Cannabis company cultivating deep local roots
From first look, it wouldn’t seem like a retirement community such as Mesquite would be a good place to build a cannabis facility. But now six years into it, Deep Roots Harvest has grown like, well, a weed in Mesquite.
“It was a little bit of happy accident,” Chief Operating Officer Jon Marshall said of the company’s decision to make their base in Mesquite. “We were looking for a license in Las Vegas, but when we looked at who the players were in that market, it looked like an uphill battle. So the guys started looking at properties adjacent to Las Vegas.”
Now Deep Roots Harvest employs about 150 people in Mesquite between the cultivation plant and the retail shop. Now, there are six Deep Roots Harvest dispensaries throughout Nevada and in October the Mesquite shop celebrated it’s millionth transaction.
The company also recently announced a $4 million investment in its Mesquite cultivation plant to update and modernize the facilities.
“We’re really excited about the future,” Marshall said. “Beverages are fairly new to the market. Seltzers are becoming pretty popular. We do quite a bit of in-house (Research and Development). Different products and formulations.”
Some of those products developed are the popular Cheebas taffy, Helix Gummies,Elite Live Resin, Dreamland chocolates and Nordic Goddess topical.
When Deep Roots Harvest opened its first location in Mesquite on Oct. 22, 2016, the state was still in the early days of medical cannabis sales, but its voters were about to legalize cannabis for recreational use the following month with the passage of Question 2 on the 2016 statewide ballot. With the medical dispensary housed alongside the company’s cultivation, kitchen and lab facilities, the Mesquite location staked the claim that Nevada’s cannabis “doesn’t get fresher than right here.”
Today, after six successful years that included opening to recreational sales in 2017, the Deep Roots Harvest Mesquite store is going strong, and can now tout having conducted more than one million transactions as part of its success story.
“There is a joke in the cannabis industry that if you have been in the business for just a few years, it is like a decade in any other industry. By that definition, I am an industry veteran,” said Mike Martinez, one of the original employees at the Mesquite location. “It is hard to believe how quickly time flies when you are working to build a business and an entire statewide industry from scratch. It has been an adventure.”
Now serving as the Director of Retail for Deep Roots Harvest, Martinez joined the Mesquite cultivation team in the role of trimmer as one of its first employees. Today, the Mesquite retail location alone employs 35 people, and the adjacent cultivation, kitchen and lab facilities employ an additional 120 employees. All told, Deep Roots Harvest now has more than 275 employees statewide.
