Ambitious plans
Kitchener’s James E. Wagner Cultivation raises $18.5 million from private investors
KITCHENER — With an $18.5million injection into its bank account, Kitchener’s first licensed medicinal marijuana producer is rushing to ramp up production for the recreational cannabis market.
James E. Wagner Cultivation, or JWC, raised the cash from private investors ahead of its plan to become a publicly-traded company by the end of this month.
It’s all part of ambitious expansion plans to turn the former Lear Corp. automotive plant into a full-scale cannabis factory capable of producing as much as 30,000 kilograms of marijuana by next year.
“That project is going to cost us considerable investment, but this will allow us to get underway,” said Nathan Woodworth, the company’s president and chief executive officer.
Right now, JWC has five flowering rooms at the former Lear plant on Manitou Drive, which it moved into in January. It aims to have closer to 50 flowering rooms there by the end of the year.
The cannabis company has grown rapidly since it began as a family-run startup with federal approval to grow medicinal marijuana.
It opened its first growing facility in Kitchener in 2017, leasing a 14,500-square-foot building with space for five flowering rooms.
In a few short years, JWC has evolved into a 40-person outfit, with plans to have as many as 400 to 600 employees in 2019, when production is at full-capacity.
Part of that evolution is an upcoming reverse takeover of a company called AIM1 Ventures — a transaction that’s essentially a shortcut to getting listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
“In our industry, time matters a great deal. We’re under a lot of very tight deadlines,” Woodworth said.
“In the end, this was the easiest and best way for us to become listed.”
Going public will help the company finance the next phase of its ambitious growth plans, he said.
The race for market share is on across the booming marijuana sector, ahead of expected legalization later this year.
JWC has already entered into a strategic partnership with Canopy Growth Corp. — a deal that will help it process cannabis oil, access plant genetics and sell its products to a broader customer base online.
JWC, which specializes in aeroponically grown cannabis, said it hopes local consumers will be able to buy its products as soon as this fall.
Within a year, it hopes to be at full capacity and able to distribute its Kitchener-grown cannabis across Ontario.
If the company is able to reach its growth targets, it will be a symbolic revival of the Lear plant, which closed in 2015.
At its peak, the automotive plant employed 1,300 people, producing car seats that were installed in Ford, Chrysler and General Motors vehicles across North America.
In the meantime, there are still plenty of logistical challenges ahead as JWC scales up into a major marijuana producer, and adapts a former auto parts plant into a large-scale indoor growing operation.
Those hurdles have slowed the company’s growth plans somewhat, but haven’t changed the overall goal for JWC.
“A project as big as this requires a great deal of management,” Woodworth said.
“This is the largest project I’ve ever undertaken in my life. It’s a been a very rapid rate of change, but I feel like this is what I was meant to be doing.”
The CEO, who named the company after his tobacco-farming grandfather, has been growing his own medical marijuana since 2007 to control the pain from migraines.
“Marijuana gave me my life back,” said Woodworth, the son of former Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth. “It’s given me back my ability to function, and to do something with my life.”
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