Justin Wildhaber, owner of Green Freedom, a marijuana production company based in Elma, stands among his product in one of his greenhouses.
Justin Wildhaber’s fledgling business is experiencing what you might call growing pains, despite the considerable business acumen he brings to the state’s budding recreational marijuana industry.
Wildhaber, a Chehalis native, is the controlling partner of Green Freedom, a marijuana growing and processing start-up just outside of Elma and across the street from the back nine at Oaksridge Golf Course.
Wildhaber doesn’t fit the common pot-grower stereotype — he’s never really smoked the stuff himself. (Well, maybe a little of his own “product” now, he admits, since he has to know what he’s selling.) He’s in this because he knows a good business opportunity when one crops up.
“This is a professional team,” he says of the group starting Green Freedom. “This is not a bunch of backwoods stoners trying to pull this off.”
Wildhaber’s company, which began growing plants within its fences about five months ago, is now putting “product” out under the brand name “Sweet As!,” and the marijuana he is growing is getting some pretty good reviews from “bud tenders” at the Harbor’s various retail recreational stores, especially his high-potency strains that go by the names of Dutch Treat, Blue Ox and Ghost Train. Dutch Treat recently tested out with a whopping 29.7 percent level of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Most Sweet As! marijuana is selling for $10 to $15 per gram in local pot stores.
And it is selling.
Right now, Wildhaber’s biggest issue is getting more product out to the stores; it’s quality seems to be selling itself, to a certain extent, Wildhaber said on Friday, when he had just returned from sales trips to points south and east.
“In Vancouver and Longview, I did $30,000 in sales in two days,” he said. “There’s 17 stores in Spokane, so now I am getting in that market.”
And the marijuana market statewide is a lucrative one. Just a dozen — of the hundreds of retail stores statewide — realized sales of well more than $1 million in the month of March alone, according to the most recent sales figures released by the state. So far, the state has realized more than $52 million in revenue from the excise tax collected from the recreational marijuana industry in less than one year of operation.
And people want Wildhaber’s product, especially his high-potency strains, which fly off the shelves.
One retail proprietor in Vancouver told Wildhaber that his Dutch Treat strain would “be the highest THC flower in the store.”
“I had another guy in Spokane tell me, ‘It’s the best product I’ve seen yet,’ which is nice to hear,” Wildhaber added.
The marijuana farm and processing plant isn’t hard to spot. It’s surrounded by a 10-foot fence meant to shield the operation from public view, as required by state guidelines for I-502 growing operations.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington, before departing the state at age 23 to pursue graduate degrees in business, first from University of California-Berkeley and then the Ivy League’s Columbia University in New York. Prior to returning to his home state to start Green Freedom, Wildhaber was working in Atlanta, where he headed a chain of urgent-care clinics with about 300 employees under his supervision.
As to why he pitched all that to become a weed entrepreneur?
“It was one of those things,” he said with a wry smile. “My mom’s a partner — she’s the one who applied for the licenses — in my name.”
Wildhaber is currently growing hundreds of high-quality plants of 42 different strains, with such names as Ogre, Snowcap, Royal Kush, Purple Arrow and — with a nod to the view from his Elma facility — Satsop Nuclear.
Wildhaber says there’s almost $1 million now invested in the business and more infrastructure is still needed.
There have also been some hiccups along the way. The company’s first crop went to seed, making it unmarketable. And an early cloning operation saw a 90 percent failure rate, costing the operation hundreds of young plants that would be coming to fruition right about now, he said.
“Now I am in a situation where I am going to sell out,” while waiting on the next cycle of plants to harvest, he said.
Wildhaber has two climate-controlled greenhouses of 3,000 square feet. Each can hold a capacity of about 550 to 600 plants, but they cost a lot of money to run, with electric bills that can reach up to $4,000 per greenhouse per month, Wildhaber said. That’s the reason that Wildhaber, like many licensed growers, are hoping an outdoor “summer crop,” grown at much lower cost, can increase his profit margin and allow his company to grow and thrive in future months. Then he can build more of those high-end greenhouses, which can cost about $150,000 each.
He has a couple of hundred plants growing outside right now, but will need to build basic hoop-style greenhouses to shelter even those as fall approaches to protect the valuable flowers from rain, which can cause mold and other problems.
“We’re not getting return on investment yet,” Wildhaber said. “If we can make $20,000 this month, we’re building more green houses for this outdoor crop. This outdoor crop is the hat trick for getting us to the next level. This summer crop is where it’s at.”
Wildhaber figures if his yields are close to what he’s expecting from the larger plants, that single crop could gross the company $750,000 this fall.
That will help offset the many costs associated with the new industry. He is paying bud trimmers and packagers $12 per hour. He has shelves upon shelves of packaging in his warehouse, and there’s a lot of competition out there, so crops aren’t fetching the top dollar they were a year ago.
“There are seven growers for every pot store now operating,” Wildhaber said. “The state needs to get more stores open. Right now many are operating as local monopolies.”
With his business background, Wildhaber understands that his company will have to operate lean and mean to compete with some of the highly financed growing operations in the state such as the Phat Panda brand, which has already built a loyal following among recreational users and stores for its high-potency products, glitzy packaging and slick branding and marketing campaigns.
“You don’t expect to have to buy 50,000 units of packaging,” Wildhaber said looking at the boxes lining the shelves. “To be competitive in the market, we have to keep our costs down, which means we have to go to China for our packaging.”
Maybe turning to Chinese resources isn’t a bad idea when you’re taking on a Phat Panda. But Wildhaber believes the quality of his product is the ace up his sleeve.
“I can’t compete with them on the packaging level, but I can compete on the product level,” he said with a wry smile.
