Project). In November 2024 alone they put $60,000 toward the Texas VFW. It's specific, it's itemized, and it's verifiable — which is more than most brands flying a flag in their marketing can say.

They went to court for Texans — and won the fight that mattered

Here's the part most people don't know. In 2021, when the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly tried to reclassify Delta-8 THC as a Schedule I controlled substance — by editing a note on its website, without formal rulemaking — Hometown Hero sued the state. On November 7, 2021, a Travis County judge granted a temporary injunction pulling Delta-8 back off the banned list. An appeals court upheld it, and the Texas Supreme Court let the win stand. That single case kept hemp-derived products legal and accessible for Texans, and the small businesses that sell them, for years. (In 2025 the Texas Supreme Court ultimately ruled the other way on the underlying classification — but the years of access that injunction protected were real, and the fight is far from over.)

They didn't stop at litigation. In May 2024, Hometown Hero founded the Texas Hemp Business Council to organize an industry that employs tens of thousands of Texans. And in 2025, when SB3 threatened to criminalize federally-legal hemp-derived THC statewide, the company helped lead the campaign that ended with Governor Abbott vetoing the bill on June 22, 2025 — with CEO Lukas Gilkey going on to testify during the special session that followed. Whatever you think about cannabis, this is a local company spending its own money and its founder's time to defend small Texas businesses and the adults who are their customers. That's the definition of fighting for your community.

What they make

Hometown Hero is best known for being, in their own words, the company behind one of the first hemp-derived Delta-9 THC products designed to be legal nationwide. Everything is third-party lab-tested for potency and contaminants, with the certificates of analysis posted publicly — the transparency standard you want from anyone selling this category. If you'd like to support them, these are the doors in:

Why we're telling you this

Because this is exactly the kind of business this series exists for: veteran-founded, Austin-built, vertically integrated here in Texas, transparent about what's in the bottle, and willing to spend real money and real political capital defending its customers and its community. You don't have to use what they sell to respect how they operate. If it's for you, buy from them instead of a faceless brand. If it's not, send this to the Texan in your life who'd want to know they exist.

Support Hometown Hero

Visit hometownhero.com →Follow @hometownheroatx

Austin Gallery is not affiliated with, paid by, or sponsored by the businesses we spotlight — this is an independent community feature, written because we think they're worth knowing. Hometown Hero's products are age-restricted, hemp-derived items intended for adults 21+; availability and legality vary by state and change over time. Check current law where you live, and follow all label and dosing guidance.