As big pot player exits Leamington, another fires up local production
Less than a month after one of Canada’s biggest pot players announced it was shutting down its Leamington operation, another large international cannabis company said it’s starting up local operations.
“Nothing is yet settled in cannabis — this is pretty exciting,” Craig Wiggins, an industry observer and managing director of The Cannalysts Inc., said of the rapid change of affairs for Leamington.
Sunens Farms Inc., a joint venture with Auxly Cannabis Group and headed by local grower Peter Quiring, has received a cultivation licence from Health Canada for the first phase (360,000 square feet) of a large, 1.1-million-square-foot cannabis greenhouse operation north of the downtown and just west of Highway 77.
“We have built what we believe to be the ultimate cannabis growing facility,” Quiring said in a news release. “Our objective is to produce the highest quality organic cannabis at the lowest cost possible.”
“This is a very happy day for everyone at Auxly,” added Auxly CEO Hugo Alves. “Sunens will provide
Auxly with a consistent, high-quality and cost-effective source of organic cannabis.”
Wiggins said the shutdown of High Park Gardens, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tilray Inc. that employed about 120 workers in Leamington, follows a trend elsewhere in which greenhouses once used for growing vegetables and then converted to grow cannabis are found to be ill-suited or uneconomical.
High Park, he said, “was a retro-fitted old pepper and cucumber shop,” while Sunens is “state-ofthe-art, built for cannabis.” The new facility’s cultivation output will be used to feed Auxly’s Prince Edward Island-based operation manufacturing Cannabis 2.0 products such as vapes and gummies for the adult recreational market.
“This makes me happy,” Leamington Mayor Hilda Macdonald said Monday of the Sunens news, just three weeks after she expressed her disappointment with Tilray’s announcement it was pulling up local stakes after only a year in production.
Macdonald reminded a reporter that, while the news in May of the 120 lost jobs was grim, she had expressed confidence that better news was on the horizon. Leamington and Kingsville, a North American centre for agricultural greenhouse operations, is home to cannabis giant Aphria Inc. and other businesses lured to the sector.
“Remember, I said there was so much growth happening, so much building, so much expanding — my expectation is there will be others soon,” she told the Star on Monday. Meanwhile, those currently in the process of winding up their jobs and High Park’s operations can hopefully pivot to the new company, she said.
Quiring is president of Nature Fresh Farms, one of Canada’s biggest indoor vegetable producers, and he is one of the continent’s biggest builders of greenhouses. He could not be reached for comment on Monday. It’s not known how many local workers Sunens’s high-tech Leamington operation will employ.