NORWOOD, Mass., August 10, 2021 -- PRESS RELEASE -- MariMed Inc., a multi-state cannabis operator focused on health and wellness, has announced a series of appointments intended to help the company drive sales of its award-winning brand portfolio.  

Senior CPG marketer and former Sam Adams beer Chief Marketing Officer, Robert Hall, has been appointed as a Senior Brand and Marketing Advisor to MariMed. In that capacity, he will help MariMed establish data-supported, distinct brand strategies and brand building techniques as the company expands the distribution of its top selling brands and products across the country. Hall will also assist the company in the expansion of its marketing team and organization. 

Hall has been recognized for helping transform both the U.S. craft beer (Sam Adams brand) and hard seltzer (Truly brand) categories while working at the Boston Beer Company. Earlier in his career in a series of senior leadership roles, Hall was responsible for the overall marketing and profitability for Kellogg Company’s new Cereals and the marketing of the Natural & Functional Foods division. 

Kevin Compagna has joined MariMed as Vice President, Wholesale & Licensing for North America. The accomplished sales executive will be responsible for driving revenues and market share for the company’s top-selling products, including Betty’s Eddies fruit chews and Nature’s Heritage high quality flower brand, in markets where MariMed is already licensed as well as new markets via licensing partnerships. 

Compagna brings over two decades of spirits, beer and carbonated beverage sales experience, representing the full Constellation Brands portfolio at distributor Horizon Beverage, the Stirrings division of Diageo, the Moet Hennessy portfolio for that company, and Pepsi-Cola products as a Key Accounts Manager before that. 

“I’m thrilled to announce today’s appointments and look forward to the many contributions each of these highly accomplished executives will each make in helping us achieve our business goals,” said MariMed President and CEO Bob Fireman. “Refining our product portfolio strategy and maximizing the revenue potential of our award-winning brands are core drivers of the strategic plan we began implementing last year, and Robert and Kevin’s expertise will contribute immensely to our efforts. Our plan has been working and MariMed is among the most efficiently run, highly profitable companies in our peer set.”

What started as a tour to celebrate summer and highlight a new line of cannabis edibles transformed into an effort to bring the COVID-19 vaccine to the people of Colorado during a series of pop-up vaccination clinics this past weekend.

Wana Brands, a cannabis edibles manufacturer, and The Green Solution, a Colorado-based dispensary chain, partnered with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to provide COVID-19 vaccines to the local community during Denver-area stops along Wana’s Summer of Quick Tour.

The tour, which launched in early July to kick off the summer, initially aimed to highlight Wana’s Quick Fast-Acting Gummies. The company set up a van at dispensary locations along the tour to celebrate the new product line.

“It was basically a pop-up in the parking lot, and that was inspired more or less from the post-COVID summer that everybody was really looking forward to,” Kim Gibson, a territory account manager for Wana Brands, told Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary. “They had the vaccinations, and there was this real sense of getting out and everybody being social again.”

As the summer progressed and more information surfaced about the Delta variant of COVID-19, Wana and The Green Solution wanted to encourage more people to get vaccinated.

“With the pandemic last year, we saw a lot of folks suffering from different levels of the pandemic, from financial [impacts] to folks who were passing away from COVID,” said Steve Lopez, CEO of The Green Solution. “We always want to help out all the communities that we serve. … We’re trying to increase vaccination rates and trying to make sure we’re doing our part to combat this pandemic.”

Wana approached The Green Solution with the idea to turn some stops along the Summer of Quick Tour into pop-up vaccination clinics.

“We wanted to basically look for other opportunities to make vaccinations available for people in Colorado,” Gibson said. “The consensus was to do it with a dispensary because we could target people where it would be very convenient for them [because] maybe it just wasn’t available to them until now.”

“A lot of things we’ve been hearing out in the news is that a lot of people are not getting vaccinated because of convenience—it’s too far away,” Lopez added. “This gives us the opportunity to take advantage of the traffic that’s coming to our stores to help get us to our level of vaccination rates that are known to make an impact on safety.”

Wana is a fully vaccinated company, Gibson said, and the leadership team is passionate about not only providing a safe working environment for the company’s employees, but also providing support to the local communities it serves.

“For Wana, it was important for us to support our community in offering opportunities for vaccination,” Gibson said. “We value our communities. We want our communities to be safe, and we want them to stay out of harm’s way. In our minds, becoming vaccinated not only serves our local community, but also our state as a whole. It was a unique opportunity that we felt that we should definitely step into and serve as well as we could.”

Photo courtesy of Wana Brands

Since Wana and The Green Solution were already working together on events to showcase Wana’s Quick product line—and since The Green Solution is one of Wana’s largest dispensary partners with 23 locations across Colorado—Gibson said the dispensary chain was a good fit to host the vaccination clinics.

“They definitely had the bandwidth and the structure internally to help support this initiative because there are a lot of moving parts that are involved with putting on one of these events,” she said. “A lot of moving parts had to be connected, and it really takes a strong partnership between the dispensary and the brand to put this into place and make this go off without a hitch.”

The vaccination clinics were held Saturday, Aug. 7 through Monday, Aug. 9 at The Green Solution’s dispensaries in Edgewater, Aurora and Northglenn. The vaccines were administered in a separate tent in the parking lot during what Wana called the “Vaccine Edition” of the Summer of Quick Tour.

“We made a little special edition to highlight these particular stops to emphasize that there were going to be the vaccination clinics available,” Gibson said.

The clinics were generally well-received by the public, she added, with people pre-registering for the vaccinations and walk-ins who saw the tent on-site and were interested in receiving the vaccine.

“It’s really turned into a political thing, which is unfortunate,” Lopez said. “But we’re not political about this. This is not a red or blue state thing for us. … All we’re doing is trying to help out the community. … It just goes back to taking care of our communities and our employees.”

The Green Solution launched its dispensary locations with online ordering and express windows, which Lopez said helped the company comply with the coronavirus-related restrictions that went into effect last year. The dispensary had much of the infrastructure needed for curbside pickup already in place, for example, and is currently looking at ways to offer delivery services.

After seeing the success of the vaccination clinics, other dispensary groups in Colorado have reached out to the Wana team to ask if they can participate in similar events. Gibson said that although Wana has not scheduled any additional clinics at this time, the company is evaluating other opportunities.

“I think it’s even more important that we make these opportunities available for people just as a sign that we’re all in this together,” she said.

“We just are trying to get the word out so that people know, even if you don’t shop with us, you don’t even have to come in or any of that,” Lopez added. “Just come by, and we’ll get you vaccinated."