How The Flower Collective Succeeds As A Single Source Supplier – Interview Series

Since the beginning of the Colorado recreational cannabis industry well over a decade ago now, The Flower Collective has continued to serve as one of the only remaining single-source supply chain cultivators. Along with having its diverse catalog of products featured in dispensaries across Colorado,  The Flower Collective is an equitable business, meaning that the employees themselves share in the profits of the considerably successful business. For a better understanding of the benefits and disadvantages of being a single-source cultivator, as well as how the Colorado industry has changed and evolved over a decade, mycannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with Ethan Shaw & Maxwell Pollet, Co-Founders of The Flower Collective.

How did the two of you first become interested in cannabis and the cultivation of this plant that oftentimes needs perfectly tailored conditions to grow under?

We were hanging out with this group called Food Not Bombs when they introduced us to a collective of farmers from Fort Collins who called themselves HammerTime. These folks were living communally, and they had the most incredible garden—seriously, some of the smartest, most idealistic people you’d ever meet. Through them, we got our first taste of permaculture and freeganism, which totally blew our minds.

At the time, I was studying business, and seeing the way they lived and thought inspired me to figure out how to bring this idea of a collective into what became the cannabis industry. It felt like there was this raw, grassroots energy that could mesh perfectly with a more structured, business-savvy approach—I was standing in the garden one day and my friend who had organized HammerTime said we were too organized to be calling ourselves anarchists and they would not be joining The Flower Collective but that our hearts were in the right place and she wished us luck. She ended up working for the Denver Botanical Gardens and we founded TFC.

When did The Flower Collective come into existence, and how would you describe the experience of growing cannabis in your very own backyard as opposed to a controlled cultivation facility?

We got The Flower Collective off the ground right around the time Colorado flipped the switch on recreational cannabis. It was a surreal moment, especially after my earlier run-ins with the law for cannabis related offenses. Let’s just say backyard cultivation used to feel pretty “duck and cover.”

As for the difference between growing out back and a full-on facility? There’s definitely a certain charm in the open air—you feel a real closeness to the plant. But once you’re in a controlled environment, you can fine-tune every element, from humidity to temperature, which gives you way more consistency.

What early struggles did the brand face in getting off the ground and into Colorado dispensaries? How stringent is the process of business owners getting their cannabis products to be sold on dispensary shelves?’

After the repeal of the 70/30 rule—which required medical stores to grow 70% of what they sold—our biggest challenge was convincing dispensaries to purchase wholesale pre-rolls rather than roll their own from leftover shake. We saw that consumers wanted high-quality, nug-run joints—something the market wasn’t providing—and we needed to show dispensary owners that customers would pay for a superior product.

The major turning point was when we started making bubble hash. On the recreational side, no one really knew how to smoke it, so we rolled the hash into joints and sold them as the easiest way to enjoy bubble hash. That happy accident was the real breakthrough that finally convinced retailers to trust an outside source for pre-rolls.

Of course, bringing cannabis products to market is more than just innovation. We’re dealing with a highly regulated product that has stricter cleanliness standards than drinking water. Businesses must navigate an expensive and arduous licensing process, juggle overlapping and often contradictory regulations, and then layer all of their day-to-day operations on top of this complicated framework. It’s no small feat, but it’s the reality of the industry—and it makes successes, like defining what became the infused joint category, feel like magic.

How would you recount the first few years of the Colorado cannabis industry’s existence? Because it was one of the first two states to legalize recreationally, would you describe the experience of working in America’s newest industry as exciting or frequently turbulent?

The first few years of regulated recreational cannabis sales were a total rollercoaster. We started with scattered regulations, and the folks in charge were working overtime, trying to stitch everything together. New rules dropped out of nowhere, leaving us with stacks of obsolete packaging and forcing us to pull all-nighters, slapping fresh compliance stickers on before the next day’s deliveries—it was intense.

Sure, it was chaotic and stressful, but it was also thrilling in its own way. That wild ride tested us, taught us, and ultimately made us stronger. We may have been winging it half the time, but pushing through those uncertain times is what got us here today.

How did The Flower Collective achieve the status of being one of Colorado’s few remaining single-source supply chain cultivators? And with that distinction, what advantages in cultivation operations and success come with it?

We always believed a single-source supply chain was the best way to avoid recalls as the industry matured, and we wanted to guarantee repeatable, consistent, high-quality cannabis. Early on, when our bubble joints really took off, it strained our supply chain and forced us to work with multiple grows—which made it tough to keep quality on point. That experience showed us how critical single-sourcing truly is, so we doubled down and built our Greenhouses on some beautiful Ag. land in De Beque, Colorado, to keep everything in-house.

With the market in remission the last few years, we could’ve saved a lot by buying wholesale inputs, but we’ve stayed true to our mission. As a single-source cultivator and manufacturer, we’re able to pivot quickly with each harvest and ensure our zero recall reputation is maintained. Every product we make has its own unique process and the only way to know it’s being done with integrity is to do it yourself.

Conversely, what are some frequent issues in operations and cultivation that The Flower Collective encounters as a single-source supply chain?

The most complicated part about being single-source is the demand to provide variety to the consumer and keeping our menu stocked with new cultivars. We harvest 11 times a year and we try to offer new strains each harvest, but because of plant count restrictions, burdensome testing requirements and other logistical hurdles we have to repeat strains and the craft consumer always wants new varieties but is not always willing to pay for the costs incurred to do so.

I noticed that The Flower Collective is an equitable business where employees share in the profits. As a business owner, how does that model work, and how would you say that it benefits the employees and increases overall workplace morale?

We go beyond just profit-sharing—it’s deeper than that. Everyone’s share comes from a pool that’s baked into the cost of goods sold. It’s commission-based, so every sale directly benefits the collective before we even calculate what most people would call ‘profit.’

To us, ‘profit’ is the money left over when you don’t share with the people who made it happen. Because we started small and have low debt liabilities, we don’t see the point in that – if the business is successful, everyone who makes the business successful should share in that. By structuring it this way, everyone gets their fair share upfront, and it keeps us all invested in the work and in each other.

What was the process of becoming the first cannabis brand to have infused joints in the Colorado market? Did you receive any pushback or extra investigations by state regulators for introducing an entirely new product type?

For the first 9 years of operation, there were no specific written rules regarding infused pre-rolls. We were operating under the assumption that if the pre-roll was to be infused with a concentrate, that the entire weight of the pre-roll, including the non-concentrate portion, should be considered a concentrate and be subject to concentrate testing requirements and equivalent carry out limits. We took the conservative approach and over regulated ourselves in order to sell a product that had no regulatory direction.

In 2022, the regulators finally made a distinction in the regulations that specifically laid out the rules for producing an infused pre-roll – it was exactly how we had always been operating, so we needed to change very little to remain compliant. However, still to this day, there are rules on the books, but the METRC tracking system does not have an infused pre-roll category, so in a way, we are still required to remain compliant without any direction or structure to do so.

How does The Flower Collective and its catalog of products stand out among a vast sea of other competitors in the $1.5 billion Colorado cannabis industry while also ensuring their promise of quality?

We have more than a decade of operations under our belts with zero recalls. Being the first to the infused market sure helped, and staying true to traditional cannabis definitions is crucial. If we sell you “cold cured live rosin” it’s cold cured. If we sell you “first press” its first press. In the beginnings of this industry, there weren’t any competitors in the infused space. Then, by 2017, there were more than 70 licenses producing pre-rolls that we knew of as competitors. When you’re up against startups literally giving away products for free, it’s tough to make a sale. In the last few years, the tide has receded and revealed who was skinny-dipping with debt, and now we’re looking forward to a much healthier and more stable industry.

It’s worth mentioning that the $1.5 billion number conflates things a bit. The actual wholesale value of this would be more like $600 million when taking into account the retail markup and taxes.

Meanwhile, “legal” hemp intoxicants are paying little to no taxes with virtually no oversight. The MED and the state of Colorado need to get their heads out of the sand and rethink these tax policies and bans on the THCA loophole. Many brands are leaving Colorado because the government is thinking short-term and preventing us from taking advantage of a farm bill that accidentally legalized weed for half the country. The THCA flower loophole is a joke, and after six years of this madness, we should be able to get in on it. If Colorado wants to have an industry when federal legalization happens, they need to start incentivizing growth and treating us like any other great Colorado industry. Instead, they’re treating us like golden geese and act like we’re lucky to have the privilege of laying eggs for them.

How would a federal rescheduling impact both the operations of The Flower Collective and the greater Colorado cannabis industry?

The federal rescheduling of cannabis poses various challenges to The Flower Collective and every other currently licensed entity in a state with regulated cannabis. These challenges range from regulatory compliance, tax implications, and operational conformance with a new regulatory body that is the federal government.

This rescheduling after all will be pioneered by the government… the same government that frequently threatens shutdowns because they cannot agree on how to allocate funds. These are the people who control our future and we have no confidence they will understand the deep complexities of state to state and state to federal regulation integration.

Thank you for joining us, Ethan and Maxwell! To learn more about The Flower Collective and its products, please visit its website.