Cannabis firm with Toledo connection growing like a weed
An Illinois company that opened the Toledo area’s first medical cannabis dispensary and owns a cannabis production plant in North Toledo is expanding its local operations to include a marijuana growing facility to augment its Ohio supply chain.
Green Thumb, Inc., of Chicago is investing $25 million for the growing facility on Jason Road in the Northcross Industrial Park and it should be ready to start operations by late next year, Jen Dooley, the company’s chief strategy officer, said Wednesday.
“We already producing from our Toledo facility. We’re producing and packaging our Incredibles and Rhythm brands there. The construction project is underway and it looks like it will just be getting going in the later part of next year. We’re very excited about it,” she said.
Green Thumb, which had been led by Ottawa Hills native Pete Kadens before he retired as chief executive officer in February, 2009, is on a roll.
Just last week the medical marijuana firm, which became a publicly-traded company in 2018, reported superb third quarter earnings results. Quarterly revenues were $157.1 million, a 31 percent increase from a year earlier. Thus far, its year-over-year revenues are up 131 percent.
More importantly, it had a quarterly profit of $9.6 million, or 4 cents a share. A year ago it lost $14.6 million, or 7 cents a share in the quarter.
Ms. Dooley would not say whether Green Thumb hit or exceeded its targeted growth projections.
However, “we love the position that we’re in,” she said. The company is encouraged by where it is and its potential for growth, she added.
“We saw it in our third quarter earnings — people love our products and we’re doing well with a lot of growth to go,” Ms. Dooley said.
Currently, the medical marijuana industry is placed at between $15 billion and $20 billion. “But it’s expected to hit $100 billion over the next 10 years,” she said, adding that Green Thumb should be in position to capture at least 1 percent of that growth.
The chief strategy officer said the industry is still quite young with about 80 percent available growth before being declared a mature market.
Ohio, she added, still has a large amount of untapped potential customers.
In a conference call with analysts last week, Green Thumb CEO Ben Kovler noted that legalization of marijuana for medical use was on the ballot of five states during the Nov. 3 election — and it passed in all five.
“There’s a tidal wave of demand that we’ve been talking about for six years in a row,” Mr. Kovler said. “And it’s helping people feel better, and makes me excited to help more people feel better through this product, and then what comes out is these numbers,” he said of the company’s third-quarter result.
Green Thumb, the chief executive said, is “on that path to over $1 billion sales. And as the world wakes up to the U.S. cannabis opportunity, we’re excited, we feel the privilege of this.”
Posted By: The Toledo Blade on November 19, 2020. For more information, please click here to read the source article.
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