It has been one year since Long Beach, California-based Glass House Brands (NEO:GLAS.A.U) (NEO:GLAS.WT.U) (OTCQX:GLASF) (OTCQX:GHBWF) announced the start of cultivation at the 5.5 million square-foot facility located in the Santa Barbara County city of Carpenteria that it had bought and then converted into a mega-greenhouse and nursery in which to grow cannabis at a scale unheard of by one grower within the state or outside of it, according to co-founder and president Graham Farrar. Glass House Brands is one of the fastest-growing vertically integrated cannabis companies in the country, but it has always been and remains focused on the California market even as it sets itself up for national domination when the barriers to interstate commerce come down, whenever that will be.

It’s a strategy that distinguishes the company from just about anyone and is partially why it refers to itself not as an MSO, which it is not, but as an SSO, or superstate operator, which it clearly is. Farrar explained the difference at an investors conference a day after the release of Q4 financials, which reported revenue of $32.2 million, up 14 percent quarterly, a decrease of 5 percent for cost of cultivation to $127 a pound, and an increase in retail outlets from three to nine.

“Long-term cultivation is going to relocate to where plants like to grow, predominantly in California, manufacturing is likely going where the lowest cost of labor is, and stores need to be where the people are,” he said. “That’s a pretty big differentiator between us as a superstate operator and the MSOs, because a lot of the infrastructure that they’ve invested in over time we think is going to have to get written off and is going to be shuttered. The idea that you’re going to grow cannabis in a warehouse in Massachusetts by burning coal to recreate the Southern California sun and sea breeze doesn’t make a lot of long-term sense for us.”

Glass House co-founder and CEO Kyle Kazan expounded on the idea. “We’ve taken a more traditional approach to business in that low costs are forever, pricing is cyclical – it goes up, down, it can do anything – so we grow at scale lower than anybody else in the country,” he said. “Since it’s state-by-state, it doesn’t matter as much that we can grow so much cheaper than anybody outside of California, but at some point it is going to matter.

“That durable competitive advantage is big,” he noted, “and when most of our competitors are basically going out of business – and we’ve seen lots and lots of licenses go, which is causing prices to go up – we were still able to make money, and now that we’re seeing the cycle go up, we can’t turn on the next million square feet fast enough. The last thing I would say is we’re 80 percent vacant of cannabis at our big farm, so we have a massive runway ahead of us that we’re really excited about.”

A (California) Love Story

Less than a week before Glass House Brands released its Q4 results, Farrar jumped on a call with Cannabis Business Executive to talk in detail about the strategies for growth they would soon present to investors, and also how Glass House Brands came to be. A longtime grower and Santa Barbara native, Farrar’s journey began with another related business.

“We started Elite Garden Wholesale in 2014-2015,” he said. “It was a hydroponics company. Specifically, we made nutrients, fertilizer, and the reason we went there is we saw that this was going to grow from closets and garages to warehouses and greenhouses, and a lot of the nutrients that were available then were 50 bucks for a gallon. It was crazy. We made a nutrient that was very simple, it only has a few parts, and you can buy it in a drum or even in a 270-gallon tote. We went out to sell that to the farmers and say, ‘Hey, it’s legal, and it’s going to get more legal.’ Farms are always under pressure, particularly cut flowers in my hometown of Santa Barbara, and then we realized that we were teaching them how to grow cannabis so that they can be customers of our nutrients.”

An idea started to formulate that could not be ignored, and not long after starting Elite, Farrar pivoted. “The Dutch and Japanese scoured the country and landed in Santa Barbara because it’s got great sun, great weather, water, and flatland, so there are a lot of greenhouses here,” he said. “We realized that these are great farmers, but we were better cannabis growers. I said, ‘Why am I teaching these guys how to grow weed and sell fertilizer to them if I can grow weed as good or better than they can?’

“That’s when Glass House came about, and we got our first greenhouse,” he continued. “I’ve grown in a closet, in a room, in a garage, in a house, in multiple houses, and we started Glass House around 2015 with a 150,000-square-foot greenhouse. I ran it, my partner Kyle was the landlord and my first investor. He provided the funding, I provided the operational know-how, and we started with what at the time felt like the biggest cannabis greenhouse in the world at 150,000 square feet. Our last one was 2000-square feet.”

It was a huge leap up, especially in the Prop. 215 days of California’s 1996 Medical Marijuana Initiative, but it was also just the beginning. “We developed, and then we were like, let’s do more, and we bought the next greenhouse, also in Santa Barbara,” recalled Farrar. “It was 355,000 square-feet, and we were sure that it was the biggest thing in the world, what with half-a million square feet. We also built an awesome team by melding the cannabis gurus with the greenhouse operational gurus.

“There are 25-year cannabis guys and there are 25-year greenhouse guys,” he explained, “but there are not many 25-year cannabis greenhouse guys. Those guys are all in jail because you can’t hide a cannabis greenhouse very well. So, we melded those two together and made lots of mistakes but we also learned lots of things and through that we became quite knowledgeable about cannabis.”

When Santa Barbara announced plans to open medical and eventually adult-use dispensaries, Glass House applied, beating out six competitors for one of three licenses in the city. “That’s where the Farmacy brand got started,” said Farrar, adding proudly, “For three out of three years, it has been voted the best dispensary in Santa Barbara. It’s a beautiful boutique with awesome budtenders who love what they’re doing in beautiful Santa Barbara, right on Main and Main. “They put us through the wringer,” he added of the licensing process, “but they didn’t stick us by the dump or the strip club or somewhere that would make you feel embarrassed or ashamed of what you’re doing. Instead, we’re in the middle of Santa Barbara, which has been great.”

The company’s manufacturing was up the road in Lompoc, and it also had dispensaries in LA. “Eventually, we put the whole thing together, made it one company, and that’s when it became Glass House Group, which was eventually Glass House Brands,” explained Farrar. “I became the president, my partner Kyle is CEO, we’re both founders, both board members, and then we decided to take it public.”

There was a specific reason why they went public, he added. “There was what we believe is a unicorn greenhouse in Camarillo, which is five and a half million square feet, 125 acres of greenhouse, 160 acres of land,” he said of the property that has come to define Glass House. “Everybody, including myself, starts with the size because that’s really easy to grasp, but it’s actually the third most important thing. The most important thing is its amazing climate, and it’s an amazing facility to grow great weed very efficiently.”

The idea is to meet the sweet spot of the market as inexpensively as possible. “You don’t need more crappy weed and you don’t need more too-expensively-grown weed,” said Farrar. “When you have great weed produced efficiently, that’s when scale matters. So, this thing has positive pressure, roof-washing robots, on-site power plants, our own well, water recirculation, ebb & flood floors. We put in automated plant-handling and developed these amazing cure and dry rooms. That’s the stuff that’s actually the most exciting.”

The excitement is contagious. “Now the scale gets exciting because [Camarillo is] the second largest greenhouse in the United States of any crop,” he noted. “Pick any MSO, if you combine everything they have for cultivation from 20 states, this greenhouse is twice as big. So, we’re in the right climate in the appellation of California, where consumers have a preference and pay a premium for products, with an amazing team that has been growing cannabis with quality and consistency of scale for a century of combined experience, in the nicest facility that anyone’s ever grown cannabis, and all powered by the sun, so you can feel good about it from an environmental point of view, and with the lowest cost of production that I think anybody has.

“In Q3,” he added, “we grew about 75,000 pounds of flower, smalls, and trim, and we sold it all, which is key because everyone says California is over-supplied and what crazy person would bring on more capacity. But yet, in the quarter we grew and sold as much cannabis in three months as we did in the entire previous year when we were also one of the largest producers.”

A Glass House Full  

Was the Glass House mindset circa 2017-18 to get as many licenses as possible in order to grow as quickly as possible? “It was not quite that overt,” replied Farrar. “At the time, it was more, ‘Here’s a greenhouse, it’s nice, it’s in my hometown, I’ve done this before, I think I can go bigger, and being able to do a bigger one would make us stand out versus the way most of the other folks are doing it.’ And we went through Santa Barbara County and actually helped them with all the stuff that was a precursor to the impending Prop 64, where you needed actual licenses. So, we just kind of started doing Prop 215, liked it, and then we did all the things that we needed to do to keep it going under Prop 64.

“The 365,000 square foot greenhouse was Prop 64 from the beginning, so we bought that knowing what the future looked like,” he added. “We were mainly focused on continuing to be able to grow and execute, but we were not involved in writing any of the Prop 64 language, and we didn’t lobby for the stacking of licenses or any of that kind of stuff.”

They did anticipate the increasing value of the agricultural middle of the state for cannabis, however. “A lot of people who grow in Northern California went there because they wanted to be left alone,” he said of traditional grows. “Back to the land, weed was illegal, and they wanted to be off the grid. NorCal is a great place to hide and grow more than it’s a great place to grow, if that makes sense. What we saw was hiding was for a while the number one skill-set. If you didn’t do that well, you stopped because you were in trouble and you couldn’t keep going.”

Legalization changed all of that. “Now the Fish and Wildlife guy, the sheriff, the fire guy, the county planning guy, the state, everybody knows where you are, because you now have to provide plans to 13 different agencies and have them all over for tea and inspections every three months. It’s the opposite of hiding, and we looked at that and said this new world is not going to prioritize hiding, it’s going to prioritize compliance and the ability to navigate bureaucracy and regulations, and grow great weed, and do it efficiently and do it at scale. It’s not as much of a joke as I wish that we run a compliance business and sell weed on the side.”

What did Glass House do to distinguish itself from its mid-coast competitors, of which there have been a few over the years. “I think there’s a couple things,” said Farrar. “First, I always give credit to luck, because things can break in multiple ways, and sometimes you get lucky. But I also think that maybe we were businesspeople doing cannabis instead of cannabis people trying to do business. I think a fair way to say it is we had kind of a block and tackle, one-on-one philosophy where we were trying to run a business that worked. We wanted to grow great weed, and we wanted to do it at a scale that rivaled anybody else. But we also recognize that you can only do that if your business runs well, and we maybe had a little bit more of just basic budgeting and accounting and trying to track our costs well and really understanding what we were doing. For a long time, cannabis was for people who were willing to be felons, but that’s not necessarily the filter for the best businessperson. As that changed, we tried to marry the love for the plant with a desire to do good sustainable business that works from the economic side as well.”

A (Glass) House of Brands

As much as it is a large-scale cultivator, Glass House Brands also has … brands. In addition to retail brands Farmacy, The Pottery, and NHC, product brands include Glass House Farms, FIELD, Forbidden Flowers, PLUS, Mama Sue, and Allswell. I asked Farrar how Glass House thinks about branding.

“The brand is always important,” he said of the Glass House name. “Long term, I want to make the most consumed cannabis brands and products on the planet. I want to bring as much cannabis to as many people as possible and do it in a way that everybody can afford it. That is my over-arching goal and I think everything – brands and products – all start with the plant. That’s why I like our vertical integration and the fact that we start with growing the plant, and then manufacture and process it into buds in a jar, prerolls, vapes, our PLUS gummies, and our Allswell flower or tinctures. We produce the products that we hope consumers will love, and then we sell them in our own stores and in other stores around the state, but we always thought that the brand was important, and we branded Glass House early on.

“I don’t know if we put the sign up first or had our first harvest first,” he continued, “but they weren’t very far apart where we said, we’re not just going to be weed, we’re going to be Glass House Farms. And as we sit here today, I don’t know if we’re the number one or number two flower brand, but it usually bounces around there, and I think our PLUS gummies are the number three brand in the state. So, at least with the two biggest categories, brand stands out and people know it. I think they look for it as a hallmark of quality, consistency, and a good value, and that was always important. Right now, brands are struggling because retail is struggling, but long term a brand is one of the most valuable components. It’s a promise, and I think a California cannabis brand that’s grown under the sun is good and is something that can be an everyday luxury. That’s our promise, and I think it’s something that people across the country and across the planet will appreciate.”

Do they do their own distribution? “We have never done distribution,” said Farrar. “I do not consider myself to have any special skill in it, so Herbl has always been our distribution partner on the CPG side. On the wholesale bulk flower side, we sell that direct, but for the CPG for our brands, we’ve been with Herbl since the beginning, and still are today.”

Glass House Brands is certainly available throughout the state, but determining market share is not always easy. “As far as I know, we’re the largest vertically integrated cannabis company in California,” said Farrar. “We have three distinct parts; our wholesale flower, our CPG brands, and our retail, and each of those has a slightly different answer. On the wholesale side, I cannot actually tell what our share is because there isn’t really any good data out there. You used to be able to back into it by looking at the total cultivation tax that was paid, and then how much we paid, and I could kind of derive that maybe we were 6 percent of the market. But the cultivation tax is now gone, and we know that the illicit market is probably three times the size of the legal one. And we always paid our taxes, but I’m not sure that tax number was accurate, either.

“On the flower side, it’s so fragmented as a category, so even with number one or number two, you’re only talking a three percent share. It’s certainly not Coke or Pepsi, which each have a 35 percent share or something like that. But I do think we’re going to see consolidation. There are a lot of “brands” that are really labeled containers. I think a lot of folks out there with labeled products are counting on sub-cost of production, flower being abundant, and just being able to show up with cheap product. But as broader prices return to a sustainable level many of the folks who don’t grow their own are not going to have a real value proposition by packaging somebody else’s flower. My guess is that over time we’ll see consolidation around flower brands like we see with vapes and gummies and other CPG products.”

What about segmentation of price points in the market, and offering products for each segment? “Alcohol as a CPG market, not a product, is a pretty good parallel,” said Farrar. “Our goal is to be the Casamigos of cannabis. Cosamigos tequila is not the most premium. It’s not 1942 or Jose Cuervo Familia – and doesn’t cost $30 to $50 a bottle – but it’s great at a good price. That kind of works for everything. I wouldn’t put 1942 in a margarita, for example. That would seem silly to me. I usually drink 1942 on a special occasion, not on a Tuesday night. With Cosamigos, on the other hand, if you want a margarita, it can be a Tuesday, it can be a Friday, it can be a shot, you can put it on your bar and not feel embarrassed to have it there. It’s kind of an everyday luxury, with a good price that makes you feel good, and it’s a good product. That’s our lane.

“But for sure, there is flower that costs $90 an eighth instead of our $25 or $30 an eighth, and I think those are great products, just in different segments,” he added. “My personal belief is that the middle area, the fat part of the triangle, so to speak, is going to be where most consumers live. Just like with tequila, you’ve got connoisseurs that like all kinds of things that the average of us doesn’t, but there’s not that many of them. There are weed connoisseurs who know all kinds of stuff that the average person doesn’t, and they will probably spend three times as much money, but they will probably be 3 percent of the market.

“So, ours is that everyday craft beer kind of approach to cannabis, where we’re trying to grow the best weed you can get everywhere,” he said. “I want to be on every shelf, and I think the walls will come down eventually for interstate commerce. I can say with a straight face that I’m not sure there’s another company that could actually do a national cannabis brand right now. Who else has five and a half million square feet of potential production, and can actually grow good quality, consistent, affordable flower that you can put on the shelf in every store in every state? I don’t know that there’s another company that can do that.”

Especially at $135 a pound in cultivation costs, I said. “That was our Q3 number,” replied Farrar. “Q4 will do better than that. My target is $100 a pound. I think we’ll be able to get there, and I think we’ll probably be able to beat it. And again, that’s not magic. It’s because we’re in the right climate with plentiful free sunlight, good water, amazing facilities, a great team, good genetics, and California culture. Those are the ingredients to being able to do that, and I don’t know how anybody in a warehouse in the snow in Massachusetts can generate enough power to reproduce the Southern California sun and climate.”

California Dreamin’ (and Smokin’)

I noted recent conversations with a few MSOs where they said they were scaling back cultivation to focus more on quality over quantity. “That touches on the fact that the world we’re in today is not the world we’re going to be in,” responded Farrar. “If you look around, there is no other CPG product that is forced into a silo in each state. You don’t go to Wyoming and drink your favorite Wyoming wine. You don’t go out and drink New York tequila. We should grow plants where they like to grow.

“I joke that if you stand in your cannabis grow, and you look around you see office buildings, you’re in the wrong spot,” he continued. “We stand in a greenhouse, I look around and for five miles plus in every direction, 12 months out of the year, including December and January, I see plants growing outside. It’s a good place for agriculture, and eventually that’s what’s going to happen, but it’s just not California arrogance. If you say pizza, I don’t think of California, I think of New York. Peaches, I think of Georgia. Corn, Iowa. There are just places where plants like to grow better, and we optimize for that.

“But we’re in this model where the MSOs are building all this vertical production in states that have no business growing cannabis,” he added. “Cannabis is actually a really interesting crop, and I don’t think people appreciate it, but it’s basically fruit with no skin. Big buds that like to rot, and they have no protective skin on them. It’s hard to grow with quality and consistency, and it’s virtually impossible to do in the wrong climate. And no other crop is grown in warehouses in any kind of real scale. That’s not how other agriculture happens, and I don’t think cannabis is going to be like that. I think the MSOs are saying, ‘We’re not going to try and supply a Florida, or Illinois, or wherever, with a product that was grown there anymore than we aren’t going to supply it with strawberries that were grown here.”

He added that strawberries are in fact a good corollary to cannabis, with seeds on the outside that are not well protected. “And 95 percent of the strawberries that are grown in the United States are grown in California,” he added. “Wine is another good one. 90 percent of the wine that is produced in the United States comes from California.”

It will be exactly the same with cannabis. “I think those MSOs are smart to not do massive here,” said Farrar. “We’ve been playing this game for longer than anybody else. The culture is here, the genetics are here, and the people recognize quality. And if you go to one of the 2500 illicit dispensaries in New York, they’re filled with California cannabis. They can go to Michigan, to Detroit, to Massachusetts or Florida. Cannabis is all over the East Coast. Instead, they drive 3000 miles and come to California to get a better product for a lower price, and then drive 3000 miles back. We know that is the future because the illicit market already tells us that when it comes to cannabis, California has the weather.”

What will happen to California’s legacy growers, I asked. Are they doomed to the dustbin of history? “I think more work deserves to be done, but the freedom that we have is due largely to the folks that are advocates in the Emerald Triangle and in San Francisco on the medical side,” said Farrar. “Those are the pioneers who were fighting for this, and they deserve a tremendous amount of credit. I hope that they are not relegated to the dustbin of history. I don’t think they need to be. I think what’s really killing them – and I don’t know when it will change – are taxes and regulations and the restrictions on interstate commerce. It’s also kind of crazy, because what years of enforcement and the war on drugs failed to do, over-taxation and over-regulation have accomplished. People are getting forced out because taxes and regulations are so tough, and it’s really unfortunate because I don’t think it needs to be that way. But I also don’t know how much it’s going to change. As an example, in Mendocino, they won’t let you grow more than 10,000 square feet, which is almost farmers market size.”

Is direct-to-consumer the ultimate solution?  “Interstate commerce would be great for us, no doubt about it, but it’s a savior for those guys,” he said. “I’ll tell you why. A 10,000 square foot grow can produce 1000 pounds a year. That’s 120,000 eighths. If you have customers that want to try an indica, sativa, and hybrid, that means you need to find 50,000 people. If you can find 50,000 people who will buy three eighths for $50 each, or $150, that’s not a big number, but your 120,000 eights direct-to-consumer across the country is worth six and a half million dollars.”

As far as shelf space in Glass House stores, is there room for local brands? “Our stores are not flagship stores,” stressed Farrar. “We sell everybody’s product that we think is great. We sell our products of course but it is not a store full of Glass House. 75 percent are not our brands and 25 percent are ours.

“Our belief is that there are consumers for all of it,” he added. “Different products for different times for different people for different budgets. For instance, we have a small farmers initiative to make sure that our stores have a place on the shelf for Ridgeline Farms, Redwood Roots, or Huckleberry Hill Farms. Those are great products, and people love them and deserve access to them. I also think that they deserve access to Old Pal, and I think they deserve access to Glass House. The best market is a market where everyone who wants to grow weed and make a product has a home for consumers to pick from. There are always going to be consumers who like all different sorts of things, and that’s the way it should be.”

I expressed how good it was to hear him mention Redwood Roots, a SoCal distributor for small farms whose owner, Chris Anderson, has been trying to hold firm in the face of mounting pressures from an unresponsive government and unforgiving market. “I connected with Chris and he and I kind of started that small farm initiative in our store,” said Farrar. “I know some people look at us as competitive – you grew big so we can’t – and we don’t actually look at it like that. But the one thing I don’t think there’s any debate on is the more retail stores we have, the happier our farmers are, so one of our goals is bringing on more stores.

“We started this year with three retail stores, we have nine now, and we’ll have a tenth one soon,” he added. “That is good for everybody, and we want to make sure that truly is everybody, because we want consumers to come in there to find whatever it is they’re looking for. So, Chris and I got together and said, ‘Let’s make a place that makes sure that his brands and other brands from up in the Triangle have a home. It’s the right thing to do, he’s a great guy, and I feel for the challenges that everybody’s having.”

A Big Bet or Something More?

Glass House Brands was recently featured in the Washington Post, a great achievement for a cannabis company, but I did wonder if the headline of the article, Giant California greenhouse signals a big bet on cannabis legalization, got it right about it being such a big bet as opposed to a calculated risk or a cautious strategy that allows for flexibility by Glass House.

“I do think it’s much more calculated than a Hail Mary,” agreed Farrar. “I don’t think our farm is counting on interstate commerce at all. There’s nothing that any of our forecasts, or any of our estimates, or any of my budget that say, here’s when we shift to other states. I do think that will happen, but I do not know when it will happen, so nothing we’re doing is predicated on that.”

The farm has enough capacity for a million square feet per greenhouse, he added. The two that are currently underway will covers costs until it’s time to expand into the others. “We are selling it faster than we can grow it,” he added. “There’s no shortage of demand, and there’s basically no inventory. Prices are moving up because everybody is sold out. The market is rationalizing, it couldn’t sustain the cost of production indefinitely, and we’re seeing it move to a place where it’s sustainable for enough people to satisfy demand.

“It’s basic supply and demand, but what we’re doing has nothing to do with any other state,” he repeated. “We’re turning on another million square feet of flower canopy not because we think we’re going to be shipping it to other states. It’s a California thing. We want to be so far on the left-hand side of the cost curve, and so high up on the quality curve, that the intersection of those two things, the quality that we produce for the cost that we produce, is undeniable. Our view is that if we produce the best cannabis for the lowest price, there is always going to be demand for that, and so nothing is counting on interstate commerce. It will happen when it happens. We have the most valuable cannabis asset in the industry, and we will be the only ones who can actually do national scale on a quick timeframe, but I don’t know if that’s one year, two years, or five years.”

The competitive landscape will also look very different from today, predicted Farrar. “I think the MSOs probably end up being some of our biggest retail partners, because they own more stores in the country than anybody else,” he said. “Glass House will be one of the largest growers and the biggest brands. Right now, the MSOs are like CVS except they’re making their own Tylenol and selling it, but eventually they’re the CVS, Walgreens, or BevMo!, and we’re the producer growing the highest quality for the lowest cost in the best climate, packaging and shipping it to all of their shelves. So, they end up some of our biggest partners, and I think that’s better for the consumer because right now their consumers are paying $70 for a crappy eighth when they can buy a fantastic eighth for $25 in California, and eventually they’re going to get that.”

Regarding the strength of the consumer, Farrar said prudence was warranted. “We’re cautious on that because we think the consumer is going to get pinched,” he said. “I think cannabis will be recession resilient, but I don’t know that it will be recession proof, which I think is a good thing because things that are recession proof are the things that people are addicted to, like cigarettes and alcohol. I think people are going to enjoy cannabis and keep it as part of their wallet, but they’re probably going to spend less.

“If I was walking into a dispensary with 3 twenties, maybe I’m walking in with 2 twenties now,” he added. “Our Allswell brand is a price-focused brand, and I think we hit a significant milestone with our Allswell 10 milligram gummies out the door with taxes paid in California for 10 bucks. And why I think that’s significant is because that’s the same price and maybe even a little less than you will pay for an illicit gummy that isn’t tested.”

It is the only way to successfully compete, he insisted. “The best way to beat the illicit market is to economically outcompete it, and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do, and I think the Allswell gummies are one of the first direct hits that we’ve gotten towards that goal,” he said. “The more you open up markets, the more you open up interstate commerce, consumers are going to get better quality products for a better price, and that should be the overarching goal.”

I asked Farrar what goes through his mind when companies and brands pull up stakes in California to refocus their efforts in other markets. “I think the future for the rest of the country looks like California,” he replied. “Part of the reason why we stay here is because where the rest of the country is having a pillow fight, California has been having a knife fight. Competition is hard, but competition also breeds excellence.

“It’s like training at altitude,” he added. “You don’t train at altitude because it’s fun; you train at altitude because when you meet somebody who hasn’t, you win, and that’s California. The customer is discerning, there’s tons of choice, the innovation is here, the culture is here. If you want to win the World Cup, you don’t train with a sixth-grade soccer team. California is the World Cup, and I think you can see that playing out a little bit. The brands are leaving because they can’t compete in California, but why are they going to be able to compete when California comes to the rest of the country? Why will they be able to win there?”

It’s a question everyone east of California should be asking themselves. I mentioned that in an interview I did last year with Mitch Baruchowitz from Merida Capital Holdings, he referred to Farrar in particular as a happy warrior, and the exact type of person he likes to invest in. When asked about that, Farrar said it was about making the world a better place.

“We’re building a company with a great team, where people are excited to come to work, and we’re making products that customers love. Scaling that up to reach more people is what I asked for, so what more do I want? I’ve got the trifecta of happy company, happy customers, happy planet, and that’s pretty awesome.”