CANNABIS TWIST
Dan Crosby talks about his latest venture, Purefusion Cannabis, at a 60,000-squarefoot facility Tuesday in Tecumseh, where foods, beverages and nutritional products, infused with cannabis, could soon be shipped to consumers across Canada.
Foods, beverages and nutritional products all infused with cannabis could soon be shipped to consumers across Canada from a Tecumseh industrial park.
Purefusion Cannabis would be the first business in the region — and one of the first of its kind nationally — to legally sell ingestibles containing THC, CBD or other active ingredients derived from pot.
“I’m very pumped, and super anxious, too, this is a big deal,” Purefusion’s founder Dan Crosby said Tuesday on a tour of his sprawling 60,000-square-foot facility still undergoing finishing touches.
“It’s a very exciting industry, and it’s a very new industry,” Crosby said. Nine years after starting Canadian Protein, an online nutritional supplement manufacturer that currently employs about 30 in Windsor, the local entrepreneur said cannabis was a natural next step.
It means Tecumseh, despite rejecting cannabis retail outlets within its municipal boundaries, will get a toehold in a new national industry, one for which Crosby said Essex County is ideally suited given its agricultural, manufacturing and food processing prowess.
There won’t actually be any pot plants grown at the Tecumseh facility, part of an investment estimated at $6 million, but cannabis harvested elsewhere will be shipped in and turned into extracts, oils and other products to be infused into or become additives for other products. Everything from fitness drinks and chocolates to gummy bears and powder for food flavouring (all for adults).
“This is a welcome diversification opportunity for our community and the region,” said Tecumseh Mayor Gary Mcnamara. “Certainly, it’s an opportunity to create employment and that’s good news.”
Crosby said there could be up to 50 employees with the new company within six months. He said he sees Purefusion as complementary to the food grade processes that are already part of Canadian Protein’s operations, “we’re just using a different ingredient.”
Given the latest Health Canada requirements for prospective new entrants into the cannabis industry, proposed facilities must first be built and readied for operation before someone can apply for a licence.
Consultant Mary Ducharme of Leamington’s Fox D Consulting, which is involved in that process, said Purefusion’s application will be submitted at the beginning of February, and she’s confident the company could have Health Canada approval and begin operations before the spring.
Ducharme, who has been involved in more than 200 cannabis producer applications to Health Canada, said Purefusion is only seeking a processing licence, not a growing licence. Crosby said “numerous suppliers” are “very interested” in what the new Tecumseh company can do with their harvested marijuana.
Purefusion has a three-phase business model, said Ducharme:
■ Manufacturing and offering its own brands of cannabis-infused nutritional and natural health products.
■ Offering extraction services to other cannabis growers.
■ Providing labelling and other packaging services to other businesses in the cannabis sector.
A large part of the facility being built in Tecumseh — Crosby is reluctant at this stage to make public the exact address — is designated for secure storage, with processing and packaging rooms offering quarantined areas to prevent cross-contamination of cannabis products.
Crosby said the market for Purefusion is cross-canada but other certifications are being sought to permit global sales as well.
“This is going to be a big facility,” he said.
As for this year’s start, with Health Canada having only recently approved cannabis extracts in foods and drinks, “we’ll definitely be one of the first to process foods and beverages legally,” he added.
Mcnamara, who is also Essex County’s warden, said local economies must open up and diversify to succeed, and the cannabis sector is just such a new industry, expanding with “high-tech, very professional type jobs.” He said he sees a difference between the growing and the processing sectors of the budding cannabis industry.
As for his town opening up its commercial sector to a cannabis retail store, Mcnamara said it remains “a wait and see,” particularly with the provincial government’s slow efforts at privatization since Ottawa legalized pot in the fall of 2018. “We wanted to see how things evolved. They haven’t moved much,” he said.