[00:31] Tom Ritchie: Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Legacies. I'm your host, Tom Ritchie, joining me as usual, Mr. Wesley Bowles.

[00:39] Wesley Bowles: We've got a good show today. Who's the guest today?

[00:48] Tom: That's right. Victoria Cannabis Company is doing some really cool stuff over there. Obviously, we see their branding, but before we get into that, we'll certainly understand it more from Kyp's perspective. It's been a crazy week.

[01:05] Wesley: There's a lot of news. What is going on at BZAM?

[01:11] Tom: Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who's been affected by the layoffs over at BZAM. That's quite a week for them for sure.

[01:18] Wesley: This is typical industry maneuvering. We saw a recent announcement where BZAM was purchasing Final Bell, which obviously they've got a lot of brands under their umbrella...

[01:42] Tom: This is going on at the chairman level, billionaire or not. There's a board of directors involved. There's upper management. But who we feel most akin to are those employees that are affected.

[02:07] Wesley: I know Final Bell had some stern statements for the BZAM team. We'll see what comes of that.

[02:23] Tom: When we were back in our old days we saw CCA letters coming through continuously. It's not uncommon. It's just a sad state of affairs for the industry. Obviously, excise taxes are killing us. They're beyond astronomical. The numbers are staggering — $200 million plus owed in excise duties across 250 plus companies.

[02:56] Tom: Individuals and companies like Stratcann — David Brown over at Stratcann, they do a phenomenal job at assembling this information and making it easy for individuals like ourselves to digest. David, keep it up. It's incredible.

[03:40] Tom: You remember last week I mentioned some new vape format that is being pushed. I'm not a big vape guy, but I know the standard across the industry was typically the 510 vape carts, and apparently there must be some issues with them. The folks over at Motif Labs have introduced a new vape cart...

[05:19] Wesley: I'm of the mindset that it's more about the potential for refillability...

[06:03] Tom: Maybe there's experts out there that can weigh in. If you're watching on YouTube, Spotify, add some comments. There's only a team of four of us right now and we're pitching in across High Flyer Media and Legacies.

[06:36] Tom: You had a little road trip. And I'm jealous because you're wearing a Stok'd hoodie. Where did you get that?

[06:47] Wesley: I made it up to the Stok'd Niagara Falls, Ontario location. The store is beautiful. The staff were great, really nice selection, and prices were great too. They had a pretty nice extensive collection of accessories — glassware, glass ashtrays, bongs, and pipes that I haven't seen in other places.

[08:50] Tom: I've been trying to track down Rosin Heads pre-rolls for a while. Todd announced those are going to market. They're going to be available through OCS flow-through. Just so everyone's aware, this is not a paid endorsement by Rosin Heads. They are a brand partner, but we love these products. Across the edibles category, top of the charts, definitely Rosin Heads.

[11:09] Tom: I love these hash rosin drops. 50 tabs in the container, 250 milligrams, five milligrams each. They have the texture of chocolate, but they're not sweet. They're not chocolate. I love them because they taste like hash to me.

[12:37] Tom: I'm a little jealous. I don't live in Quebec because this seems to only be available there. It's infused poutine sauce from 1964 Supply Co, which is part of Rubicon Organics. Currently only available on the SQDC. It comes in two 5 mg pouches and you just mix that with water in a saucepan. Ten milligrams THC total.

[17:08] Tom: I caught an episode of Trafficked Underworld on National Geographic. The episode called Hash Smugglers — there's a lot going on in Morocco. They're moving towards legalization for medicinal use. But in the process, it's a matter of how do you incorporate the traditional farmers into a regulated system. Not unlike what we had to deal with transitioning from the traditional market to the legal market.

[19:15] Tom: This one family exports from Morocco 60 tons of hash. There's 4 to 5 families doing this at scale.

[27:44] Tom: Welcome back, everybody. We're joined by Kyp Rowe, VP of Brand Development at Victoria Cannabis Company. Here at Legacies, we tell the story behind a legacy. And you've been in this industry for a hell of a long time.

[28:40] Tom: Product has been available in the market for approximately seven months. But let's go way back because you are a legacy individual. Your experience dates back to seeds in '99?

[29:00] Kyp Rowe: I opened up a seed company back in 1999 called Legends Seed Brokerage House. It was a place where you could get cannabis seeds from around the world. I carried Canadian seeds. I'd go over to Amsterdam and grab all the Dutch stuff — Sensi Seeds, Flying Dutchman, all the classics. We would get them back to Canada and take out ads in High Times. The 1-800-GOT-SEED — that was our number.

[30:06] Tom: You'd go to Amsterdam and bring back seeds? How did you get them back?

[30:18] Kyp: I was going three or four times a year to buy seed. I'd spend a week packing seeds into corrugated plastic, into little envelopes in the hotel. Once they were all ready to go, I would jump on a train and get out of Amsterdam to the first town over in Germany. I'd make sure that postmark was from a German town, not a Dutch one.

[31:34] Tom: Way back then, 95, 96 — prices haven't changed that much in the world of hash. Street level pricing has been almost consistent for years. $10 grams, $35-40 eighths, $70-80 quarters. That hasn't changed much.

[33:57] Tom: First experience with cannabis — what sold you on the plant?

[34:04] Kyp: I'm 14. Classic story — my buddy's brother was a head. We looked up to all those guys older than us. We got our hands on some hash oil at a local pinball arcade. Went down to the Thames River in the park and that was it. That was the beginning of a very long journey.

[35:17] Tom: You fast forward to '99, you start dealing with the seeds. At what point were you like, okay, we need to start considering the legal market?

[35:52] Kyp: We also helped out Hilary Black at the BC Compassion Club, fronting them gear all the time. But I took a break from cannabis for about seven years. I was in the wine industry. Started a winery in the Okanagan and became a vineyard manager and cellar master. Those seven years prepared me for the opportunity.

[36:19] Kyp: Then I got the opportunity to jump into cannabis, and that was with an LP that finally got their license just last year. But this was 2014 up in Powell River. I was with that group trying to get licensed.

[37:05] Tom: Are there aspects of the alcohol industry you wish would come over to the cannabis side?

[37:16] Kyp: At the winery I'd work the field and then work the bar. That connection with consumers was great, because I'm the guy that's growing the vines, talking about how we process, bottle — that whole experience. When you're live sampling, you can guide them through their flavor profiles and give them a vocabulary to describe what they're experiencing. That would be the number one thing I'd want to see cross over.

[39:56] Kyp: Cottage Cannabis became the first dispensary that just allowed sampling in the back patio. BC did say they were going to allow on-site consumption as long as you were cigarette and tobacco smoke-friendly. And it's now about cracking into the municipality level.

[40:25] Kyp: I've dealt with every level of government in this industry. At the municipal level — they're the biggest mobsters of the whole bunch, to be quite frank.

[41:46] Tom: We see what's going on with BZAM and Final Bell. What is your take?

[42:19] Kyp: Non-cannabis people running cannabis companies. Corporate CPG corporatism — when we ran this game for 50 years on the West Coast in the black market. It worked very well. Everyone knew the prices were stable. It was nonviolent for the most part. Then when the transfer came over from the traditional market to the legal market, it was easy for corporate Canada to say, "We don't understand how any of that worked, so we're just going to use the alcohol model."

[42:58] Kyp: In doing that, you miss out on all the nuances that cannabis brings that alcohol doesn't. If you don't understand those nuances, the connection to the consumer, then you are doomed to fail. BZAM is a classic example. It's just corporatism with a cannabis sticker on it.

[44:28] Kyp: You need a little of column A and column B. But my guess is that what corporate cannabis never got was you've got to give the decision-making — cannabis decisions — to cannabis people. From the grow to the marketing, you have to have somebody from cannabis to be even remotely successful.

[45:02] Kyp: Public companies in cannabis is ridiculous. You don't need that much money. When you have all this corporatism, it takes ten months to make a decision. It's a slow-moving oil tanker trying to make a right-hand turn. A mid-size or smaller company can pivot because the market — SKU rationalization from province to province, cultivars come in and out of fashion — you've got to be able to move quick.

[47:56] Kyp: We've got a little bit of overstock of a specific cultivar that's already run its course. Within three weeks here in BC, I've got a new SKU — a large format ounce. We drop the price, we're pounding it out. We did that all within an hour meeting. BC LDB picked it up a week later, paperwork's done, we're dropping it quick.

[48:23] Kyp: We put bar stools out in Ontario and pitch at OCS product calls — it's a joke. You're pitching cannabis that hasn't even been grown yet. I love BC for the fact that you can quickly get things done and pivot.

[49:27] Tom: You have to start dealing with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — two of our partners at High Flyer are in Nova Scotia and they're going in and flipping through a paper catalog of what the listings are.

[49:41] Tom: Does California still influence the Canadian market?

[49:59] Kyp: Absolutely. Most of the big hot breeders are all down in Cali. Jungle Boys, Seed Junky — they've got massive followings on socials. They are definitely influencing what we at BC are looking to drop, because we've got more of a culture connected to California because the culture has been here on the West Coast for so long. The kids that yell loudest on Reddit or Twitter or IG are connecting with that cannabis culture in California. What the new flavor profiles are — yes, they make their way up.

[51:17] Tom: Let's talk about Victoria Cannabis Company. The team is made up of some legacy individuals. Combined, 30 plus years of cannabis experience. Half from Shelter Cannabis, the other half from Broken Coast.

[52:17] Kyp: I came onboard two years ago after Shelter Cannabis closed up shop. Got the opportunity to come to the facility in Vic West. We're literally a four-minute drive to downtown Victoria over the bridge. It had two micro-cultivation licenses and a nursery license. They were just doing wholesale cannabis at that point and needed a direction.

[52:47] Kyp: I came on board and immediately we started work on the standard processor, and then it became evident we could also have a farmgate. So all five licenses in one building, a stone's throw from downtown Victoria. But a lot of heavy lifting to get there.

[53:13] Kyp: I developed my past connections, built relationships with brand houses — Pistol and Paris, Joint Venture Craft Cannabis, Red Barn. I would sell them our cannabis. The deal was they'd shout us out — hands on the bags, socials — so people knew it was coming out of our facility. We had a whole year of ground-level marketing from other companies wrapping our gear before we launched a bag with our own name on it.

[54:16] Kyp: We launched our first cultivar, Pomelo, in July of last year. The first six months we did over a million dollars just in BC alone.

[54:34] Kyp: Now we're focusing on moving into other provinces and on our farmgate store.

[54:50] Tom: Two micros, standard processing, nursery, and farmgate under one building. They're all separate licenses?

[54:58] Kyp: All separate licenses. Three separate addresses too, if you can believe that. It's all one building. To get into each license, I've got to go outside — they're not connected. That's the madness of this industry.

[55:27] Kyp: We're very centrally located — 44,000 cars pass a day. We've got the Galloping Goose Trail, which is 250,000 people on a bike trail every year. The seawall is two blocks away. And they're about to put in close to 30,000 new residential units within a three-block radius over the next two years.

[56:01] Tom: What does farmgate look like for you guys? What are you hoping to achieve?

[56:09] Kyp: I want to showcase British Columbia cannabis to tourists. Victoria is the biggest tourist destination. I want to showcase all the small growers, all my friends, my compatriots, my colleagues. The cannabis community out here in British Columbia has been great for 30 plus years.

[56:40] Kyp: We're going to focus mostly on British Columbia craft cannabis plus our own brand. We want to be a focal point for education — to consumers, to our neighbours, to businesses coming into Victoria. To tell the story of what it was and what it is to be about British Columbia cannabis.

[57:22] Tom: You're focused on BC but you have presence in Ontario now?

[57:27] Kyp: We're currently in Saskatchewan. We're going to be jumping into Manitoba come May. We have two SKUs on OCS — our Pomelo half-gram pre-roll and a one-gram pre-roll. We're about to launch another on general listing: our G-Wagon.

[1:01:07] Tom: How many cultivars is VCC running right now?

[1:01:12] Kyp: We basically drop a new flavour every four or five months. I always want to have one equatorial and one indica player. Right now about four running consistently: After Eight (a Canadian variety), Pomelo (from Mansfield Genetics, an island breeder), Starchild (cloned from Seed Junky Genetics), and G-Wagon, which we hunted from seeds from Mommy Genetics.

[1:01:55] Kyp: We have a saying: nose over numbers. I don't give a rat's ass about numbers, to be quite frank. Does it get me lit? Does it give me legs? That's what matters.

[1:02:25] Kyp: We took our G-Wagon for testing and it came back between 34 and 37. Over 4% total terpenes. She's a thumper. Where others are going, "That's too low, let's go get it retested until it comes out at 38" — sometimes you don't have a choice as a business because the market demands it. You're sitting on gear that you know is spectacular. You go back to retest because that's the game they designed for us.

[1:03:03] Kyp: 90% of cannabis, if it's from different flavour profiles and genetic backgrounds, is going to be between 18 and 23. Full stop. Over the last 50 years there's been more breeding with essentially the same genetics. The cultivars getting 30-31-32 are outliers. Absolute outliers.

[58:31] Tom: What was the inspiration behind the brand? This is a very vintage feel.

[58:47] Kyp: Think about an old school tarot card. That frame has consistency across the whole deck, but each card has its own story. There are different colours associated with the terpene profiles — how we associate colours and flavours together. Your citrus is your lighter colours, your darker richer flavours are more in the blues and purples.

[59:35] Kyp: What I wanted to convey was: you are buying traditional garden cannabis from people that have been doing it for 30 plus years. When you see that card, you feel like — even though we're seven months old — we've been there for 30 years. I also wanted to have fun again. I wanted to be different. I didn't want to be one more graffiti drip-and-goop brand.

[1:15:00] Tom: What would you hope to see change the most when it comes to regulation to allow a brand to market?

[1:15:11] Kyp: You built this like alcohol — then treat us like alcohol. You're taxing us to death as it is. At least give us a bloody fighting chance. Let us have people's faces in ads. How many Molson Canadian ads do I see during a hockey game? You won't go to an event but it's everywhere. It's prevalent.

[1:16:17] Tom: We've used this point a lot — packaged goods are an opportunity to educate a consumer. At the most basic level: what ingredients are in it, where it was produced, which parent company owns it.

[1:16:51] Kyp: That's what we've done at VCC. Back of our bags: how long the flowering timeline, what the inputs were, where the cultivar came from, who the head grower was, what the terpene profiles are, all the cannabinoid contents. Transparency to us is everything. We are not buying other people's flower, bagging it, and sticking some brand on it. We have hunted, selected, grown, processed, bagged, and we are selling it.

[1:12:05] Kyp: The biggest disconnect is between brand and budtender. You've got these kids making $17 an hour. They are not only managing the stores and making product recommendations — they are brand ambassadors and salespeople. And we're paying them just over minimum wage. That's the CPG pay-to-play model. That's what happens when cannabis gets put into a paradigm that wasn't ours to begin with.

[1:17:48] Tom: 20 to 30 years from now, people start saying "that was VCC's legacy" or "that was Kyp's legacy" — what do you hope they're talking about?

[1:18:19] Kyp: Educating people on our culture and our products. Understanding that cannabis is different for every single person. You can't put it in a box. I want to show all the different flavour profiles, different SKUs that aren't out there. I want to be innovative. I want people to say, "Those guys — they brought cannabis into my world." That's what I want. I believe in the plant. I believe in the strength of the community. Everything I've got in my life from the last 30 years, cannabis brought to me. So I share that with everybody else.

[1:19:55] Tom: Remind everyone — distribution, formats, and then tell me your current favourite cultivar.

[1:20:02] Kyp: Right now we have the G-Wagon, which is an Afghan lime profile. Generally we use 7-packs and 3.5s. That's our general format. Occasionally we'll do a one-by-one gram on a loud equatorial. The Starchild is like grandma's baking. And then After Eight — some of the most elegant cannabis I've ever grown. It's linalool dominant, and it's just an elevated experience.

[1:20:38] Kyp: I would probably say After Eight is my favourite. It's a Cookies Legends cross. It's got sweetness from the Cookies side. But it's linalool dominant — less than 1% of overall bred cannabis has linalool as a dominant terpene. It's lavender, it's floral, it's smooth, it's uplifting with a bit of sweetness. It's unique. And it burns paper white. It's not "get lost" — it's a combination of floral and sweet. It's quite an outlier.