Building on the Legacy of Cheeba Chews

There is not much brand recognition in cannabis still to this day, so it was somewhat notable in 2020 when Green Horizons released a survey indicating that, among other findings, “Across 20 brands tested, only three—Leafs by Snoop, Cheeba Chews, and Marley Natural—are known by more than one in five cannabis users.” But the three brands did not arrive at their fame by similar routes. Unlike the other two, Cheeba Chews is a legitimate legacy brand founded in Colorado in 2009 by James Howler (CEO), and Dave Maggio (COO), and Eric Leslie (CMO). The brand is so long in the tooth, in fact, that some people are surprised to learn it is still around. But around it is, and quietly but in a big way, the Cheeba Chews brand is finally stepping out from the shadow of its own success to remind the world that not only is it a brand with different products to offer, but legacy done well has deep-rooted advantages in the modern market. CBE recently had the opportunity to chat with Leslie, who cofounded Cheeba Chews at a time when regular candy lazily sprayed with an unidentified cannabis-derived goop was commonly sold in dispensaries. It was that Wild West of edibles into which Leslie and the team introduced something entirely new.

“James [Howler] had a small medical grow, had some extra trim, and didn’t quite know what to do with it,” recalled Leslie of the original impulse to start a company. “We also saw that there were inconsistencies with edibles. It was cookies and brownies and cheesecakes, and he saw the opportunity and started playing with different products, and taffy, the viscosity, the way it held the extract from the trim was pretty consistent. We threw some names on a Board, and here we are today.” Sounds easy enough, and it wasn’t. Making a better product in those days required vision and discipline.

“The one thing about James, a lifelong friend of mine, is he’s almost OCD, very detail oriented to do things in the right way,” said Leslie. “And so, we were always infusing, and with the taffy, when we were able to melt it down into almost a liquid viscosity, the way the oil absorbed into the taffy and the technique that we used in order to stir the taffy so that it spread consistently throughout, became a mandate. The technique and the consistency in which we did it was so critical, especially at that time when people were spraying; sometimes this got sprayed a little more, and sometimes that got sprayed a little less, and you never really knew what you had.

“The other thing we did different was that we were testing before it was mandated,” he added. “We needed to know, just going back into James’s brain and the level of standard that we wanted to keep. How much oil, what was the potency percentage of that oil when we put it into the taffy, and is it spreading consistently throughout the pan? We worked with Rm3 early on, and that’s how we knew what we were doing was effective and working consistently with each of our products, because we were testing it before anybody was even thinking of testing their products.”

Back in the day, the founders of edibles companies sometimes came out of the food industry, were foodies, and were starting to bring food industry standards and levels of consistency into cannabis. Was Cheeba Chews doing something similar?

“We don’t come from the food industry,” said Leslie. “Dave, our COO and a co-owner, has a restaurant background, but he’s the only one. I come from the marketing, branding, entertainment industry, James was in construction, and he always had an interest in the science and in growing, and he found this unique ability to extract oil – which is so commonplace now – and infuse it in a consistent manner. When he brought it to both Dave and me, it was very clear at the time that we had something so unique from anything that was out there that we just had to run really fast with it. So, we bootstrapped it for as long as we could, hand-labeling, hand-wrapping, hand-cutting.

“At the time, we really didn’t have a scalable strategy,” he added. “We didn’t go into this thinking we were going to be what we are today. We were literally flying by the seat of our pants trying to ride this rocket ship as far as we could. There was no strategy of, let’s take Cheeba Chews and become an iconic member of a legacy industry. We had to grow into that through tons of trial and error. We couldn’t take the hand-cut process and bring it into a 10-pack recreational market that required child resistant packaging, so we had to reinvent ourselves. Once we established ourselves, we had to rebuild all of our manufacturing processes and try to figure out what’s a suitable packaging solution for taffy in order to hold a THC symbol in it, but that was also adaptable enough to take into multiple markets.”

I heard stories back then about state regulators coming in to inspect the early kitchens, and they were food inspectors, so they didn’t know what to look for and had to be educated. Did Cheeba Chews go through that process?

“100 percent,” said Leslie. “We would have regulators come in, and they really didn’t know what they were looking for, so it was an educational process across the board. We were learning from each other, especially around 2014, when we turned recreational, and we started getting into more automated equipment and machine processes. How to separate and calculate oil, where to place and store oil, shelf stability, these were things that all of us were figuring out collectively.”

They obviously figured it out and grew their market share, but at a pace that no one saw coming. ‘In the early days, before we turned recreational, it was like a rocket ship,” recalled Leslie. “We exploded on the scene, and it was because there just wasn’t any sort of consistency out there, and Cheeba Chews at the time was a small and efficient 10-gram piece of taffy. We put them in packs of 25 for wholesale, and that entire 25-five pack could fit in your pocket. So, being able to distribute statewide to scale that up happened in a very fast manner. Word got out about Cheeba Chews just within industry talk. We’re a very gossipy type of industry, so when one shop heard about it, the next shop had to have it, because there really wasn’t a lot of variety, especially in the candy capacity sitting on the shelves, and the demand and pull-through spoke for itself. So, we exploded in less than a year, and within months we had saturated the entire state.”

Recognition came fast and furious. “In 2010, we won the Colorado Cannabis Cup with our Deca Dose, and that became a legend of Cheeba Chews,” said Leslie. “Winning that award propelled us not just statewide but nationally, because it was High Times, and at the time, High Times was a very credible print magazine. And that was the other part of what we did; we latched on to our relationship with High Times. For probably seven years, we held the back page of High Times and did all of our advertising in there. Everywhere from California to Alabama, people reading High Times knew about Cheeba Chews because the magazine was so highly regarded within our industry. So, that win at the High Times Cannabis Cup combined with our continuing push through the magazine – simply that one channel – helped us saturate the market and increase our demand significantly.”

California soon beckoned. “I believe it was 2010 when we followed up in California because we had just begun dabbling in that market, and so we went to the Los Angeles Cannabis Cup and set up shop and exhibited at the event, and we got second place for our Deca Dose in a completely different state, where they had multiple brands,” said Leslie. “I think one was Bhang chocolate.”

The company has been a ubiquitous presence on retailer shelves in the Golden State ever since, and now it is expanding its footprint into new states, bringing a portfolio of products that include taffy, gummies, and chocolate in addition to new products. The Cheeba Chews process is replicable, said Leslie, but it has to be done consistent with the company’s values and size.

“After we had launched Colorado, we had launched California, we’ve done internal efforts and then are finding relationships in states, because we’re a really small team, and we decided to stay small and not scale with investors or additional capital or to bring on resources,” said Leslie of their expansion model. “We intentionally stayed small in order to maintain our agility, and so we have had to build relationships from state to state. The way to make that work was to create SOPs and processes that could be replicable and scalable from market to market.

“It is really challenging,” he added, “because when you’re a national brand outside of a highly regulated industry like cannabis, you set up regional manufacturing so that you can distribute into multiple states. We had to take this system, this process, refine it and perfect it in Colorado, and then we had to go replicate it with brand new partners, brand new sales staff, new sourcing relationships in every single state that we were going to set up shop in, all while maintaining our small agile teams. Our bandwidth was always stretched as we decided what states we are going to go into and how we are going to do it.

“On the manufacturing side, it was about innovation and technology,” he continued. “We came from cutting pieces of taffy, weighing it, wrapping it, and then putting a sticker on it. The biggest challenge in Colorado is you had to have a symbol on your candy or your edible product, and if we’re hand-cutting it, how do we put a symbol on there. And taffy, with its viscosity, won’t hold that symbol in and of itself, so we had to engineer a process that used a chocolate depositing machine that we beefed it up so that it can handle that thicker viscosity, and when we deposited the taffy into trays, it held in the tray to create the stamp on the individual pieces. Then we went out and got our own child-resistant certification, very similar to blister packs in pharmaceuticals, we were able to build and source our own materials and reach our own certification so that this process was adaptable in every market, and we had the sourcing of materials in order to provide it to each individual market that needed it.”

Does that mean they have to purchase and refine these machines and processes for every state they enter? “Our license agreements are set up so that our partners are purchasing the machinery themselves,” said Leslie. “We have really good data that shows us ROI on investment, and what the cost of that system is, so once we made the investment into buying the machine for Colorado, we basically set up a template of, here’s the machinery that you’re going to need to operate in a big state. If you’re in Missouri, say, maybe you don’t need such a big fully automated system, so we have a smaller, less-expensive system that we can offer. So, we have small-market and large-market packages so our partners – who are licensed in the state and handle all the manufacturing and distribution – will make the investment into the equipment in order to manufacture our products.”

Are they looking past state-by-state mandates to the day when they can manufacture and distribute regionally? “That’s where we’re at right now,” he said. “We have really good partners in Oklahoma that we’ve worked with, and we are launching multiple markets with them, and we’re in lockstep with that same thing. While we’re making these investments into machinery for each market, because we have to manufacture in that state and stay within state lines, we also have the ability to adjust that model to a regional scale because of the partnerships like the ones we have in Oklahoma. So, we definitely have our eye towards it but it’s not slowing us down from going state-to-state and building relationships.

“I also think we’re so far away,” he added. “I mean, we’re close, but we’re also so far away from turning that national program on because of how much legislation we’re going to go through, the time it’s going to take to develop regulations, the bureaucracy behind it. I think we have time. So, our focus now is kind of insulating and connecting the dots around Colorado while also planting the flag on the east coast, looking at the market saying, where would we be if we were going to do some sort of regional plants? What would that look like, and what markets would we leverage in order to distribute out of?

“We’re also selective about the markets we go into,” he continued. “We’re not interested in just doing licensed deals as fast as possible. And again, being as small and agile as we are, it’s really about relationships. So, the partners we bring on, we really look at how do they insulate or how do they amplify not necessarily a weakness, but something that we’d like to be better at, whether it is distribution, manufacturing, OSHA regulations, sales planning, whatever it is, we look for that in each state partner. Because we know holistically if and when we can scale to a national model, we’re going to need all these partners to work collectively, and we will make sure those pieces fit together in order to work in a scalable way.”

Beyond the Chew

According to Leslie, branding Cheeba Chews is practically a matter of managing already established expectations. “Cheeba Chews is always a door-opener in every market that we go into,” he stated without doubt. “That’s what gives us our value when we go into a new market and find good relationships, and that’s also how we connect the dots of finding the partners that we want to work with. We don’t solicit for a new market; it really is about making a connection, and if somebody wants to bring our brands to their market, they’re familiar with the brand. They know it, they love it, and they’re behind it, and they want to see it win. It’s the only way we’re successful because it is such a competitive landscape.

“Very early on, we had great market dominance just because of the immaturity of the market,” he continued, “and over time the market evolved around us. As small as we were, our thinking was, well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, so we kind of paused on our innovations. We did sativa indica chocolates in a hybrid caramel, and we just stuck to what was working while the industry worked overtime to mature and evolve itself. We saw that, and we saw that we ourselves needed to innovate, because we were that market leader, we were the brand that people look to as far as positioning and voice. And then it became really crowded, really competitive and it matured fast, so what we decided to do is look at where we are leading as a brand, and over the last four years, we’ve looked at the innovation of minor cannabinoids. THC is THC, we all love it, we all enjoy it, and we always will, but there are so many opportunities with the combination of minor cannabinoids.

“We started introducing things like our Sleepy Chews, by infusing them with CBN, and then following that with our Trifecta, which has CBG, CBD and THC, and consumers started to realize that there are unique effects with these unique cannabinoid combinations, we started seeing a deeper relationship with our consumers,” he continued. “We started seeing much more recurring business because when we find things that work for us, when we find a sleep aid that works every night, when we find something that psychologically benefits us the way we’re looking for, we stick with that product. So, while the brand saw much more competition in a saturated market that is much noisier, once we made our pivot into a wellness capacity, we started seeing deeper connections with our consumers and deeper loyalty, and that’s what’s helped us evolve as a brand, and we bought on Fruit Taffy and have done some fun things.”

One new product is called Melts, admittedly a provocatively great name for an edible. “Melts was another thing that we added, and the reason why we added Melt, which we’ll scale in 2023, is because a lot of our customers will come back to us and say, rightfully so, ‘I want something that’s all-natural,” explained Leslie. “Especially for the California market, we love you, but they always came back and say, ‘I can’t have your Taffy because ‘this’ is in there,’ so we wanted to go to something that was vegan-friendly and all-natural in its products. What we also saw was taking live rosin, which is just fresh-pressed organic product, and infusing it into an all-natural product was a really beautiful pairing, because you could take all that full-spectrum oil that also retains its terpene profile and fuse it into a strawberry jam-like substance, and then you can reach the consumers that are looking for gluten-free, vegan-friendly, and make a connection with those consumers and not avoid them. And that’s just one product we saw that fits that pie of what consumers are looking for.”

Unlike other edibles producers, Cheeba Chews does not work regularly with formulators. “We do it ourselves,” said Leslie. “We always look at bringing on consultants to help us with certain aspects of our business, but with Dave’s background, and my background, we just kind of put our heads together, and we have a really good kitchen in Colorado. That’s where we do all our R&D work. We have a staff that’s been with us a very long time, and when we’re doing research and development it’s a very trusted group, and that’s where we’re able to insulate ourselves and say, if we can develop it here, now we can scale it and introduce it to our other partners in other states.”

Interestingly, Cheeba Chews has a gummy on the market, just like everyone else. “We started with Green Hornet gummies back in 2010 or 2011,” said Leslie. “We had a very basic gelatin-based gummy recipe, and we’ve had a Green Hornet gummy in our portfolio since then. What we saw was the same thing; when you look at the pie of demand and because consumers have this familiarity with gummies as vitamins, nutraceuticals, and a relationship of trust with a gummy product, we always had demand on the gummy side. Taffy was always a very unique attribute of Cheeba Chews and it’s kind of what’s pulled us through from an identity standpoint, but we’ve always had a gummy.”

They also sold chocolate. “We’ve always had our chocolate, which is Dabba,” he added. “We had a chocolate line, because again, you look at the pieces of the pie and ask, can we service our partners as well as ourselves by putting these products on the shelf? The thing that sustained us was if we were just a gummy, we probably would have just faded into the ether because of how busy the marketplace is. And now it’s just commonplace that everybody’s going to come up with a gummy. Extract companies are making gummies, dispensaries are making their own gummies. Everybody has a gummy because it’s pretty easy to figure out a gummy formulation. Taffy has its own unique lane, and it has its own challenges from a scalability, sourcing, and creation standpoint, but taffy has really been the avenue that we’ve owned, and it’s kept us unique and different along with staying at that front edge of effects-based minor cannabinoids, live rosin, and innovating over the last five, six years around that taffy brand.”

Not all Cheeba Chew products are in every state the company is currently in – which include Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Missouri – but as Leslie explained, consumer IQ is constantly improving. “I think it’s just an educational thing,” he explained. “It’s awareness, but what we see is how fast these markets adapt, because people are going to other markets and they’re seeing products, so it doesn’t take long for a market to mature, to catch on from a consumer standpoint. We saw that when we went to Oklahoma. That place was like wildfire – so many shops, so many products, so many brands – and it just evolved so quickly.

“And every market we step ourselves into we see the same thing, depending on how early you are,” he added. “A good example is we’re just about to get ready to launch in New Mexico. I was down there last week; I’m taking a look at the market, and it’s in its infancy on the recreational side. You go into the stores, and it is still homemade products, not a lot of brands, and mostly THC products sitting on the shelves. Won’t take long. I give it six months before those shelves are totally diverse effects-based products and consumers have more demand for those things than what’s on the shelves today.”

What markets get his taste buds salivating? “I’m not ashamed to say it, and I’ve talked to my partners about it, but I really want to get to Florida.,” admitted Leslie. “The biggest challenge in Florida is just that vertical integration. There’s a bit of a monopoly going on down there, but man oh man, is that a market?”

Is it the demographics? “100 percent,” he said. “The wellness side of things, plus the tourism that will continue to come into Florida as they transition and eventually go recreational, but just the market itself. It comes down to finding a good partner, because it’s a pretty complex set of variables, but from a consumer standpoint, that’s a beautiful one.”

What about New York? “We’re excited about it, but we’re a really small team, we are no debt, no credit, three owners, and from the beginning days, no investors,” he repeated. “We have to be very calculated in our moves. I look at other MSOs who are well capitalized, maybe bleeding cash because they have endless amounts of it but are able to hop market-to-market fast, and the one thing I look at as our advantage is our agility. When we’re ready to strike, we have the ability to move quietly but to move effectively. When we went to Massachusetts, our priority was to plant the flag on the east coast, but it wasn’t to saturate the market and plant the flags in every state that became available. It was a starting place for us to build a relationship on the east coast.

“But the second market we’re going to get into out there will be New York,” he added. “I’d love to be able to tell you when we’re going to be there, but we don’t have a signed contract yet. But when I have that signed contract, I’m going to be one of the first brands out there. We’ve been working at this for probably a year and a half, setting up with our partners in the state, and we’re finally at a place where we’re comfortable with how the arrangement would be set up. And so, we’re looking at New York to be our second state over there, and once we get through that, I think you’ll see us move up and take over the Vermont domains. I love the area up there, but it comes down to relationships. It’s not about just being there to be there. It’s about finding great partners that you trust, that love your brand and want to win with you. As small as we are, we don’t have the bandwidth to be able to manage every single market at a tactical level. It’s about relationships, and if those relationships aren’t solid and working together in tandem to be successful, our bandwidth runs really short really fast.”

It is easy to picture Cheeba Chews doing well in any market, with any demographic. “Our story is incredibly unique,” agreed Leslie. “Just in the manner of how we constructed ourselves to begin and how we sustained that structure and haven’t sold out. And we’re not looking to sell out. The products, the innovations – obviously, it’s commercial and everybody is trying to make a profit – but the impact we have on consumers is what drives us. Making sure that the products we produce make a difference in people’s lives is the standard we hold ourselves to. Being a small guy competing in an MSO capacity, we had to defend against that for years. Everybody thought we were this big extravagant company just because they saw us multiple places, and we had really good market presence.

“But we’re really not a big business,” he added. “We’re just small and efficient, and we continue to grow ourselves that way. But now we see these big multistate operators, and our advantage is agility, it is our small capacity, our connection to the local community, and understanding the local consumer in a way that maybe these bigger brands with big budgets and large marketing departments don’t have as intimate a relationship with. I still answer DMs on Instagram from our customers, I still answer emails from our customer complaints, or compliments, or whatever they are, because I care. And if I’m connected to that level of understanding, I know how my brand can shift and move, and I don’t have to watch another brand do it and try to mimic what they’re doing. I can trust my gut, my instincts, and my experience, to drive where we need to go next.”

Cheeba Chews has to live in the real world, of course, with its impending recession, shrinking margins, escalating costs, and a consumer base stretched to its limit. With all that, is it feeling the pressure as a smaller company?

“That’s a great question,” responded Leslie. “And thankfully, we spent the better part of 2015 through the beginning of 2017 really looking at drilling down our costs, because we’re a no debt, no credit company. We only spend what we make, and we reinvest pretty diligently, so we really worked on getting our pricing down. A really good example, and it is still the case today, is the cost of child-resistant packaging, which was incredibly high because you were limited to what was available to you. So, we went out and got our own certification, sourced our own material, and cut our cost by 60 percent, maybe more, and we also worked on our recipe formulations.

“In contrast, everything is going up right now, so 2022 has been a really challenging financial year,” he added. “We still maintain profitability – we have never not been profitable in a year, and we will maintain our profitability this year – but our margins are considerably smaller than they have been, mostly because the cost of our ingredients have gone up substantially. Some of our packaging costs have gone up, but not to the point of being too concerning. But also, we’re growing and the more markets we go into, the more investments we have to make in things like merchandise, marketing materials, advertising, those sorts of things, and the market gets tighter. We see markets plateau, like Colorado, markets get really messy, like California, and then we also have to compete and invest in new markets, like Missouri or Massachusetts. And so, we see our margins tighten up, but thankfully, we’ve been incredibly disciplined. We’ve always focused on making sure we’re profitable to manage our own destiny as a business. I’m not beholden to needing investment capital, and we maintain that flexibility and fluidity in order to make those decisions.

“But it is tight,” he repeated with emphasis. “We hope in 2023 that we’re going to see a little bit of capital relief from all the investments we’ve had to make. We’re going to streamline some of our product sourcing and really drill down. I mean, we were created in 2009, just after the 2008 mortgage crisis. I think we were tight when we started, so we know how to build business in really tight circumstances. We have to make some adjustments in order to maintain that because it’s going to continue to get tighter in 2023 and ’24, but we will still maintain our profitability even though our margins tightened up over the last year.”

This theme of fiscal discipline is one that repeats itself with companies that find themselves in not completely dire straits at this point in time. “We see it, too,” said Leslie. “Being in multiple markets with multiple partners and relationships, we get to hear a few things, and I’ve heard of some pretty dire situations with some well-known competitors. And I just harken back to how we started, with our discipline. Yes, it’s fun to make money in a new industry, but don’t pull profits; reinvest in your business and see the next step, because it’s not always going to be so cashflow positive.

“You’re going to have to batten down and be incredibly disciplined in order to maintain and compete, because consumers are fickle,” he added. “You will have brand loyalty, but with so much competition in such a busy marketplace, consumers love to experiment, budtenders love to introduce new products, and manufacturers will continue to think of new products to introduce. So, while that happens, your market share is going to fluctuate, and I think our advantage has been being here for so long. We’re back to the beginning, and we can lean on our experience of starting this thing and bootstrapping and saying, well, okay, how do we get through this next phase? We’ve been through it before, and we understand how the market is going to evolve.”

The company’s understanding of its market is intuitive, but data is playing a bigger role as time marches on. “We understand the culture of our industry and our instincts about what it means to be here is a differentiating factor from a lot of these MSOs and big companies coming in with big marketing budgets, but data was a side that we wanted to be more intuitive on, especially as we move into new markets. And so, we lean on data, and that’s the fun part of where we’re at. We just had a talk with our Nevada team about SKU planning for 2023, and the advantage for us is that I have multiple markets worth of insights to be able to share with that one market That’s incredibly valuable to say, what’s the overall consumer trend not only with our brand but across multiple brands, to have that level of insight to say, California next year is doing this, Colorado is doing that, all the way across to the east coast of Massachusetts doing this. We realized that level of data intelligence was not just critical for us and the decisions we made, but also to help our partners better understand the trends that they’re currently up against and the trends that they may see here in the near future.”

Is it saying anything about the strength of the cannabis consumer in 2023? “I think there’s two things,” replied Leslie. “I do genuinely believe consumers in a general sense shop on value, and I think that’s the most critically important part for what we do. We’re always analyzing costs, we’re always analyzing our pricing, but I’m not going to chase the cheapest product in the market just to chase it, because there’s flaws in that. I think one of the biggest flaws is, can you sustainably offer that product at that price? And we saw this in California, where everybody was dropping their prices completely in the market, and a lot of them were well-funded companies doing it to starve everyone else off the shelves, a pretty dirty little tactic, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world.

“We’ll play in an economic climate like a recession, and I think we’ll be okay as long as we’re diligent and we’re disciplined in how we price our products, and how we think long-term and not just short-term,” he added. “I can’t price myself where I don’t maintain some level of profit, or I’m not in business. And I have to be honest with myself and with my consumers that I don’t want to go out and get investors to fund a business that’s losing money in order to ultimately sell out and just become a cash cow. I want to be able to provide a consistent product that they can trust at a price point they can afford, so we’re always looking at the pricing, but not overreacting to it.

“The other thing that you can do wrong is once you start completely dropping your pricing, you’re never going to get it back,” he continued. “So, maintaining a level of discipline but also foresight, looking into the future to ask, what does it really mean. I think wellness was a great example for us. We’re not selling off of the amount of THC in our wellness products; there are 20 pieces in our 100 milligram Sleepy Chew product. We don’t expect you to take 10 milligrams a night, we expect you to take one piece. Well, that’s 20 pieces. The price point of that can be a little bit higher than 100 milligram straight THC 10-piece product, because you’re getting 20 doses instead of 10. So, there are ways to look at your pricing models, but also what you are offering for that price, and what is the maximum value you can provide for it?”

Our time about up, I asked Leslie if Cheeba Chews has any asks of the market. Are they looking for partners or anything else at the moment? “We’re looking for partners that really want to make a difference,” said Leslie. “What I love most is going into a new market and identifying the brands and companies that are going to create a legacy, because every market has at least one to three different brands that are born there that are going to grow outside of that market. Those are the partners that I want to work with, because they have more invested than just finances. They believe they’re making a difference, and that’s why we got into this industry, knowing that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to make a real impact not just on our lives but also on the people that consume our products lives. We want to partner with people that feel that same value, so I think it is finding really good partners that care about what they do and want to make a really big impact in their local marketplace.”

Will they need licenses? “Yes, they will need licenses or are working towards the license,” said Leslie. “Obviously, the biggest part is you have to have a local license, and then we can work through all the details.”

Are we in the age of cannabis brands as opposed to the ongoing age of quality and experience? “No, I don’t think so,” said Leslie. “At least I hope not. While I’m a brand and maybe shouldn’t say that I still believe consumers see through brands. I think the consumers in our industry are really smart because we come from the streets. We come from a different place of consumerism than maybe the person that buys a Pepsi. Quality is always going to matter, and they’re going to see through that fraudulent brand if it doesn’t have the substance, if it doesn’t have consistency.

“A brand can get on a shelf,” he added, “and it can be glitzy and glammy and interesting and have lights and neon, and so you’ll buy it, but it’s the experience that’s going to bring a consumer back. If you fail in that experience, the bandwidth of trust with the consumer is so short that you lose them. So, if you’re not focused on delivering a quality, consistent experience every time and that’s not the root foundation of who you are, you will lose consumers faster because of the way our industry communicates, and the way that budtenders share feedback from consumers. You’ll lose that credibility just as quickly as you invested trying to create presence.”

Is Cheeba Chews ultimately acquirable, or are you more like, ‘No way, we’re only in the second inning!’

“Definitely not in the second inning,” said Leslie. “We’re way past that, and probably in extra innings right now. We think a lot about the legacy of our brand, and the importance of leaving a lasting legacy. You think back to brands that have stood the test of time from other industries, and what matters to us is that in 10, 15, 20, 30 years from now, you still know Cheeba Chews, it’s still in the marketplaces, and it’s a staple of identity. So, the most important part to us is not necessarily cashing out and making the most money but making sure what we do leaves a lasting legacy because we put so much blood, sweat, and tears into building this brand and maintaining it – getting punched and knocked down, and getting back up – that we don’t want to just offput it to the highest bidder.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I’ll take the highest bidder, but it’s about the caretaker of the brand, and until we find that relationship that makes that connection to the importance of what our brand means to the industry, what our industry means to consumers, and not just the dollars that it creates, we will continue to operate the brand for as long as we can.”

I could hear in his voice what gets Leslie up in the morning, but what if anything was keeping him up at night? “Keeping me up at night is just this consumer downtrend, it’s shortcuts in our industry, and also policy,” he replied. “I think it’s got to be the will of the people, and greed is a very powerful drug. When bureaucrats and legislators see tax revenue dwindling and they need to find another source, they’ll overregulate it a little, overtax it, and they’ll kill it just like they did in California. Making sure that consumers voices are heard as we continue to grow as an industry – that keeps me up, because when you talk about federal regulation, how long do I last in that landscape? I don’t know, because then everybody jumps in, and every big brand from every industry is going to come to try to knock us out.”

Including Big Candy? “They have to skirt that line now because of the kids, but yes, big alcohol, big candy,” he said. “I think they’re looking at it, knowing there’s a huge marketplace. They just have to stay quiet, and I think that gives me an advantage to go state-to-state the way that we’re doing. This is the only way I can create my legacy. I cannot scale and compete on a federal level like these multibillion dollar companies, so this gives me my window of opportunity, and we’ll continue with that until we see federal legalization because that’s probably a point where it’s like, I’m not sure how I’m going to compete there.

“I think we have a place in history to help guide, but we have to make sure we sustain and have a footprint where the industry is going,” added Leslie. “That’s why I’m talking to you. Early on, we didn’t talk to anybody from a PR perspective, because we let our product speak for itself. But as we saw the industry grow and new players come in, and as we saw what they represented, and that it was farther and farther away from what the core representation of the industry was, we knew we had to speak up a little bit more, to say, ‘No, no, no! This is the voice of people who have led us to this point and are doing the hard work to push us forward. We want to make sure these voices are heard and not drowned out by these big corporate brands with lots of funding!’”