VIANARCHRIS
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Photo Illustration by Mike FailleMedical marijuana that you can eat is poised to explode into a huge growth industry.
SMITHS FALLS, ONT. — For more than four decades, Smiths Falls was known as the “Chocolate Capital of Ontario” because of its iconic Hershey factory. But Hershey bolted in 2009, and a few years later, the plant was sold to a very different sort of company: Tweed Marjuana Inc. In 2014, it re-opened as Canada’s largest marijuana production facility.
The plant retains a few signs and other remnants of the Hershey days, but otherwise, it has been fully repurposed as a pot palace. The skunky smell of cannabis is overpowering as soon as one steps in the building. Tweed t-shirts are proudly displayed in the concourse. A massive growing room features row upon row of plants at different stages of development with the strains carefully labeled: Super Lemon Haze, Cannatonic, Bubba Kush and the like. One room features a sign that jokingly reads: “Work-free drug place.”
In effect, the town of Smiths Falls has been rebranded as Ontario’s pot capital. But if Bruce Linton gets his way, it will be going back to chocolate soon enough.
Darren Brown/Postmedia NewsBruce Linton, chief executive of Canopy Growth Corp., checks some of his medical marijuana plants at the Smith Falls facility.
“When we get this thing done, it’s going to have been a chocolate factory, a marijuana factory and a chocolate marijuana factory,” the chief executive of Canopy Growth Corp. (Tweed’s new name) said in an interview.
“There can’t be anything more balanced than that whole circle.”
Within days, Canopy expects to receive approval from Health Canada to sell cannabis oils to its medical customers in addition to the dried, smokable pot it currently offers. These oils are already being produced and logged into inventory at Smiths Falls. If all goes as hoped, the next step will be to sell oil-infused edible products — like chocolates and candies — in the near future.
Postmedia NewsFor more than four decades, Smiths Falls was known as the “Chocolate Capital of Ontario” because of its iconic Hershey factory.
These products are potential game-changers for the pot business. Analysts expect oil sales to bring significant numbers of new medical patients into the fold. And edibles have been a huge hit in markets that legalized recreational marijuana, which Canada’s federal government plans to do.
The new products represent a staggering amount of change in a short period of time for the nascent industry, which has yet to reach its second birthday and has no meaningful free cash flow.
Ottawa brought the medical marijuana industry to life in April of 2014, when it introduced rules requiring patients to buy their product from licensed producers. Marijuana companies immediately sprouted up across the country and on Canadian stock exchanges. More than two dozen of them are currently licensed to produce pot.
The birth of this industry received massive interest from investors and media. But last June, an event of near-equal importance happened in the sector, only few people paid any attention to it: the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that medical marijuana users should be allowed to consume cannabis in other forms besides smoking. That opened the door for producers to sell fresh oils, in addition to the dried buds.
Essentially, this ruling took a brand new industry that was just getting on its feet and transformed it into something entirely different.
Chris Roussakis/ for National PostCanopy is currently producing 400 to 600 grams of the concentrated oil a day, which translates into thousands of millilitres of the finished oil.
The marijuana firms were pleasantly surprised by how fast Ottawa acted after the court ruling. Within a few weeks, Health Canada convened a conference call with executives from all the licensed companies, informing them that they could produce oils by applying for a legal exemption and laying out a few other ground rules.
