‘YOU CAN’T GROW IN A GREENHOUSE’
Building a business is never easy, but building an industry virtually from scratch in less than two years is almost unprecedented. Licensed producers faced endless challenges in the race to scale up, while the provinces also scrambled to set up their cannabis sales regimes. Things didn’t always go smoothly. And not everyone was happy with the results.
Bruce Linton This sector has had a nearly continuous case of hiccups for five or six years because there’s a lot of friction involved in doing something that changes perception, public policy, creates an entirely new supply chain, doesn’t have generally good access to banking, all of a sudden becomes international.
Vic Neufeld It’s not an easy thing to build a greenhouse and know you can produce, you know, 20,000 kilos a month. It takes a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge. And Mother Nature is not cooperative at all times.
Bruce Linton People said, ‘You can’t grow in a greenhouse, that won’t work, greenhouses Brian Harriman, CEO, New Brunswick Liquor Corp. We knew supply was going to be critical. We knew from our experience that we could build buildings and hire people and train them and do all those good things, but doing all that and having empty shelves wasn’t going to work. At that point, we didn’t have the mandate to run the stores. But we thought, ‘No matter who’s running retail stores in New Brunswick, they’ll need supply.’ So we began signing supply MOUs in July 2017. One of the challenges was we, as the New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, couldn’t sign supply contracts with a cannabis producer given that it was still illegal. So there was some stickhandling there to think about who did have the authority to sign. At the end of the day, the province was
are too easy to break into because they are glass,’ all these complaints. So I didn’t know how big the company or the sector would be, but I knew our objective — it wasn’t to be small, it was to be No. 1.
Greg Engel, CEO of OrganiGram You have to be very creative and work with the right companies to help build and find solutions. And a lot of those solutions, you’ve had to create custom, such as preroll equipment that’s going to produce millions of pre-rolls (pre-rolled joints) per year. I mean, no one out of the U.S. had that expertise, and we’ve had to go to engineering/design/manufacturing companies to create that equipment. the entity that had to sign the documents and to support the process.
Bruce Linton I feel as a Canadian taxpayer, we should be very proud of how the bureaucrats have conducted themselves. If this was done in any other country there would probably be an awful lot of bribery. If it was done in any other country, the bureaucratic capabilities wouldn’t last and the outcome wouldn’t work. There’s a reason why 25 countries have come to say, ‘Hey, how are you doing this here?’ Brian Harriman We had 6,000 people apply to work for us. We screened through to 2,000, interviewed 800 and hired 330 people. But from the 2,000 to 330 job offers going out was done in four weeks. So it’s been a pretty mammoth task.
Sebastien St. Louis, CEO of HEXO When the legislation was announced, we were extremely concerned with the ramp-up and execution of our medical business. And then when (recreational) came on, and the size of the opportunity, it required a restructuring. Medical is just dried cannabis, and eventually they introduced oil. But now we need to start to think about food. We need to start to think of cannabis as an ingredient. We need to start to think about the branding opportunities. How do we put in an enterprise resource planning system and seed-tosale tracking for recreational? And how are we going to do the age verification? Brian Harriman A lot of times we’ve been at a crossroads and been forced to make a decision without knowing what the final federal regulation was going to state. As we were designing our stores and we were looking at security within our stores, there was no federal guideline. Can we just leave it on a shelf somewhere? Do we need it locked in a cage? Does it need to be in a vault? So we erred on the side of caution and every one of our cannabis stores has a vault in the back for product. Jodie Emery, cannabis legalization activist The last two years for me, have been nothing but seeing big business and big government trying to eliminate and harm the pioneers and the entrepreneurs who actually built the industry. It was very scary being sidelined, and basically the government at every level, they are saying to us, ‘You’re going to be locked out of the legal system, you can’t afford to get in, and your criminal record will ban you, and you’ ll get locked up.’ We had war declared against us.