Dankr.ca – Your Toronto Connection
Written by Jennifer Kaplan for Bloomberg.
Why did you get into the cannabis industry?
I got into the marijuana business, ironically, to make money. Boy, was I wrong in the early days. I realized in a very quick time period that there was far more to this industry than making money. The power of cannabis is just superior to some of the other wellness platforms, so it’s exciting to see us six years later and how the company has grown.Why edibles?
It is called weed for a reason, because it grows like one. But to grow good quality cannabis, it’s incredibly challenging. It’s as much of a science as it is an art. I’m not one exactly to get my hands dirty in the garden, so I eliminated that as an opportunity.We started with the concept that we could take cannabis and add water and ultimately create an elixir. With that, Dixie Elixir was created in early 2010. And it’s exciting—from that one product, we’ve grown 15, 16 delivery systems—a total of 170-plus products.
Who is your target consumer?
At the height of the medical marijuana registry in Colorado—that’s our home state—we had just 120,000-plus registered patients. In January of 2014, the first month that adult-use cannabis was offered, over 10 percent of Colorado residents, 500,000-plus people, embraced legal adult-use marijuana for the first time. So the demographics just exploded. You’ll have construction workers all the way up to women in business suits grabbing products like Dixie’s on their lunch break.
