In this episode of the Spilled Salt podcast, our host Maureen Ballatori interviews Tim McDowell, the COO of Bristol Extracts, a licensed cannabis processor and cultivator in New York State.
The conversation revolves around Tim’s journey into the cannabis industry and his experiences as it has evolved over the years.
Tim shares that he entered the industry in 2009 after the Department of Justice Ogden Memo was passed, which opened up opportunities in the cannabis market. Starting in Colorado, Tim worked for a company that sold cannabis-infused products and witnessed the state’s aggressive approach to licensing and regulation. In 2014, Colorado legalized adult-use cannabis, leading to significant growth in the industry.
Tim and his team started a consulting company to help other states navigate the licensing process. However, challenges arose, including audits, limited write-offs, and scaling issues.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tim decided to exit his businesses and relocated to New York with his family to work for Bristol Extracts. The company faced challenges due to the crash of the CBD market but sought to develop consumer packaged goods with Tim’s expertise.
They obtained conditional licensing for cannabis cultivation and processing and launched three brands in Manhattan in 2023.
Tim discusses the risks and rewards of his career choices, including moving his family and being involved in the policy and legislative aspects of the cannabis industry. He emphasizes the importance of adapting to changing regulations and the long-term nature of the cannabis market in New York.
Despite the challenges, Tim remains excited about being part of the evolving and young industry.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori, and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage, and agriculture industries. Today’s guest is Tim McDowell. He’s the COO of Bristol Extracts, which is a New York State licensed cannabis processor and cultivator.
Our discussion today is about what brought Tim to enter the New York State cannabis market and some of what he’s gone through. as that industry has grown and developed over the last handful of years. And a little bit about what it takes to run a cannabis business too. Enjoy the conversation.
Thanks for joining. I’m gonna jump right into our content because half an hour-ish isn’t really long enough to cover all of the many aspects of cannabis. So we’re just gonna scratch the surface on a few things, but I’d love for you to start by, I know you as a cannabis guy, and I’d love for you to start talking a little bit about your background in cannabis and why you relocated to New York.
Tim McDowell: Yeah, I could take the whole half hour, I guess, in this answer. So 2009, I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I actually lived there for 22 years in the Denver Boulder area.
I met a group who was entering into the cannabis industry then because there was the Department of Justice Ogden memo that was passed. And it kind of popped the lid off of cannabis. It’s really what’s happening. It was the catalyst for starting all this.
Colorado is similar to where New York was a year ago, where there was a lot of what we call sticker shops here in New York, but gray market sales. And so, really January of 2010, we started selling products, drinks really, and the company that I was working for at the time, they had a dispensary, and then Colorado nestled their cannabis industry under the Department of Revenue, along with gaming and liquor control.
So they actually copied and pasted a lot of the gaming rules to help create the background checks and whatnot. And they really were aggressive in getting licensing going.
And so I think it was the summer of 2010 when House Bill 24 passed in Colorado, and the State started licensing businesses. And that’s when you started getting background checks, you’d have a badge. And so it was medical marijuana.
There were stores, we were what was referred to as a MIP, manufactured infused products, so making edibles, various form factors. And so that was early on, I mean that’s 14 some years ago, and so we grew that bit.
Maureen: So before you move on to like how that, how that, you know, continued, what made you want to go into that? Like what were you doing before, and what made you want to follow that?
Tim: That’s a great question. So my passions were skiing, snowboarding. But I had gone to culinary school. I was a chef. I worked in restaurants to afford the lifestyle that would get me on the snow as much as possible.
My last chef gig was in Tahoe, and I ran a catering company in Stro on the lake, and then we had a little shack up at one of the ski resorts, and it was classic chef things going that just killed me; burned me out.
I was 27 or 28, but I had worked in kitchens since I was 14. And I really, at that point, just said I had enough and drove from Tahoe to Providence, Rhode Island. I finished a degree, got a bachelor’s degree when I was 30, met my now wife, and moved back to Colorado. I had been in Colorado for eight years, and then we arrived back there during the Great Recession.
I was working for corporate Whole Foods. And my first non-chef job, an office job, I was doing vendor evaluations for some of the quality control programs that had in place. great job, dream job at the time for me.
I’m like, wow, I’m not scrubbing floors and working 17 hours a day. You guys are gonna pay me for this? And then a friend, he was like, hey, all these guys, they’re doing this thing. It’s exciting. We can only pay you $13 now.
And I’m like, I’m in, to the chagrin of my family. And so, and then it was just there. It was this crazy, intoxicating world of entrepreneurship. And just grinding and kind of being on the cutting edge, but really step up, and we had a good team at the time, but my background of really going through, I’ve gone through a Marriott corporate training and then the Whole Foods corporate training and then all the kitchen work, we entered it with like this level of quality control and systems in place to have a consistent product out the gate, and that was like a huge leg up in 2010, 11.
People were bringing in trays of brownies, and we had bottled 12-ounce drinks with labels and cases that were branded. It wasn’t all, it was a lot of bumpy road.
So that grew, and then in 2014, Colorado legalized marijuana, so adult use, recreational, is what they called it then. And so that just blew the lid off of things. And then we transferred, we still had the business, but recreational was just crazy busy. So we learned some tough lessons about scaling at that point.
During that same time, we started a consulting company because of all these other states, the momentum had started then. Really 2014, 15, 16, 17, all these states are doing certain medical marijuana licensing programs, competitive licensing.
So we had a small team. We created this consulting business to take our hard lessons and help people license. We were very successful at it. you know, part of larger teams, but during that time, we expanded our brand into the Nevada market, into the Illinois market around 2015, and then we’re managing these three locations [inaudible] which you’re seeing in New York a lot now, and it’s a difficult thing to do because the margins are so small on this, to begin with.
So then, you know, that’s chugging along. A lot of hard lessons in Nevada and Illinois, varying levels of excess, kind of getting your toes over the edge of the board, and biting off more than you can chew. And let’s see here.
So that’s the teams, really. We went through two IRS audits, and two ADE audits, which are unique to cannabis, that’s a drug trafficking audit because we can only write off the cost of goods sold. So there’s, no, you can’t write off anything other than the direct cost of goods sold. Those are expensive lessons.
Maureen: So everything is accounted for all the way through, and there’s nothing that could go missing, right?
Tim:
Yes, and you know, we, you know, as a business, this is probably a whole other podcast, but like, you know, there’s no management, you know, isn’t labor, marketing is in any, you know, your lawyers, your accountants, you can’t write anything of that off. There’s more that I probably don’t even know that our accountants know.
So a decade ago, getting that on it was an expensive crash course in accounting. been through DEA engagements, like a lot of crazy stuff through the teens.
Then 2020 hits, COVID hits, the marijuana sales in Colorado, still in Colorado at this point, in Denver. They are deemed an essential business, people are getting PPP, free money. Cannabis sales skyrocket, right?
But for various reasons, a lot of them personal, some of them business. That was at a point 11 years into the same business, the same family team, essentially. We’re a small-smallish business.
I just pulled the plug, similar to what I did when I was living in Tahoe, it’s like I need to switch it up I had a kid, you know, it’s COVID happening. We’re as busy as we’ve ever been during all this madness, and I exited both businesses.
And it was, in hindsight, like the timing was excellent, which we can get into why that is later on in this. But at the time, it was a very hard decision.
People were really like, what are you doing? You’re leaving at the peak of this.
I would have liked to just keep riding it out. They’re still doing it with the brand and the business. And I wish them the best.
Through a recruiter, I met Bristol Extracts. Brits like Jacks, who I work for now, COO, hemp business, licensed hemp cultivator, and processor in New York State. They were doing toll processing.
They were hit hard with the timing of COVID and launching their business and the crash of the CBD market. And so they brought myself and a woman from Oakland, who’s actually from Binghamton, New York, Corrine Devine. They brought us on at the same time to help them develop end products, consumer packaged goods, tinctures, lotions, and powders, and whatnot through for hemp CBD.
So now we’re at 2021. And so there I am in New York. And so, you know, I put my family on a plane. I’d never been here. I’d been here for about 20 hours to see the place and fly back. And we haven’t really looked back.
And so then, you know, 2022, we started growing cannabis, adult-use cannabis, got the conditional licensing for processing and cultivation. And then March 3rd of 2023, we launched three brands in two stores in Manhattan, adult-use cannabis. And now we have those three brands in nine of the 11 or 12 stores that are in New York.
Maureen: That’s great. And, you know, kudos to your wife who courageously, you know, dropped everything and your son and followed you here sight unseen.
I mean, that it was a real risk leap. I think one of the things that I find in talking to anyone with an entrepreneurial mind is you kind of have to see the future a little bit like you saw down the runway. Right. That these are the things that are happening. as did Bristol Extracts to bring you and Corinne on to fill these crucial roles that they knew they were gonna need for the success of the company.
Tim: Yeah, I mean, at the time, as I remember it, and you know, hindsight’s a 20, that I had two major factors that I was making these decisions on because I had a couple of offers.
One is my family, I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and we’re now three hours north of my family. I moved to Boulder when I turned 18; I was gone. You know, I went to paradise, I went to Boulder, Colorado.
But as my parents get older, as my kid gets older, I was like, I wanna be closer to family.
My wife, her family is from Pittsburgh. Who would have ever thought we’d leave Colorado to come back? We never, never, ever would have thought that.
I wanted to leverage my cannabis experience into new markets. You know, I was a little, maybe less valuable on the West Coast, California, Oregon, Washington, all these places that we would have loved to live.
You know, I almost went to Missouri, almost went to Michigan, and coming to a hemp company in New York State, which my people in my network in Colorado cannabis were like, you’re what are you doing? You’re moving to Rochester hemp, you’re in Denver cannabis. Some of them they’re still thriving in that world. I mean, Colorado has taken a huge hit in the last 12 months in that industry, as cannabis, in general, has.
But moving here and just being kind of back boots on the ground, you know, is very exciting, you know, and just being involved in policy and legislative affairs and helping stores open. And I mean, I’m getting to be an old guy around, you know, in this, you know, it’s like find myself in rooms. I’m like, oh, shit, I’m the oldest guy. Really? When did that happen? But cannabis is a young industry, which is exciting.
So yeah, and Eric, who’s the founder and CEO of Bristol, to your point, was looking ahead, saying, look, if we’re going to do this, we need to completely pivot and move away from a wholesale toll processing to retail, to wholesaling the retail.
Maureen: You mentioned regulations, which, of course, is a huge moving target. And so trying to keep up with the changing regulations in New York is like trying to jump onto a moving freight train while you’re trying to build the train at the same time. So is that common based on your experience in other states, what the legalization of adult-use cannabis has been like in the state of New York?
Tim: So that’s a great question. I mean, there’s a lot of angles to answer that. I’ll answer from my perspective.
Right before I got on this Zoom, right now, there’s the first town hall happening, a virtual town hall between licensed cultivators and the Office of Cannabis Management in New York. And it is very tense, it’s being done very well through CANY, the Cannabis Association in New York.
But there is a lot going on in New York regulations right now because the market is stalled, and it’s affecting everybody.
So my perspective being in Colorado was unique in that it was first. Now, California had done its thing, but it wasn’t at a state level. It was all local, and you could have one county and the next county over.
So Colorado and Washington, and Seattle. had done it around the time, but Colorado was very aggressive in setting up a state agency. And so that, but it was the first. And so that was unique. And then, through the consulting company, we were coming into groups that were funding everything, and we were coming in as the consultants.
That’s a good place to be, you know, at some point you’re talking to groups, you know, in Ohio or Maryland, and it’s like, This is your life savings.
And after us working in seven states, our free advice is: don’t do this. So it’s a unique perspective coming in there.
I think States have learned over the last decade-plus how to, you would think. Now, a whole other podcast on how New York is doing this. New York is unique. As all the states are, there are lessons in that area that I have learned that are helping us kind of navigate it.
One [lesson is] that this is a marathon, and our business strategy for the next 12 to 24 months is not, that’s all it’s for. We may be a completely different business beyond that because the market is going, it’s be two years before the New York market is really turning to what it is. And will something federally happen in that time? I don’t think so.
We’ve been saying it for 10 years. But the fact that New York legalized, and decriminalized cannabis without any infrastructure for, I don’t know, was it two years to get licenses out to create tax dollars, right?
So big proponent, no one should ever be locked up for cannabis, so yeah, the faster you can legalize it and stop. arresting people, do it today, do it tomorrow. If you are going to try to set up a system to collect taxes and licenses and a new State agency, doing it after that cat has been out of the bag is a monumental challenge.
And so we’re in this mix now where, you know, we have a 20,000 square foot facility, we have 30 acres, and we have a staff, we have a security company, we have a lot of overhead.
The State is not opening a market that we can set to 12 stores, eight clients. They’re great clients. There’s great sell-through, but there are only so many shelves. Um, meanwhile, there are 2000 stores open in New York that are selling products that are from Oklahoma and California.
It has its unique challenges, but if we can weather the storm. And a lot of people will not, and that’s what’s happening right now already, less than a year in, you’re going to see a large percentage of these companies going out of business.
Maureen: Well, I think that’s it, right? Is that any, it’s a high-risk business, right?
You mentioned margins are slim, to begin with. This is a very capital-intensive thing. I mean, even just that list that you rattled off, right? You’ve got, you’re talking about acquiring, about pulling in staff, like high-level leadership, right? To run these companies, the warehouse, you know, the cost of cultivation, security. I mean, all new packaging because the regulations changed. All of those things are just ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching.
Tim: Exactly.
Maureen: It has to be a marathon. you have to prepare for it to be a marathon, or you’ve got the wrong business.
Tim: It’s nearly impossible right now in New York because a year ago, you have the governor saying, and I don’t like complaining about these things because I’m solving. But you have to have, you’re starting a business. Who’s my clientele? What am I selling? What problem am I trying to solve?
Maureen: Totally.
Tim: Right? OK, why are we doing this? All right, well, there’s this market here, and this is telling us the governor is saying we’re going to open 20 stores a month from now until they open. Okay, no one asked you to say that. You told us that. So let’s do it.
Maureen: Right, I worked those numbers into my projections. Yeah.
Tim: Exactly. Exactly.
And now, you know, back that out, there should be 150 stores open, and there’s 12. And, you know, there’s just an oversupply. the demand error, but people are going, well, I’m going to the corner store and getting it, because there’s no, it’s unique, it’ll get there.
It’s gonna take time, will we make it? I think so, but it’s a challenge, you know?
And so, we have an excise tax on everything that we set to around 17%, it could be 17 to 20%. That’s off the top. So everything gets up charge. That gets passed down.
Meanwhile, there’s a flood of cheap cannabis. Cannabis has been commoditized. And so it’s a Rubik’s cube. But we get good people in. And we have a great staff. We have local people. We’re in a rural area. So we just all wear a lot of hats. Directly next to me, there is a window across the hall. I can get into the manufacturing floor. And I’m just, you’re just in it, you know?
After this, I’m going out because the tractors lay in the plastic molds for the fields today. And so we’ll probably be here till about nine or ten tonight. But it’s exciting. We’re gonna transplant next week.
Maureen: A lot of similarities with many of those things in some of the food brands that we work with, food and beverage brands, like a dairy. They’re trying to add value-added production, and it’s very similar, right? They’re taking care of the cows, they’re birthing calves, and they’re making ice cream. That’s why I love this whole industry is that you have to go through your day-to-day to just figure it out.
Tim: Yeah, yeah, we joked that we don’t have any tanks in the lobby here, you know. It’s not fancy. We do have a quarter million of a dollar distillation machine that does one thing. And it does well, but these are capital-intensive pieces.
It’s exciting times, you know, it’s there’s a lot on the line for everybody. Some will make it some won’t. Luck. I don’t know. I mean, it’s all fair, I suppose.
Maureen: That’s what you get with a brand new emerging market in a state. It’s gonna be a lot of changing factors.
So let’s talk a little bit, let’s shift a bit to the economy and kind of New York state in general. I’m a big fan of economic development, and I think the legalization of cannabis in the state of New York is certainly gonna have a big impact on the economy as a whole, jobs, and agriculture. What are your thoughts about those things?
Tim: It will. We thought we were going to be ahead of it. I mean, we need people, even with the 11 stores. I would love to bring on a couple more people right now to scale.
It’s tough to scale in this environment, right? So it’s either, oh, hey, the State just said that they’re going to cut all these hoops out of the way, and now there are 150 stores, say July 1st, and we’re going, oh, damn.
Maureen: Exactly right. Supply chain, it takes time to make it, sell it, and transport it.
Tim: It’s setting up our systems, you know, we fall down to [the level of our] systems. You know, you can set goals to raise up to, but if you’re, you have to have your systems in place so that when you take those hits, you’re only falling a step.
And it’s like, okay, we’re back down to our system. Now we can step back up. And so, you know. My experience in Colorado and Colorado took a big hit, right? But the record sales were in 2021. They did 2.2 billion in cannabis sales, right?
That’s a population of, I don’t know, 5 and 1 half million people. Of course, they get tourism. But if you run these numbers, I wrote some of these down. If you run those 2.2 billion in sales in 2021, then 305 million of that was collected by the state taxes, right? that’s pretty amazing. You could see the tangible results of the tax money over the last decade in Colorado. You could see sidewalks and rec centers built in small towns. It’s amazing.
There were over 41,000 plant-touching jobs created in Colorado. And then three times that in ancillary, right? So people who aren’t touching.
Maureen: It’s amazing. I mean, when else, when else does something have such a rolling impact on creating that many lasting jobs at all levels?
Tim: Totally.
I knew a friend of a friend who had an HVAC company in Colorado. The decade of building out warehouses for him was a complete life changer. And he’s not dealing with any of the crazy cannabis that he is now because of what happened in the market.
But it’s amazing, right? We have on-site security. These guys are, we’re in a rural area. Anyway. But in 2023, They’re estimated to do $1.5 billion in sales. So that’s a two-year drop of $700 million drop. The jobs in Colorado haven’t been cut by a third in less than two years.
There is a downturn happening in the cannabis industry whole as it is commoditized and as it’s kind of correcting post-COVID. And New York is launching directly into this. So that drives up a lot of VC and investment money as they’re seeing the risk. They’re seeing what has happened, and they’re backing away from New York and saying, well, let’s give this two to five years before we come back in.
So New York, if you do three and a half times that, that’s $7.7 billion a year in sales. I don’t know where the number came from, but there was something released last week saying that New York’s already doing $15 billion in illicit sales and cannabis sales. So let’s call it seven to 15. Great.
That’s 105,000 plant-touching jobs or 315 ancillary, 400,000 new jobs. For places like where we are south of Rochester, I mean, the fact that we have a dozen folks working here that all live in the Rochester to Naples area is huge.
These are 40-hour-a-week jobs, and we’re proud to have them. So it will make a big impact in upstate New York. The city is its own thing that I am not even going to speak to because it’s its own thing. There’s not going to be growth in New York City. It just doesn’t make sense.
The processing and the supply chain will be upstate. The retail behemoth will be in the city, but it will also be upstate. I mean, we’re seeing big numbers and follows out of Albany and Binghamton. It will be a game changer for these towns when we get there.
We all thought it would be like this summer, like, oh, summer 2023, we’ll start taking off. And then that’s not the case.
Maureen: Yeah. So you keep mentioning this kind of the shift in the market. And, of course, cannabis is still federally legal. So originally, I was going to ask, you know, about how do you do business in such a sensitive landscape. But I’d love for you to add to that also kind of the unpredictability of the market that you keep referencing and kind of, again, running a business that is sensitive in many ways. Can you speak to that?
Tim:
The federal side of it, it’s real, you know, the banking part of it is, it’s a stress that’s there. It hasn’t been an issue, really, like having a bank account, running cash in your bank account, paying your bills through a bank account. That’s really not an issue at this point.
Banks are allowed to do this federally with cannabis businesses. It’s just a kind of, it’s kind of a pain in the butt for them because they have to fill our report for every transaction of suspicious activity report. For every transaction, there’s no minimum. You can put a dollar in it. So it’s more paperwork for them. Most banks are like, just tell me what you’re doing. But we cannot get into loans. So we can’t get just a normal business.
We can show, hey, we’re doing 5 million a year, and we would like to expand the bank or something. And it just can’t get basic stuff. You have to go to high-risk, high-interest, private equity, which isn’t even really there right now for cannabis.
It’s not there. It was there three years ago, but this downturn in what’s happening in national cannabis in the US is, it’s a downturn.
Prices are a fraction of what they were wholesale years ago. And it’s a trap that some of these cultivators that I have met in New York that they were going to create generational wealth.
Now there was a story kind of sold, they were going to have 20 stores open, all this. That alone, they could still have 150 stores open, but you’re growing a crop. It’s no longer this valued product of what it was. It’s not illicit anymore. So you lose inherent value to it.
Now there’s craft cannabis, and there are amazing products, people are making art, artists index that people are making out of it. And that has a lot of value. But as a whole, I mean, you’re selling pounds of the best weed ever for five, $600 where years a couple of years ago, you were fetching two plus thousand, four thousand, I don’t even know, like across the gamut. It’s a fraction of that.
You see these big warehouses out west in California, in Colorado, and even in New Mexico closing down. They built 200,000 square feet, which is very expensive to run. They did their ROI on this at $2,000 a pound, two years later, it’s $500 a pound. It’s costing them $500 a pound to grow it. They’re shutting them down. And that is happening right now.
It’s kind of a wave that’s come across the West because California has never been, it’s always been the engine of cannabis. It’s the engine of cannabis culture. It has supplied New York with cannabis for a generation. And it is a before-and-after event happening there, a farm’s closing down, what will the future look like?
Once New York’s demand kind of lessens for what they need over there coming in from the state. And none of this is happening immediately, but it’s all happening now.
And so you’re building brands, so you get into more of a consumer packaged goods. I don’t know if I’m right, but that’s how we look at it. We’re building brands, what’s the value, what’s the community that we’re creating around what we do? What can we provide to people that they’re having a great product with a gummy?
There are 50 gummy SKUs in New York already. Why is yours different? It really isn’t all that different. You know, it’s not. It’s a lot of people who make a lot of good gummies. We make a great gummy. I think we make the best gummy in New York, but there are a lot of other great gummies, great packaging.
Your relationships with your vendors – how are you supporting them? How are you creating community? How are you giving back to the community?
And these are all labor and capital-intensive ways to build a brand.
And then also having to build it within one state and not being able to scale outside and create revenue, you’re in this bubble. And so you have to acknowledge that. And there’s the pie of cannabis sales. And you can get that data now. What’s selling? What flavor of gummies really sell? Who’s buying cannabis? There’s a ton of data out. It comes down to manufacturing and how lean you can manufacture.
That’s one part of it.
Maureen: You’re lucky to have that data, too, because there are some more established industries in New York, too, that just have been around for so long that they really haven’t been collecting data like the wineries.
You’d be amazed at how little information is out there in terms of what’s being produced. So that’s one nice thing about a new market that’s emerging now. At least it does have sophistication, right? From that perspective, in terms of being aware of things like that.
But you’re absolutely right. It is going to come down to brand, and it’s going to be very, very difficult. And you’re right. Luck is going to play a role in some of that, too, in terms of how you’re able to gain traction because a gummy is a gummy is a gummy.
Tim: It is, you know, and we cut corners with our packaging. Our packaging is good. You know, we did these, I don’t have any here. We did, just in my bag.
They don’t present the best, you know, people are shopping from their phones.
We’re upgrading everything over the summer. It was the quickest you can get those in 14 businesses. And so getting to the shelf was like, all right, what’s the priority? Is it this nice, you know, container? Sure. But we want the shelf space. And if we can cut for weeks off, let’s grab the shelf space.
Those decisions you don’t know right, and once again, 2020 is in the year. We can go back and go, we should have given it that for weeks and done the better one. Or thankfully, right now, we’re like, thankfully, we got the market and started creating relationships.
And I think you need, I know I’m over on time, but the unique thing that we did with Bristol was that we’ve targeted very specific demographics, right? And so the one brand that we started is called Senior Moments, and it’s a senior-focused cannabis brand. And the feedback on it has been incredible. And it’s so like the culture and the community around it is such a different conversation than these other cannabis scents. where it’s kind of a voice of people that are like, yes, like now someone’s listening to us.
Maureen: Yeah, because they say this is for me. This was created with me in mind. And that’s really what a lot of, it’s an excellent way and strategy to connect with your consumer in all things, especially CPG is this is for me. I read this, I see this, I smell this, I touch this, whatever it is. I know that this is made for me.
And so to even just call it ‘senior moments’ is gonna help a new-to-the-market consumer that is a senior, right?
Maybe it’s gonna push them into your product as opposed to somebody else’s. And when you’re building a new brand and what is gonna continue to be a highly competitive market, it’s little wins like that that are really gonna help.
Tim: In cannabis in general, education is marketing, marketing is education, and so there is a heavy lift, a heavier lift of spend to get, maybe, to get some of these older people or people who aren’t using cannabis to come in.
There is a segment of cannabis users that are buying every day, and they know what they want. They want this, you know, it’s very specific, it’s the most competitive.
Since they are that wedge, there are 100 brands going after them. It’s a dogfight.
We have a brand that’s in that. It’s called Snobby Dankins. It’s a fun brand.
The goal with that is to work directly with all farms. They do small-crop strain-specific. We do concentrates, co-branded, and limited drops. We haven’t executed it on that yet. Hopefully, it opens up.
Yeah, it’s exciting here. I’d love to, you should do a podcast down from the field in September when the plants are eight to ten feet tall.
Maureen: That sounds great. I’m sure there will be a lot changed in the industry by then. So it’d be great to do an update at that point of, what does the landscape look like in September. How many more dispensaries opened, and what has changed in the landscape?
So count on it. I’ll put it on my calendar sometime in September.
Thanks for your time, Tim. This was wildly fascinating. I think it’s really… Not that I didn’t already know of the challenges in the industry as a whole, but it kind of really exposed some more things for me.
I always knew it was capital intensive, but to hear too about even just the way that you’re able to run your books and how different that has to be just exposed a whole new layer of challenges. So I appreciate you sharing all that.
Tim: Yeah, of course. It’s always great to talk to you. I always learn from you every time that we speak. And so I appreciate your time.
Maureen: Yeah, thanks for that. All right, well, stay tuned for version two of this one. Thanks, Tim.
Tim: More to come.