Colorado-based EcoGen Laboratories will build out a new headquarters in Grand Junction, in the western half of the state, showcasing the growth of a company that now employs 205 people.
Just last years, EcoGen landed what it called “the largest genetics deal in the history of the CBD industry.” The company sold 20 million feminized hemp seeds in March 2019 at the annual NOCO Hemp Expo in Denver. The price tag? $11 million.
Now, the Grand Junction footprint will expand on that work.
“When it’s all said and done, it will house everything,” Facilities Development Director Keith Ehlers told the Grand Junction Sentinel. “A large contingent of our operations and sales and administrative offices. It will have our entire processing line through there, which does include everything from extraction all the way through to final products. We’ll have a distribution center because we’re a very large-scale operation.”
READ MORE: Hemp Genetics in a Changing Marketplace: Q&A with EcoGen's Derek Du Chesne
Already, Colorado has secured a position on the vanguard of the emerging U.S. hemp industry. We wrote in our premier issue that it’s one of the top three states in the country to grow hemp, and, moreover, it’s a hotbed for much-needed processing facilities.
“We’re not trying to be the biggest farmers out there and we probably never will be,” Derek Du Chesne, EcoGen’s chief growth officer, told us last year. There are people who have been doing it for generations and have been doing it a lot better than we are. We have about 413 acres of our own farmable land and about another 1,000 acres of partnership farms, where we supply the genetics and the consulting, and we’ve been helping a lot of these soy farmers and corn farmers convert their fields over to hemp. It’s been really exciting helping to build out this infrastructure network of partnership farms, as well as our own farms.”
