California-based Stone Road Farms has landed in Michigan.
It’s another feather in the cap of this growing business, rooted on a 57-acre, off-grid biodynamic farm in Nevada City, Calif. The launch in Michigan follows similar moves in Massachusetts and Oklahoma, and this time around Stone Road Farms teamed up with Cheboygan-based Gamut Cannabis for the entrance into the Great Lakes region.
The company is kicking things off in Michigan with its 1-gram solventless hash-infused prerolls. Next up will be five-packs of 0.7-gram prerolls and half-ounce bags of flower.
sabrina wheeler and lex corwinWhile plenty of business are contracting (and plenty more are indeed expanding), Stone Road Farms CEO Lex Corwin said that he and his team are finding ways of cutting through the tough economic pressures and capitalizing on opportunities with like-minded people in the industry.
“We’ve constantly been on the lookout for partners who share a lot of our same ethos on operations, cultivation,” Corwin said.
That ethos can be summed up simply as “people-first.” Stone Road Farms maintains a small team producing specific range of SKUs, most notably their infused preroll lineup. (Not for nothing, this is a high-growth market segment. In California, infused prerolls made up 56% of total preroll sales in Q4 2022, according to BDSA data.)
As for Gamut, Corwin said that a big part of what Stone Road stands for is that commitment to supporting small farmers across this industry.
“They shared a lot of the same values as us, and they were looking for a preroll brand to bring into that market,” Corwin said. “Similar to how a lot of other markets are starting to see major price compression, Michigan is no different. So, they were looking for a value-oriented preroll brand that could help them grab a lot of market share.”
Corwin said he saw reflections of Stone Road in Gamut’s small, family-owned business. A flight to Michigan and in-person meeting helped seal the deal, giving Corwin and his team a chance to vet Gamut’s production setup: Seeing the cleanliness of Gamut’s facilities was key, and an important reason why these types of partnerships should be struck on the ground, face to face, Corwin said.
Stone Road has operated in northern California since 2016, and along the way Corwin and his lean team have honed their best practices and learned to find efficiencies in the highly complex environment of the legal cannabis business.
READ MORE: How Stone Road Farms Maintains Steady Growth Amid Industry Challenges
“Finding a group that already has connections and wanting to support those operators [lets us] replicate our supply chain as close to California as possible,” Corwin said, “just in terms of using post-consumer materials and supporting more diverse farms and operators—and generally being good stewards of the community and the environment.”
