North Bud ready to grow
October 23, 2019
By Hunter Cresswell
North Bud Farms CEO Ryan Brown is done having resumes – so to speak – dropped off at his Chelsea headquarters. In this case, the “resumes” are bags of marijuana.
The company’s Venosta building is complete, and the final piece of the puzzle Brown awaits is approval from Health Canada to ensure the facility is up to cultivation and security standards. A response should come within the next month. In the meantime, he’s preparing for operations and working to license genetics of certain strains of marijuana – hence, the bags of grass being dropped off.
“I’ve already secured a few of them, but we’d like to have a variety of local proven outdoor strains…it’s a good opportunity for a legacy cultivator,” Brown said.
The 12 months that have passed since cannabis was legalized on Oct. 17, 2018 have been a rollercoaster for legal marijuana firms. Stock prices skyrocketed, then plummeted. But Brown said his company, which is publicly traded, is in a unique position to thrive in the changing market since it owns its own building and has a lot of capacity to expand.
“There’s a lot of tangible value in the company,” he said. North Bud wants to get quality flower on the market for competitive prices. Brown used a beer analogy to explain: “I want [customers] to feel they bought a case of Heineken, but they paid Budweiser prices for it.”
On top of selling flower on its own and to manufacturers who need the plant material to create newly legal concentrates – such as hash or hash oil – and edibles, Brown wants to corner the pre-rolled joint market. Growers, he explained, get away with putting the lower quality buds into pre-rolled joints since customers don’t get to eye the product like they do when buying just the flower.
“Right now the pre-roll market is the most underserved,” he said. “The pre-roll is the hot dog of the industry. It’s where everyone puts what they can’t sell.”
For more information visit northbud.com.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/northbud/posts/