Native Sun will celebrate the grand opening of South Boston’s first adult-use cannabis dispensary Oct. 28, a milestone that’s been roughly six years in the making.
The Massachusetts-based, vertically integrated cannabis operator is on a mission to produce and sell the best flower possible, born out of a deep appreciation for cannabis.
“I really tried to eliminate all the other distractions on the team so they can really focus on just making one product as really high quality as they can,” Matt Gamble, Native Sun’s chief operating officer, tells Cannabis Business Times. “We partnered with our favorite local cultivators to fill out the rest of our flower menu. … We look for cultivators that have similar values and a similar appreciation for cannabis that we do—people that don’t cut corners and go the extra mile to produce a really great cannabis flower. Those are the type of people we like to work with.”
Native Sun’s focus on high-quality flower production means that the company produces only flower at its cultivation facility in Fitchburg. It then sells that flower at its existing dispensaries in Hudson and North Attleborough, and partners with third-party vendors to provide additional product offerings, including prerolls, edibles, topicals, tinctures and vape cartridges.
The company also prides itself on offering one of the largest selections of cannabis beverages in Massachusetts.
“All of our drinks are less than five dollars, and we have case pricing that is the lowest in the whole state,” Gamble says. “That’s a new category, so we’re really supporting a lot of the exciting new brands and producers that are coming out on the beverage side.”
Bringing Cannabis to South Boston
Native Sun opened its first store in 2022.
Gamble describes South Boston as a “fantastic neighborhood” for the company’s latest dispensary location, which will open as the community’s first adult-use cannabis retailer on Saturday with plenty of promotions and entertainment, including a bong giveaway and a live DJ. In addition, the first 50 guests on opening day will receive a free Native Sun T-shirt, and anyone in the store at 4:20 p.m. that day will receive a complimentary Native Sun lighter.
“We started the process six years ago, believe it or not,” Gamble says. “The founder of the company knew that this neighborhood was going to be a real great fit for our curated cannabis experience. We have a real signature retail brand where we curate all of our products. We have really high-quality cannabis and felt like the community here would respond very positively to that. Over the course of those six years, obviously the business has changed significantly. However, the strategy here for South Boston remains the same, and surprisingly, in those six years, no other dispensaries opened. We’re actually the first and only cannabis dispensary in the entire South Boston neighborhood still.”
The dispensary is less than a mile from Boston’s Seaport District, minutes away from Logan International Airport, and has on-site parking with roughly 30 spaces.
The store spans more than 3,000 square feet and features a diverse product selection, from Native Sun’s in-house flower offerings to nearly 50 varieties of cannabis-infused beverages, as well as prerolls, vapes and edibles.
The new dispensary has roughly 30 employees from the local community, which Native Sun hired through several job fairs and online platforms.
“We’ve gotten a great response to the store, and we’re fully staffed for the grand opening and ready to take care of people’s needs here,” Gamble says.
Native Sun is no stranger to community engagement; the team works with local charities in Hudson and North Attleborough, and sponsors and hosts its own events in the local communities.
The company is taking a similar approach in South Boston.
“We really want to be good neighbors,” Gamble says. “We totally understand that people have a pre-existing stigma toward cannabis, and one of our goals is to help redefine that by offering a really high-end, professional experience that’s safe for people and addresses the typical concerns that people have with a dispensary. We have a big parking lot here and staff to handle traffic management. We have a full security system and security team, so we can avoid a lot of those concerns that people have before they see how dispensaries operate in the neighborhood.”
Native Sun also plans to work with local nonprofit organizations in South Boston; it has donated part of its building to a group that represents 41 of the community’s nonprofits so the organizations can use the space to further their work in the neighborhood.
“At the end of the day, we sell cannabis just like other cannabis stores do,” Gamble says. “But we are a very value-driven company, and we … have really two products that we offer. There’s how you feel when you smoke our cannabis and how you feel when you come into our stores. Especially in South Boston, we want to bring in elements of the cannabis lifestyle to the store.”
Native Sun has partnered with local artists and fashion companies to offer curated music and cannabis lifestyle merchandise at the store. Customers can not only purchase a preroll while visiting the South Boston dispensary, but also hard-to-find shoes.
“We partnered with a local company called Laced, who are a big streetwear retailer,” Gamble says. “We actually have a pop-up store in our store where our customers have access to just an unbelievable catalog of amazing streetwear and sneakers, in particular. We have a great Nike display here with some very hard-to-find shoes available. And then if people are interested, we can, having access to the Laced warehouse, help procure all sorts of cool fashion items to go with your high-end cannabis here.”
Popping Seeds
While Native Sun doesn’t do any in-house breeding, Gamble says the team works with several breeders and conducts a lot of pheno-hunting, which they call “popping seeds.”
“We grow plants from seed, and we run them for multiple cycles concurrently until we find the genetic exception,” Gamble says. “Whenever you open a pack of seeds, you’re kind of rolling the dice on the genetics in there, and if you do it enough, eventually you find some really, really fantastic phenotypes.”
Native Sun procures seeds from all over the country and then works to find its own unique phenotypes of different cultivars to help set the company apart from the crowd.
“One of our signatures is that we have actual sticky flower,” Gamble says. “We really put a lot of work into the drying and curing process. We actually built our facility not the conventional way, but we have the right amount of space and the right systems to really allow for each strain to be fully cured and to really develop into what the cultivator thinks it should be before the customers get it. Our vice president of cultivation actually personally QCs [quality controls] every single batch through the curing process and decides when it’s ready for packaging.
“We really do go through the extra steps required to produce really great cannabis that unfortunately a lot of companies skip because they don’t have the time or don’t have the space. Our cultivation team [has] over 80 years’ experience combined growing cannabis in Massachusetts, so we’ve all been able to learn from all the mistakes of our past and really put it into this product to make it really special.”
Further Expansion
Native Sun’s focus this year has been opening the South Boston dispensary, as well as continuing to optimize the company’s operations. Going into next year, Gamble says the team is excited to solidify its place in the South Boston community and begin selling Native Sun’s flower wholesale to other stores in Massachusetts.
“We don’t produce a ton of products, so it’d be very exclusive small batches available, again, with retailers that we feel like have the same values that we do,” he says. “That’s very important to us, that the respect for cannabis and the quality that the consumers want is there. That’s how we operate, and that’s who we want to partner with.”
Native Sun has one more store opening planned for 2024: a medical cannabis dispensary in Braintree. The team also wants to obtain licenses to sell medical cannabis at the South Boston and Hudson locations.
“The [medical] program is definitely still alive here,” Gamble says. “We really want to serve anybody who wants to come and get some Native Sun cannabis, and we want to make sure the medical patients at our stores can continue to buy our products under the medical program.”
