Ottawa Citizen

Canopy lures pot tourists with chocolate and merch

Canopy Growth figures pot-themed visitors centre will draw tourists like Hershey did

- KIERAN DELAMONT kdelamont@postmedia.com

As you wind through the small and often narrow streets of Smiths Falls, cutting through quiet neighbourh­oods where the homes gesture to some historic Ontarian pastoral, the Tweed factory and its surroundin­g compound emerge, to paraphrase Hemingway, gradually, and then all at once.

Constructi­on workers and communicat­ions staff mill about in roughly equal numbers, and as you pull into 1 Hershey Way, you are pulling into the buzzing nerve centre of the Canadian cannabis explosion, set against the backdrop of a town that, on a Thursday morning in late August, is otherwise mostly asleep.

At the centre of it all is Canopy Growth’s CEO Bruce Linton — himself a buzzing nerve centre who regularly rattles off “Bruceisms,” aphorisms like saying he doesn’t work, he makes work happen — who is betting that this town of roughly 9,000 has a future as a tourist destinatio­n, and that he’s the man to make it happen.

He’s here, along with Smiths Falls Mayor Shawn Pankow, MPP Randy Hillier and a smattering of local business owners and politician­s, to unveil the Tweed “visitors’ centre,” a rather dry name for what is essentiall­y one part cannabis museum, another part behindthe-scenes grow-op tour. Linton hopes the centre will bring back at least some of the “hundreds of thousands of tourists” to Smiths Falls who have been mostly absent since the Hershey Chocolate factory closed 10 years ago.

It’s a tall order and an ambitious ask. And whether it will work remains to be seen.

Linton certainly has his believers locally. Pankow said the visitors’ centre will help cement Smiths Falls as “the cannabis capital of the universe.” Hillier bragged about the “thousands and thousands” of people who will flock to the factory. Linton joked that so many people come to Smiths Falls on work trips that they should call the whole region the “Greater Smiths Falls Area.”

The visitors’ centre itself is like a highly curated Cannabis 101 course. It starts with a room dedicated to the history of prohibitio­n, moves through displays that talk about the plant and its genetics, through a walkway overlookin­g rooms with cannabis plants in varying states of growth and finishes with a well-stocked gift shop.

(It also riffs repeatedly on its past as a chocolate factory, with a large copper chocolate drum in the foyer, and signs that say “this used to be a chocolate factory ” throughout the tour. And Canopy Growth recently bought the company Hummingbir­d Chocolate to produce chocolate out of the plant.)

The centre is meant, says Linton, to be the public-facing identity of Tweed. He calls it “the inversion of the great Canadian haircut, the mullet,” meaning, “Here, we’re party in the front, business in the back.”

There’s no shortage of interest in the Canadian cannabis industry, but whether the cannabis industry can translate that into tourism dollars in a town like Smiths Falls remains to be seen. Shaman Ferraro, CEO of cannabis tourism company Gocanna, said Tweed’s gambit is a fairly safe and probably pretty profitable one.

The cultivatio­n tour “is a staple in the industry,” he said. “The amount of interest right now behind cannabis is massive, and people want to know more about the plant and know more about the science.”

Ferraro compares what Tweed is doing to a tour of a vineyard or brewery. He estimates that the country could see a $2-billion boost from pot-related tourism, and that Smiths Falls is at the epicentre of that. “It’s like saying, ‘Are people going to go to Disney World?’ Of course they’re going to go to Disney World.”

The centre is meant to be more engaging than a tour of the rather workaday business of agricultur­al supply-chain management. “This is apparently more interestin­g,” Linton jokes before the tour, gesturing to a nondescrip­t warehouse building across the street, “than shipping out billions of dollars of marijuana.”

To be sure, this is only Step 1 of Linton’s grand vision for the site. He has plans to sell cannabis out of the gift shop — it’s currently stocked with T-shirts, bongs, pipes and other merchandis­e, but not a single gram of the herb — by next October, part of his long-standing desire to be allowed to sell cannabis much like brewers sell their beer, directly from the source.

For now, though, the visitors’ centre makes up an evolving piece of Tweed’s brand identity, one that will grow alongside the gradual cancellati­on of prohibitio­n in Canada.

“This seems pretty normal in Canada right now,” Linton said as he guided media through to the “terpene bar,” where visitors can sniff vials and candles made from terpenes, the distilled flavours of the cannabis flower. “But Canada’s way ahead in the world.”

 ?? PHOTOS: JEAN LEVAC ?? Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton stands in the new Tweed visitors’ centre in Smiths Falls, which he sees as becoming the epicentre of a tourism renaissanc­e in the town of 9,000, which lost its original claim to fame when Hershey closed the plant now occupied by Canopy.
PHOTOS: JEAN LEVAC Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton stands in the new Tweed visitors’ centre in Smiths Falls, which he sees as becoming the epicentre of a tourism renaissanc­e in the town of 9,000, which lost its original claim to fame when Hershey closed the plant now occupied by Canopy.
 ??  ?? Hats are part of the merchandis­e on sale in the visitors’ centre.
Hats are part of the merchandis­e on sale in the visitors’ centre.

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