John Schroyer
At the first ever Green Market Report Michigan Cannabis Business Summit in Detroit on Sept. 6, we recognized some of the stellar industry players with the GMR Michigan Cannabis Awards.
The winner of Best Brand was True North Collective, whose chief operating officer, Joey Stutz, said that developing a sustainable brand in the competitive Michigan market is one of his proudest achievements to date.
“The core group is still involved in our company, that’s been here for four years. Just having the knowledge and the capabilities that we have now versus what he had four years ago is incredible,” Stutz said.
Stutz added that there are plenty of marijuana companies “cutting corners, trying to just make those quick bucks, doing whatever they can to survive,” but that’s not True North’s approach to the cannabis business.
“We only put out product that we ourselves would be comfortable consuming,” Stutz said. “It’s tough to sustain that, over the course of four years, with how, you’ve got Croptober, you’ve got illicit things coming into our market from other states, you’ve got (multistate operators) able to undercut everyone because they have a bunch of money backing them.”
Stutz is also optimistic for the future, given some targeted business investments he’s helped implement over the past year, including upgrades to packaging, distillation, and extraction machinery and also a large cultivation facility he expects will be a windfall for the brand later this year.
“We have a big farm up in Hesperia, one of our assets we’ve invested heavily into the last two years,” Stutz said. “We think we’re going to get a pretty bountiful harvest off that at the end of the year. We have 11,000 plants up there. It’s going to yield pretty well. The plants are looking like monsters.”
