The people behind New Jersey cultivator Brighterside Farms may be relatively new to the state, but they are anything but new to cannabis. Their cultivating roots extend back to 2006 and way past that as well, first back east during the legacy years, then in Colorado during the early wild west days, and eventually on to other states as successful consultants, builders, and more, but always with a persistent idea lingering in the back of their minds to one day create an optimal grow of their own. That grow is Brighterside Farms, which began its New Jersey journey this year as a purveyor of craft cannabis grown in living soil. Cannabis Business Executive spoke this week with Brighterside Farms COO Lyndsey Shaw, who founded Brighterside Farms with her partner, Frank Haughton, a cultivator with over 26 years of experience. I was curious if living soil was always a part of the Brighterside mix, so to speak.
“Frank has been cultivating since 1998, even before we were in Colorado,” said Shaw. “We both grew up in Philadelphia, and we’ve always been soil growers, but the living soil really came with maturity and knowledge and space. Because very early on, we were outfitting warehouses that really shouldn’t have had grows in them, and like all the stories you hear of legacy growers, you really had to do what you had to do to and take a chance, cultivate cannabis, and engulf yourself into that culture. We’ve always been soil growers, and it was when we got into consulting in about 2010 that we started to transition into living soil. We also started experimenting with different beds and pushing the limits, and we spent the last decade learning. We’ve had R&D facilities where we were asking, ‘How far can we push these beds till we destroy them so we can define the limitations?’ It’s about trial and error. I would say that since 2010-2012, we’ve really ramped-up with living soil specifically, but we’ve always been soil growers. That’s where our passion is, and I believe that the best fruits and vegetables, and the best cannabis, come from dirt.”
Their time in Colorado was equally formative for the pair. “We were caregivers in Denver under the Brighterside title, and then we moved to Steamboat Springs in 2010, where we had a 2000-square-foot R&D facility up until 2018,” explained Shaw. “We were behind-the-scenes during our stint in Colorado and were specifically consultants once it went recreational. We transitioned into designing actual farming systems, focusing on the steel infrastructure to build out grows, and ended up doing contract manufacturing with a couple of steel manufacturers in the States. We patented a system for vertical farming, and created mobile tables that can handle large living soil beds, and from 2014 until now, we have been building out grows nationwide. In 2018-2019, we started operating farms. We operated Lyra Cannabis in Michigan and the Groff North America pharmaceutical grow run by the DEA.”
They had developed formidable skills – designing facilities, managing facilities, running other people’s grows – but still considered themselves cultivators first and foremost. “Absolutely, we did,” stated Shaw. “It’s funny, because you start with cultivating because it’s your passion, but our careers have taken us so many different directions, from consulting to building grows to running them. And you start to wear all these different hats. I mean, I taught myself how to do electrical engineering drawings in order to design facilities. And then you look back 15 years later, and you’re like, wow, a lot happened, but in the end, we’re still cultivators. What drives the advancement of our knowledge and education is how do we make our grows better. That’s really where innovation comes from for us, whether it is designing different things or just coming up with different formulas, it’s about how do we make this better, and because things can always get batter, you never stop learning.”
From Consulting to Cultivating
The decision to embrace consulting had been a calculated move on their part, and it paid off handsomely, but the market was also sending signals that change was on the way. “When the medicinal market happened in Colorado back in 2007-2008, and then recreational came, Frank and I felt like we were at a crossroad, where you make a right-hand turn and you open your own spot, or you make a left-hand turn, and the choice we took was to go the consulting route,” said Shaw of their mid-career decision. “But it had always been lingering for us, and we wanted the opportunity to showcase the products that we can actually produce.”
The long on-ramp had truly served a tangible purpose, however. “We are so fortunate to be in this position, because we’ve spent the last 15 years learning from every company that we’ve worked with, and it was just a matter of time,” she added. “It had always been a goal of ours to be able to say, okay, we have full control. We have full ownership. We don’t have outside investors. We don’t have to talk to anybody. We get to make every decision we want. And from studying the marketplace, we know how to execute and bring this type of product to market and follow a specific script that we know can be very successful. We had been studying and waiting and waiting for the perfect time, and so we knew legalization was heading to New Jersey, and for us, it was, okay, the time is now, let’s make the transition and move everything back to New Jersey. Let’s focus on getting this operation up and running, and it essentially will be a quintessential moment for us. It’s what we’ve always wanted to do, and we’ve just been sidelined for a very long time.”
One big upside of working with so many companies is that you learn what to do as well as what not to do. “So, there’s a couple points here,” Shaw said on that score. “First, the financial side of entering this marketplace. We know it is very expensive to build a grow, to build a dispensary, and that anything you do in cannabis just has a hefty price tag to enter. By entering as a micro business, we were able to build this thing out completely ourselves and take the knowledge that we’ve learned over the last decades and use that to our advantage. For example, I was able to do our architectural drawings, oversee the projects, and do the electrical drawings for the building. So, entering the marketplace as a micro business enabled us to control our costs, and we don’t have to bring in any investors. It’s just Frank and me that own it. and that has huge advantages.”
Brighterside Farms’ product is currently for sale in around 19 store in New Jersey, said Shaw, who added, “I just onboarded three more stores in the last week. We’ll probably end up in around 28 to 30 stores, and that spreads our brand across the state, creating enough market tension to keep us relevant. How do you sell product consistently and get your vendors constantly calling you for new product? You can’t surge the market with too much production, and if you have too little production, your brand becomes washed out. So, entering at this size was very calculated for us, being able to control that supply and demand and constantly keep that tension between us, our retailers, and the end-users. That was really our perspective on it.”
But is it not true that you can only control what you produce? “With that being said,” responded Shaw, “I think there’s a dance of marketing and branding, One of the biggest failures I’ve seen, and what I think is one of the biggest successes for us, has to do with branding and marketing. You can have a fabulous product, you can win Cannabis Cups, you can do all those things, but if you have no brand identity behind them, it all washes out to nothing. I can sit here and say, Oh, we’re calculated by our size, or we are calculated by our supply and demand and how our product moves through the industry, but if we don’t have the proper story behind us, that all falls by the wayside.
“In conjunction with being calculated,” she added, “we’ve needed that brand identity and that story and that brand architecture to excel Brighterside Farms’ name, and right now we have a lot of vendors that reach out every single day. During this phone call, I got two requests for product from new vendors, and a lot of it has to do with consumers coming into their store and saying, ‘Do you carry Brighterside products?’ So, by us creating that identity behind us, we’re getting ahead of our retailers and hitting the consumers at their core, and they’re going in and asking for Brighterside products.”
I asked Shaw what her experience had been in terms of quality product and its available in the New Jersey market. “I think the New Jersey market is starved for quality product,” she replied. “One of the biggest casualties I’ve seen in my time in cannabis has been that the production of quality cannabis has gone down drastically, because a lot of those legacy growers, the people that started the industry way back when, are out of the game. They got burnt out or the investors came in and pushed them out, so now you have a bunch of Betty Crocker growers following ingredient bottles of salt-based agricultural nutrients, and they don’t know the why they’re doing it, they don’t know what the plant wants, and they don’t know how to deliver a super nutritional product.
“So,” she continued, “I think when you bring a living soil organic product to the marketplace, people are like, ‘What have I been smoking for the last 10 years?’ The biggest compliment we get is people saying they can’t smoke anybody else’s weed at this point, we’ve ruined weed for them, because there’s really only a handful – not even a handful – I can count on one hand who is actually growing in soil in the state, and they’re not doing organics. So, right now, Brighterside is one of one, and it really does speak volumes when you talk about quality product, because when you smoke a quality product, that product consistently delivers, whether it’s the experience, the high, the smell, the texture, it’s always there.”
Understanding the Cannabis Consumer
I am curious if Shaw has developed an overriding feeling or philosophy about the cannabis consumer in general, what they’re looking for and willing to pay for or not? “When I look at the cannabis consumer, I think about it like a pie chart,” she said. “You have a certain section of individuals who are the THC chasers, but I honestly believe that that has to do with education. I think they don’t realize that the number on a bottle doesn’t necessarily mean that they get higher. I also think you’re always going to have the individual that wants the new genetics that come from California, or the influencer genetics that influencers talk up. But I have also seen over the last five years a growing number of cannabis users that just want a better product, and having experience in the black market as well, you see people that demand a lower price. ‘How come I can’t buy this pound for less? I should be able to buy an eighth for $20 or $10 or whatever it is?’
“But I think people are finally sick of that,” she added. “They’ve realized that when you put demands like that on the cannabis industry, the product you get is garbage. I think people are finally starting to realize that they would actually rather spend more money on better cannabis. $50 an eighth, $60 an eighth sounds ridiculous in some areas, but that $50-$60 eighth is going to last me a much longer period of time, because it actually is higher nutritional value. It also gets me stoned longer and I don’t have to smoke as much. So, there is a division of quality of product, and I have found that the consumers in New Jersey and all over the US are starting to say, ‘You know what, I do want something better. I’m tired of drinking Natty Light and Budweiser. I want to drink a craft IPA, or whatever analogy you want to use.
Quality costs, of course. “Overall, our products are definitely being sold at the higher end of the spectrum,” explained Shaw. “In more mature marketplaces that we’ve been in, our products have gotten double of what MSOs have sold for. To give you some perspective, we are definitely at the top of the marketplace in New Jersey selling our pounds, and we’re not differentiating our products right now, but generally selling everything at the same price.
“I don’t think you’ll see an economy line come out of Brighterside,” she added. “I don’t think that will ever happen. We are strictly focused on cultivating heritage genetics, newer genetics, and then reserve genetics that come out every once in a while, so that’s where we’re at. And right now, I don’t see the marketplace changing, so I really don’t see things changing for Brighterside until other vendors enter the market that can consistently deliver an organic product with the same quality.”
They are releasing limited form factors as well. “We’re only selling eighths and pre rolls,” said Shaw. “We have requests for larger quantities to go out the door, but we’re not going to do that, because we are so limited in production. If we sold ounces to dispensaries, we would be out of stock in no time., and that would not help our brand and our distribution across the state. In the future, we will get into manufacturing. We have some space on our property to do greenhouses, so we can do a base ingredient that either goes straight to extractors or we will end up doing it inhouse here. That’s something that we’ll be doing in the future, but as far as the cannabis we produce, it will strictly be eighths, and anything that doesn’t make it into a jar will go into our prerolls. All of our prerolls are whole buds. We don’t do shake, which gets sold to manufacturers for craft-like, small-batch production.”
All About the Genetics
As anticipated, the subject of genetics is greeted with rapt enthusiasm by Shaw. “We were very fortunate to meet some amazing people throughout our lifetimes, and one individual ended up gifting us his entire seed collection before he passed away,” recounted Shaw. “Literally, a package showed up at our door one day with an entire seed collection that had been started in the 70s up until the present day. Having that genetic bang for us was just phenomenal, but in addition, as cultivators, you collect genetics as you go. You grow a plant, you find what you love, and you hold onto it. We’ve been growing a lot of our genetics that are on the marketplace today for over 12 years straight, and you always keep those type of genetics near and dear to your heart.
“In addition to that, we absolutely dabble in genetic breeding,” she continued. “We are very calculated when we do it, and we do it on a small scale with plants that we believe are strong and have great qualities. We also love the classic genetics that seem to disappear, and while everyone is flooded with these really outrageous names that constantly keep coming on the market, we’re on the lookout and always trying to revitalize genetics from the past. Because I believe that when you pop a jar of Trainwreck or old school Sour Diesel, that smell transports you. Whether you have a memory from back when you were young or were at a festival, I believe that genuinely happens, and for us it’s about delivering that experience to our customers through our genetic selection.”
I was delighted to hear they also do limited runs of special strains. “And the cool thing about the genetics we have is that when we do a limited drop, it’s not gone forever,” she noted. “I’m sure you’ve seen situations where people do a limited drop and then you never see that genetic again. It’s the polar opposite to us. We’ve been holding onto genetics, and we have twenty genetics that are active that I can call up right now. I call it my A and B squad. I can call somebody up from the B squad and bring it into production at any time. We like to have fun with that and do limited drops, but the genetics are never gone. And that’s been one of the biggest questions that we hear from retailers and consumers in general: ‘Is that gone forever? That’s not gone forever, right?’ And we’re very excited to be able to say, ‘Absolutely not!’ So, we’re very calculated with what we’re doing. We want to provide our staples that you love, but we also want to give you fresh options and then take them back. We want to play with it.”
Their genetics bank of over 100 strains allows Brighterside to play, but they also strategically limit the number of strains available at any given time. “We’re looking at around eight at any given time, but we have 20 in rotation,” explained Shaw. “For example, when we first started our living soil, the beds were very hot, and were high in nutrients and very enriched, so we brought in our three best genetics that are the most stable and resilient to diversity. That was our GH1, our Velvet OG, and our Free Mac, and we ran with those three genetics all summer. People were kind of surprised by that, and were like, ‘Don’t you have something new coming out?’ No, we’re rocking these three because we needed to make sure our beds are stable. We also have these fall flavors coming out in the next week and a half, seven new genetics, and not all of them would have produced very well in those enriched beds. So, we are definitely calculated in what we’re doing, and I’m excited that the reception from the marketplace has been so good, but people were shocked that we just had the same flavors for three months.”
Getting Settled in NJ
Brighterside Farm’s first planting went in in January and they harvested in March, said Shaw. New Jersey is a relatively new rec state, and I asked Shaw about the state of lab testing in the state. Testing accuracy and consistency is of course a huge issue nationally, and every state requires different testing definitions and thresholds. “It’s funny operating in four different states, California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Jersey,” said Shaw of their experience operating a number of facilities. “In California and Colorado, you send in your own sample. The lab does not come out. So right there, there’s a huge problem, and we’re seeing the exact ramifications of that problem in the current day. When it comes to New Jersey and Michigan, where the lab actually physically comes out, I think that’s the first step to having consistent lab tests. It’s not perfect and I think there are a lot of advancement that need to happen, but we also need to have an open discussion about it, because we want safe products for our consumers.
“There are definitely people who do some really shady things when it comes to producing cannabis, and that comes down to morals,” she added. “And if you have bad morals, you’re going to do whatever you can to make sure you pass the test. But the way I see it is if you can build a solid relationship with your lab and have an open discussion with them, if you have a failed test, you can ask why? Why did you fail? Is there is an opportunity for you to fix it within your facility? So, you can work with your lab and have that relationship. Don’t just get pissed at a lab and start shopping for other labs trying to get the answer you want. That’s not the right thing to do. So, for me, New Jersey is better off right now because they make the labs come and take the sample.
“I just think we need to have a serious, progressive discussion about the testing ramifications and what makes sense,” she reiterated. “In other industries, like tobacco, there sre different ramifications for what you have to test for. Limits are very different. You have arsenic, for instance, which we have to tread lightly about because of kelp and the different organic materials that we use. So, when we get our test, I don’t care about the THC and the cannabinoid side of things. I mean, I care, but I’m looking at the actual facts that nobody looks at. I’m monitoring my levels from grow to grow, ‘Did I break that down enough? Do I need to skip something here?’ I’m looking at that side of things, so I think there are two ways to look at testing. There’s testing for safety and testing for advancement of what you’re actually doing in the grow.”
“Now, when it comes to living soil and microbials, and passing testing, it is a fine dance,” she added, “because a lot of our microbials are for the beds. Like Aspergillus, which I believe we’re going to be testing for soon in New Jersey. I always shake my head at that one, because there’s more Aspergillus outside my door right now than there is inside my grow room. So, I think we need to have an honest discussion about things like that, about what’s practical and what’s not practical,. I mean, New Jersey just copied the state of Maryland’s regulations, so much so that they didn’t even change the header of the actual rules and regulations. They literally copied and pasted Maryland, and were like, ‘Okay, these are our rules, too.’”
What about the use of pesticides in New Jersey cannabis? I assumed Brighterside utilizes IPM in its grow. “Yes, we have IPM protocols, and we use things like vinegar,” said Shaw. “We try to keep things super sterile, so vinegar can go a long way, and hydrogen peroxide and things like that are also totally safe. For us, if you’re using pesticides and insecticides, you have a bigger problem. Are you preventative or are you curing a problem? And again, it goes back to sanitation. I think pesticide use comes into play when people are lazy and don’t do a good job and they’re trying to do a quick fix. The sad part is most of those pesticides that they use don’t actually cure the problem. For me, I haven’t seen too much pesticide use, and I haven’t heard of too much pesticide use here in New Jersey, but we’re also just getting started.”
It’s often a similar conversation with respect to irradiated and remediated product. “We’re very against radiation and remediating product,” said Shaw. “In fact, on our jar, it specifically says ‘radiation free.’ That is printed on our labels because we are so against it. Again, you have a larger problem at hand if your solution is to shove the product you just produced into a $500,000 machine, zap it, and then put it in the marketplace. I just think that we’re losing the battle at that point. So, I am a huge fan of no radiation product. I don’t think that there are enough studies out there. I don’t know what radiating cannabis does – it might do nothing, it might do something, I have no idea – so that is not a solution to me. It is the easy way out of not knowing how to properly cultivate cannabis, and I’m super proud to say that Brighterside does no remediation.
“If we were to fail a test,” she added, “that product would go to a manufacturer, and that would be that. We wouldn’t compromise any standard to put product like that in the marketplace, and you just have to factor that in when you’re talking about your business plan. At some point you’re going to fail tests, or something’s going to happen that has to be a part of the discussion, and you have to have a clear and concise plan if you were to go through that. I’ve been with companies where I’ve been a consultant and come in after the fact, when they’ve had six months of failed testing, and they’re scratching their heads, going, ‘I don’t know what to do. We’re on the brink of losing everything. What do we do?’ That’s a real situation, and I can see why people take the easy way out and say, ‘If I just buy this $500,000 machine, all those problems go away.’”
Some people are also known to zap product ahead of testing just to head off any issues. “There are cultivations in New Jersey that I know of that are actively doing that,” noted Shaw. “They are irradiating their product before it hits the marketplace and not telling consumers that it’s been irradiated. That is absolutely happening in New Jersey right now.”
A Calculated Future
Even as it slowly builds its capacity, Brighterside Farms is profitable, said Shaw. “We’re looking forward to fully having our ROI within the next 15 months, which is really great,” she added. “We’re positioning ourselves to make sure that we actually are turning a profit, because there’s nothing worse than weird cannabis math that people put together in their heads.”
With a process that has been honed over the years, I wondered if Brighterside has expansion plans beyond New Jersey at this point in time. “We have some in-state expansion plans right now,” said Shaw. “We have space to expand our grow indoors right now, and we have already started that process. By the start of Q2 next year, we’ll have an additional indoor room online, and that definitely was part of our plan from the beginning. In addition to that, we have substantial space on our property to have greenhouses, which have already been approved by the town for ingredient product, for manufacturing. Once we get to that point, the discussion of going to another state is definitely relevant.
“But I’m more interested in looking at federal licenses,” she pointed out. “With the potential rescheduling of cannabis, I’m personally more interested in the research and development side of things. I think there’s tremendous value there, and there really isn’t anybody looking to become a domestic supplier for potential cannabis drug production. So, I’m very interested in that.”
Rescheduling, Descheduling, or Something Else?
Having grown weed under the auspices of the DEA, Shaw brings a rare take on federal cannabis cultivation protocols and what the industry can expect to see in terms of future protocols if weed is moved to Schedule 3. “First of all, I’m absolutely an advocate for decriminalization of cannabis,” she said when asked. “I’m also absolutely an advocate for rescheduling, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I think rescheduling and having the tax consequence of 280E going away is phenomenal in that I think it turns semi-profitable cannabis businesses into profitable businesses so that people who are barely breaking even can finally turn a profit. I think that immediately impacts the cannabis space overnight, and I pray every day that that goes through next year. I know they have a meeting in December about it, and many thousands of comments they have to go through, but I think from their perspective that it really revolves around financial research money, and with Schedule I, it’s very difficult to get proper funding to do drug research.
“But when you go down to Schedule 3,” she added, “that really opens things up for research development in cannabis, and makes it more achievable, because a lot of the research that’s going on right now for drug production is coming from Canada into the US. So, domestically, they’re importing product from Canada and doing research that direction, which is really terrible, because if we’re going to find a drug with cannabis, we want to have a domestic supplier. We don’t want to have a supplier that is based in another country. And that’s where things become really interesting, because can you really buckle down and deliver a consistent product that the pharmaceutical side of things can really study to see what different cannabinoids can do, and nail down something that could be huge for so many drug options and ideas that could be beneficial. We just don’t know right now because there is no true research going on I believe because there is no money to fund that research.”
I also had to ask Shaw about home grow, which New Jersey still outlaws, a cannabis felony in my book. “I’m all for home growing,” enthused Shaw. “I think there are absolute advantages to it, and I know there’s a movement in Jersey to try to allow medical patients to grow at home, which I think is a no-brainer. But New Jersey has also been an MSO-run state for quite some time, they don’t want it, and New Jersey is a highly lobbied state. Right now, I think the right people aren’t hearing the right things. It’s just interesting. I think people should have the ability to cultivate, like with the Colorado model: six plants, three flowering and three veg. That’s nothing super crazy. It gives people the ability to save money and grow cannabis, but I also believe that people will start to realize how hard it is to craft cannabis when they have the opportunity to do it themselves. They will realize and start to appreciate how tough it really is.”
Shaw and I realized we could banter for hours, but the interview needed to end. I asked her if the Brightside Farms team receives a lot of calls from parties interested in working with them or importing their system to another market. “We definitely do,” said Shaw. “It’s not something that we’re opposed to, but it really comes down to the people, because now you’re talking about partnership, and partnership is a very tricky thing. I’ve seen some great partnerships and I’ve seen some really terrible partnerships. I haven’t met that person yet, but we’re potentially willing to do that and that’s how Brighterside operations really came about. With the vertical farms company, we were building so many grows that we kept getting calls like, ‘Okay, you build out the grow. Can you run it now?’ And that is essentially how we got the pharmaceutical job, and how we moved into Michigan and all these different places.
“That’s why we always said we’re the product behind your brand,” she added. “That was the mission statement, that we can just be behind the scenes, grow the product, and you knew that we delivered the best product. The problem is that people are unrealistic about what things cost and what the cost of quality cannabis is, because the cost to produce a quality cannabis product is very high. So, there’s a balance there, and it’s interesting. I’ll say that many people want the best, but they don’t want to pay for the best, or they don’t want to understand the economics of what it takes to deliver the best.”
That said, was it still her opinion and belief that the living soil Brighterside model will pay off in the end? “Absolutely,” she said. “Our mission statement is every gram has an impact, and if I can make sure that every jar that leaves the facility has an impact on that end user, that creates brand loyalty. It creates a stigma – ‘I only smoke Brighterside’ – and that sets the bar for our retailers, so that when other new cultivators come online, are they the same quality as Brighterside?”