That’s how Dave Arend described the new law effectively ending CBD prohibition in Ohio, which had led to some restless nights for the owner of Your CBD Store in Anderson Township.
Arend opened the store July 1, fully aware that the sale of cannabidiol in Ohio was still illegal outside state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.
Just six months earlier, state and local officials had cracked down on retailers selling CBD products, forcing them to remove, or “embargo,’’ the products from store shelves.
How Temescal Wellness Approaches Customer Education
Director of Retail Philip Poirier discusses how the dispensary chain provides personal support to its clientele across its locations in New Hampshire, Maryland and Massachusetts.
Temescal Wellness has been first to market in many of the jurisdictions in which it operates, and has won over local communities and regulators with its focus on quality products and one-on-one customer education, according to Director of Retail Philip Poirier.
The company was founded in 2015 and has opened locations in New Hampshire, Maryland and Massachusetts. Two of the company’s three dispensary locations in Massachusetts are co-located, meaning they can serve both medical patients and adult-use customers. In New Hampshire, the company also operates a cultivation facility.
“We’re very compliance-focused,” Poirier tells Cannabis Dispensary. “Temescal Wellness is a life cannabis company. We offer diverse choices of extraordinary products—[non-]addictive, 100-percent lab tested plant products. … When we combine those high-quality products with our personal guidance and our personal touch, it really helps to amplify the happiness and the health of everyday people who use cannabis, no matter where they are in life’s journey. We have a little bit of something for everybody.”
Here, Poirier discusses how Temescal Wellness offers personalized customer support and education in the markets it serves, and how this approach varies based on the individual customer.
Cannabis Dispensary: What is the company’s overall approach to customer education? How does this approach differ based on the state market, as well as medical versus adult-use customers?
Philip Poirier: Our main priority is guest wellness. We [opened] up in New Hampshire at first, [and] being in such an earnest medical state really teaches you a lot about compassion, a lot about how the cannabis program operates. We want each individual to find the least amount of medication needed to provide symptom relief, and that’s what our goal is.
With the different states, the big thing is [that] when we approach customer education, it’s going to be different for the different regulations. In Massachusetts, we tailor our education more around what the carry limit is for an adult-use consumer, or what the limit is for a patient—10 ounces within the 60-day, two-month period.
Outside the different minutia of the different state’s policies and procedures, how we approach adult-use and patient education is very similar. It’s about the delivery methods. It’s about the dosing options and finding what makes that individual comfortable. What are they going to be confident in? We’re trying to start them off on the right foot. We’ll offer consultations to everyone who comes into our facility. If it’s someone’s first time in the facility, education is the main staple of what we do. We’re more than happy to give them one of our patient handbooks, which is one of our own documents that we’ve curated, which goes through everything from how to get a card [to] a little bit [of] the company’s background, [and] goes over our delivery methods and dosing options.
We have a wonderful patient strain log, [where] we encourage every individual to track what kind of cannabis they’re taking—how many drops or doses or how many puffs did they take, and what effect did they feel off that product? We encourage them to bring that document back in to us. The more we know, the better that we can help them.
We like to say that cannabis can be imperfectly perfect—everyone should find some symptom relief with it, but it’s not black and white. There’s no one right answer for any given individual. So, we sit down with the patient, we sit down with the guest, and we get them comfortable with the delivery method and the onset and the duration differences between [products]. If someone says that they have symptoms and they need symptom relief most in the morning, we probably wouldn’t talk about edibles, then, because edibles can have a one-to-two-hour onset time, and if you’re in pain, one to two hours is an absolute eternity. Even if you’re not in pain, one to two hours can be a really long time. So, if you’re starting your day in a lot of pain, we would look at methods like inhalation. We would maybe look at topical methods that you can apply. We have transdermal patches that you can use, or the traditional means of flower, which they can smoke or vaporize.
We ask a ton of questions and we ask for a lot of indicators, and we want to find out what the framework is for their schedule and their medication and what their dosing options might be. We work with the guests one-on-one to really help figure out when they may need it. Have they tried it before? What options are there? Then we can look at it and we can fine-tune what they tried and what their expectation and outcome was, and what they were trying to accomplish. We piecemeal it together and give them a basket of different products they can try. Many people find it’s a combination of different medications. People who use edibles very frequently will also use methods of inhalation. They may use capsules in the evening because it’s longer lasting—it’ll last for six to eight hours, so it helps carry them throughout the evening a little more effectively. A concentrate or a disposable cartridge is going to be a faster onset and a shorter duration. It’s a mix and match of different products, and it’s about educating the consumers on what’s out there.
Photo courtesy of Temescal Wellness
CD: How would budtenders approach a first-time customer versus a returning customer? How would they work through the process of determining which products or delivery methods will work for each?
PP: If it’s a first-time consumer, we’ll offer them a sit-down consultation to see if they want to go over everything the program has to offer and everything that Temescal Wellness has to offer. One of the things we notice in Massachusetts is this is a much more sophisticated consumer base. It’s an open market. You can go to any dispensary. The program has been up and running for a handful of years now. So, if someone comes in and we greet them, “Welcome to Temescal Wellness. Have you been here before?” and they say no, we follow up with, “Well, is this your first time in a dispensary?” and usually, it’s not. They’ve been somewhere else. They have a little bit of a background on the products that are available out there. And if they have been in here before, we’re asking similar lines of questions: “How did the product work for you recently? What symptoms were you really trying to help?”
Even on the adult-use side, we still try to approach it from that medical perspective. Just because someone is using it recreationally, it doesn’t mean they’re not finding therapeutic relief out of it, whether it’s stress, appetite, anxiety, sleep—whatever it may be.
If it’s someone who’s coming to the facility who’s never been here before, you’re really holding that individual’s hand a little bit more. Our conversations are going to be a little bit more in-depth about why they need cannabis. What has their reaction to cannabis been, even if it was 20 or 30 years ago? What does their current life schedule look like now, in terms of when they might need symptom relief? It’s more science-heavy. We’ll talk more about the cannabinoids, the terpenes, and we’ll talk about the entourage effect that [they] have with one another. There’s a little more science involved with the first-time consumer than with someone who has been here before. Once someone has been here, it’s working through what they purchased last time and trying to find if there’s any area of opportunity that they may be missing that can help them navigate through the lows of life or really embrace the highs of life.
CD: What sort of training does the company have in place for budtenders to teach them how to interact with customers and provide this education?
PP: Being open for handful of years now in the different states, we’ve done a really good job at being able to curate our own training materials. When we opened up in New Hampshire, we had a handful of staff who worked for us who were registered nurses, and we were able to pull in information from different expertise and backgrounds. We talk a lot, from the medical side, about protecting health information and HIPAA compliance and privacy. There’s much more that goes into the training outside of just cannabis and cannabis science. It’s a highly regulated industry, so our training goes really deep, beyond just the cannabis science. The team is really training people to provide a compassionate, understandable and knowledgeable guest experience to everyone who comes into the facility, and the best way to do that is through those one-on-one conversations they’re having with the guests.
We have materials from online databases that we use in-store. We do a ton of roleplaying. Many times, people will [spend] their whole lives telling their kids, “Don’t do drugs,” and now they feel a little hypocritical coming in and buying cannabis. It’s getting them to understand that this is plant-based medicine. This is a healthy alternative for you. So, how do you deal with those consumers and those interactions?
The company is built on the pillars of wellness, quality and community, and we’re always curating our own internal documents to help in any situation that may arise dealing with the state, dealing with compliance, dealing with guest education and the consumer experience.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.
nd3000/Adobe Stock
How to Train Budtenders in a New Market
With the opening of a new marketplace comes a challenge: training new budtenders quickly and effectively.
In June, Illinois lawmakers passed a bill that allows the legal commercial sale of marijuana throughout the state, paving the way for the states' 55 medical marijuana dispensaries to flip to recreational sales—and for additional dispensaries to open under the relaxed law.
With the opening of a new marketplace comes a challenge, says James Yagielo, CEO of cannabis recruiting company HempStaff: training new budtenders quickly and effectively.
“Things are very chaotic when a new business starts up—even more so in highly regulated markets like cannabis,” Yagielo explains. “Owners and managers are quickly overwhelmed by the demands coming from the state and city, as well as inspectors and investors—and, unfortunately, training usually gets put on the backburner for the first few months.” What’s more, as Yagielo points out, it’s likely that entry-level employees in a brand-new market have very little dispensary knowledge—making it more time-consuming to train them than it would be to train budtenders who have worked in states where marijuana has been legal.
And while dispensaries that are shifting from medical to adult-use—like Illinois—will likely face fewer challenges when it comes to training budtenders, there are still issues they will need to contend with, Yagielo says, such as dealing with a large influx of new customers.
So, how can dispensaries train their budtenders in a new market? Here are six top tips.
1. First things first: Make sure new budtenders understand how to talk to patients without violating HIPAA regulations. As Yagielo explains, “in medical marijuana states, you need to know what they need cannabis for—but you can’t violate their medical privacy either.” To stay within HIPAA law, it’s essential to instruct budtenders “to ask several questions about what relief the patient is looking for rather than discuss anything about illness they have,” he explains. “There are ways to get the information you need in a friendly conversation that will assist the dispensary agent [budtender] in figuring out why that patient is there.”
2.Teach budtenders about cannabinoids. According to Yagielo, knowledge of cannabinoids is the single most important thing budtenders in a new market need to know about. “They are really the active ingredients in cannabis,” he explains, “and each combination works best for a different ailment. [Budtenders] need to know the top dozen cannabinoids and their medicinal properties.” Yagielo recommends teaching budtenders not only what those most common cannabinoids are, but “how common they are, and what medicinal properties they hold.”
3.And teach them about terpenes, too. “After cannabinoids,” Yagielo says, “[terpenes are] the second active ingredient in cannabis, and, once again, different combinations work best for different ailments—and when you combine with uses for the cannabinoid profile you get even more uses.” And because terpenes have their own medicinal properties, they may counter—or enhance—the effects of cannabinoids. That’s why Yagielo recommends new budtenders learn the most common terpenes, too, and how they will interact with cannabinoids.
4.Go over every single product in the store. “The owner or manager needs to go over all the products in the store with the employees and explain what the most common usage and dosage recommendation is—if their employees do not previously have this training,” says Yagielo. And owners and managers should encourage new budtenders to continue studying products in their down time. “Part of a dispensary agent's job, when they are slow, is to study the products in the store: Read the labels, research them online, and ask previous customers their thoughts about them,” Yagielo says. “This, in time, creates a very well-rounded dispensary agent who is well versed in all the products.” And, Yagielo adds, “after a while, [budtenders] only need to do this [kind of studying] with the new products.”
5.Make sure budtenders understand the dispensary’s security protocols. “Each dispensary has its own security—an alarm code, an [under] duress code, even an audible word alarm,” says Yagielo. And because “each dispensary’s security is completely different, even experienced employees usually need this training when starting a new job in a dispensary.”
6. In states that are shifting from medical to adult-use, prepare budtenders for additional customers. “The recreational market can increase a medical dispensary’s daily patient count 10-fold,” Yagielo warns. “However, many [dispensaries] do not hire 10 times as many employees, at least at first. So, the biggest challenge is for the dispensary to find the right number of employees—overall and per shift—and figuring out how to train all employees consistently on the products they have in store.” After all, Yagielo points out, “You don't want one person recommending a different dosage than the person they saw previously.”
Velázquez Bill Would Help Cannabis Firms Secure Insurance
Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez and Rep. Steve Stivers have introduced H.R. 4074, the Clarifying Law Around Insurance Marijuana (CLAIM) Act.
Washington, D.C. – PRESS RELEASE – Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) and Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) have introduced H.R. 4074, the Clarifying Law Around Insurance Marijuana (CLAIM) Act, which would help businesses operating in the rapidly growing cannabis sector to obtain insurance products.
“Due to discrepancies in federal and state law, insurers are understandably reluctant to provide coverage to legitimate, cannabis-based businesses,” said Velázquez. “Without casualty, property and title insurance coverage, the growth of this industry will be impeded if not blocked entirely.”
The CLAIM Act establishes a federal “safe harbor,” preventing federal criminal prosecution of insurers that transact with consumers and would prevent civil liability for agents, brokers and insurers that do business with the cannabis sector.
“Without this legislation, insurers will understandably be reticent to insure businesses operating in the cannabis sector,” Velázquez added. “This means a legal cannabis distributor whose product is ruined from a flood or fire could lose all their capital and their livelihood. This bipartisan bill corrects these problems and I’m proud to introduce it.”
In addition to the insurance provisions, the Velázquez measure would require a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study of hurdles facing women and minority entrepreneurs interested in entering the cannabis sector.
“For far too long, minority communities bore the brunt of our country’s backward marijuana policies,” Velázquez added. “As we normalize these products and this becomes a business, we must ensure minorities, women and other disadvantaged groups are able to enter this market and profit from this burgeoning industry.”
The CLAIM Act has been referred to the House Financial Services Committee, of which Velázquez is the third most senior member. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate.
Golden Leaf Holdings Announces Extension of Chalice Earn-Out Payment
The company has extended the due date for an earn-out payment due to Chalice LLC and its members, related to the acquisition of certain assets and a subsidiary of Chalice on July 7, 2017.
TORONTO, July 29, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PRESS RELEASE -- Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd., a cannabis company built around recognized brands for the wellness and recreational markets, has announced that it has reached an agreement in principle to extend the due date for the US$9,527,350 earn-out payment due to Chalice LLC and its members, related to the acquisition of certain assets and a subsidiary of Chalice on July 7, 2017. US$4,527,350 of the Earn-Out Payment is payable in GLH stock and the balance of US$5,000,000 is payable by wire transfer of immediately available funds. The value of the shares will be based on the 30 day VWAP at the time of any share related payment.
The Extension Agreement provides for the Earn-Out Payment due date to be extended to May 2, 2022, but is not effective until the holders of the Debentures that mature on Nov. 2, 2019, vote to approve the Extraordinary Resolutions described in the company’s press release on July 23, 2019, including the early conversion of the Debentures, and the company signs the Extension Agreement. The meeting of the Debentureholders is scheduled for Aug. 21, 2019.
John Varghese, interim CEO and president of GLH commented, “With the terms of this Extension Agreement agreed to, the company’s attention is now focused on the meeting of the Debentureholders. If the Debentureholders approve the Extraordinary Resolutions, we believe we will have cleaned up the company’s balance sheet to an extent that will allow the company to attract and hire a qualified CEO and greatly enhance the company’s prospects for success.”
More information can be found in the notice mailed to Debentureholders.
Legislative Map
Cannabis Business Times’ interactive legislative map is another tool to help cultivators quickly navigate state cannabis laws and find news relevant to their markets. View More
Melissa Schiller
