Q. Can you tell me about your marijuana venture?
A. We started in 2011 as caregivers in Colorado. During that time, it was just us taking care of the cultivation space. We had cancer and HIV patients we were growing for. Fast forward to 2014, and they killed the caregiving model in Colorado, leaving us with a 12,000-square-foot building we can now only grow 16 plants in. We quickly had to figure out how to become fully legal. My wife is always complaining about smoke in the house, no matter what I use, so as a smoker and being in the industry, I asked myself how people can consume discreetly. We decided to dedicate the remainder of our grow to producing extracts.
Since then, Viola Extracts has become one of the top three concentrate companies in Colorado. We’ve expanded as a business as well, as we have a 40-acre farm in Oregon now, with six tax ID lots. In the first year, we did 40,000 square feet of canopy. When we max this whole thing out, it’ll be 240,000 square feet of canopy in Oregon. We also have a building in Michigan that’s 48,000 square feet. That space will be vertically integrated so we can cultivate, manufacture, and have a retail location there as well. We should have our licenses in July, so we’re super excited about that. In California, we did a joint venture with a company called Vertical Brands, almost like a licensing deal where they grow our genetics, they extract to our methods, and we just focus on creating amazing packaging and sales.
Q. What type of concentrates do you carry?
A. All of them. Live resin, shatter, butter, sauce, and we just added solventless extraction through water hash. We’re really excited about that product, it’s been flying off the shelves and we can’t make enough of it. We offer another product called Baller Buckets, where we offer 7 grams of live resin in a jar. Colorado has been our gold standard, that’s where we get all of our information, all of our knowledge. As we grow there, we’ll just be bringing those same methods to other states.