Marijuana Business Magazine

84 • Marijuana Business Magazine • November / December 2017 Begin With Great Ingredients and Staff Grön’s edibles begin with good chocolate that is carefully sourced from fair-trade producers. Rounding up significant amounts of dark and milk chocolate is a tall order for a small company that now goes through 1,500 pounds of the sweet stuff every week. “We’re constantly looking for new sources,” Smith said. It helps to be in Portland, a foodie mecca in a state with a heritage of sustainable agriculture. Early on, Smith decided to hire key staff with startup experience in artisan foods to complement the company’s cannabis expertise. “It’s what we need to look ahead and be prepared for more sophisti- cated mainstream business growth,” she said. Grön’s operations manager came from one of Portland’s large organic bakeries, bringing a wealth of vendor contacts and knowledge of precision food manufacturing. Its new sales director knows how to expand a regional business into national mar- kets, having helped grow Stumptown Coffee from “three guys in a garage” into a java powerhouse. Ingredients are sourced from across the state and sampled again and again. Grön buys hand-harvested sea salt from the coast, hazelnuts from Melcher Family Farm in St. Paul and blueberries from Corvallis. “We must have tried 15 different blueberries before we found” the ones we wanted, Smith said. She and her team did blind taste tests to pick the perfect single-origin coffee bean at the Portland roaster Water Avenue Coffee. Without naming names, Smith differentiates Grön from edibles companies that aren’t sticklers about producing high-quality artisanal products. “Their focus is on being weed chocolate and getting people high,” she said. “We want to focus on being a delicious food experience that just happens to have cannabis in it.” Cannabis trim and flower also are carefully sourced and have Clean Green Certification, a type of organic seal in the marijuana industry. Most of it now comes from Christine and Jasper Smith’s own Skunk Valley Farm in Sandy or East Fork Cultivars, an open-air farm focused on CBD in southern Oregon. The cannabis is processed into a clear THC or CBD distillate without terpenes, leaving a flavorless oil that provides a consistent dosing pro- file and blends seamlessly into the chocolate. Here, too, Smith is picky. “I have turned down pounds of oil because the terpenes weren’t fully removed and might have a slight fla- vor,” she said. “We want to know the farm and the farmer, that every part of the product we put on the market has a story we’re proud of.” Smith said she finds it satisfying to be able to offer a bar made from single-origin chocolate, single-origin coffee beans from El Salvador, and single-origin cannabis. The demand for CBD and CBD/THC blends is lead- ing Grön to broaden its line, using only cannabis-derived CBD to assure potency and quality. “There’s a lot of not-good CBD out there,” she said. Even the packaging is carefully considered: a biodegradable, indi- vidually packaged, child-resistant box designed by Smith and produced by Oakland, California-based Sun Grown Packaging. “I’m tired of seeing so much plastic in this industry,” she lamented. ◆ Grön Chocolate Founder and CEO Christine Smith.  Photo by Doug Hoeschler Photography