Sonoran Roots, a seed-to-sale craft cannabis operator, was founded in 2018. O’Brien said that at the time, it was a property holding and management company, renting sites that were later developed into its operations facilities. In 2020, the company opened its first cultivation facility in Mesa and began selling its cannabis products to the market. A dispensary division, Ponderosa Dispensary, and an extraction facility and brand, Canamo Concentrates, soon followed.
“Our first year in business, we were only wholesaling product as a grow. That was all of 2020. In 2021, we acquired the dispensary and continued to see an uptick with products,” O’Brien said.
The industry flourished after recreational cannabis was legalized in the state following the passage of Proposition 207 in November 2020. “To go from several hundred thousand medical patients to the entire state of 21 and older folks being eligible to purchase obviously dramatically increases your market,” O’Brien said. “In 2023, we’ve mostly been growing on the retail side.”
Today, the company owns and operates three cultivation facilities in Mesa and Tempe, a extraction lab in Tempe, and retail dispensaries in Glendale and Florence. A third dispensary opened on September 11 in Chandler, growing the company’s employee ranks to about 200 people, O’Brien estimated.
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