Utah in the Weeds Episode #96 – Paul & Bijan, High Times and Beehive Farmacy

What to Expect in This Episode

Episode 96 of Utah in the Weeds features High Times CEO Paul Henderson and Beehive Farmacy Founder Bijan Sakaki.

First, the pair told us about their acquisition of a license to cultivate Medical Cannabis in Utah, a process that took about a year and a half. [02:43]

Next, the discussion shifted toward the business philosophies in Utah’s Medical Cannabis market. [09:11]

Tim asked Paul about his role as the CEO of High Times, and how the company has grown to become much more than a magazine. [12:12]

The discussion then shifted to some of the challenges that cannabis companies can face, particularly with banking. [23:35]

Tim talked about his use of the cannabis strain Ice Cream Cake to treat an issue with his back. He said the strain helped him with muscle relaxation, pain relief, and keeping his mind free of stress. [34:22]

Next, Paul and Bijan talked about their expansion plans and the challenges that some cannabis companies face. They also talked about their biggest cannabis competitor, which they say is the black market. [36:30]

Paul and Bijan then talked about the importance of quality assurance in the cannabis industry. They also told us about some new products coming to Beehive Farmacy in the next few months. [41:54]

Podcast Transcript

Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to episode 96 of Utah in the Weeds, a discussion about cannabis and cannabis culture here in Utah, I’m your host, Tim Pickett.

Tim Pickett:
Today, our interview is with Bijan Sakaki and Paul Henderson. Bijan is the founder of Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah, and Paul, also is one of the partners. Paul is also the CEO of High Times, really the largest, essentially media group for cannabis in the cannabis space, and we talk a lot about his High Times’ opening of dispensaries in California, and how that, what started out as a magazine and writing articles has become a full fledged vertical offering in the cannabis space. We also talk a lot about Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah with Bijan, really great sess with those two, it was super fun and perfect intro into the week of 4/20. When I was growing up, I was going to rodeos around July 4th, and that was always called cowboy Christmas, and 4/20 seems to be cannabis Christmas or the hippie holidays, whichever you prefer. This is a great week for Utah Therapeutic Health Center, our spirit week as a healthcare company that is focused on bringing cannabis into legitimate medicine. It’s super fun this week for us as well.

Tim Pickett:
Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah is on 1991 South, 3600 West. It’s right off of the 21st South Freeway headed west, if you had thought about going up to Windover and getting your cannabis this week, just get off of 3200 West there on the 2100 South Freeway and just stop here in Utah, save yourself the trip and the legal problems with going out to Nevada, just stop here. We’ve got a clinic across the street that will be open all week right there across from Beehive, and it’s a great place. They’ve got drive through, they’ve got online ordering, they’ve got a huge parking lot there, and they’re going to have an event on 4/20 with special discounts, and we’ll be there as well, stop by and see us, stop by and see the other vendors. Just an exciting week all around and enjoy this episode, this discussion with Bijan and Paul.

Tim Pickett:
Your name first because then I’ve got to get that right.

Paul Henderson:
Paul Henderson.

Tim Pickett:
CEO of-

Paul Henderson:
CEO of High Times.

Tim Pickett:
High Times, just High Times?

Paul Henderson:
It was High Times Magazine, some people still refer to it as that name, but yeah, High Times, we’re branching off into a bunch of different directions now.

Tim Pickett:
And Bijan, we’ve had you on the podcast before.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yes.

Tim Pickett:
We even heard about all of your paintball-

Bijan Sakaki:
That was old world. Yes.

Tim Pickett:
Your old world stuff.

Bijan Sakaki:
Old world. I’m Bijan Sakaki, CEO of Beehive.

Tim Pickett:
Worlds best Utah Cannabis Pharmacy.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yes, you heard it from Tim, not me.

Tim Pickett:
That’s right.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah. So Beehive Farmacy we’ve got Buzz, we’ve got Beehive Gardens.

Tim Pickett:
Buzz and Beehive Gardens are the brand names, because you’re vertically integrated?

Bijan Sakaki:
Correct. We’re one of the four vertically integrated groups. So Beehive Gardens is-

Tim Pickett:
That’s not well known, I think.

Bijan Sakaki:
Okay.

Tim Pickett:
I think that it’s well known wholesome and Perfect Earth, with True North is Curaleaf now with Tryke. But I think there are a few-

Bijan Sakaki:
Dragonfly is also a vertical.

Tim Pickett:
We’ve got Dragonfly.

Paul Henderson:
But that’s because we did not start out that way, right? We were retailers and we had the chance to acquire the license from Harvest.

Tim Pickett:
And so Harvest was the grower-

Bijan Sakaki:
Was the initial, correct.

Tim Pickett:
… And then you acquired that.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yep.

Tim Pickett:
Paul, were you involved in the whole thing all along?

Paul Henderson:
Yep.

Tim Pickett:
Because we met, I think we met originally-

Paul Henderson:
Maybe around the opening of Beehive in Salt Lake.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah. Not as long as Bijan, but well before the laws had passed, Bijan and I had got together and started talking about what Utah would look like, and then I was going to be a small advisor, just to help out with what I had done in the California market, and then that just kept snowballing into a larger and larger role. And then Bijan and I actually wrote the applications ourselves, we didn’t hire law firms.

Paul Henderson:
And so yeah, I was there all along with the coming in ninth place on cultivation, first loser, all the way through to top application on the retail side.

Tim Pickett:
How does that, I remember that because I was lifting weights with Sean Hammond at the time all those applications were being processed. And then the losers and the winners.

Bijan Sakaki:
They all get their emails.

Tim Pickett:
Right.

Bijan Sakaki:
Like, “Hey, it wasn’t you.”

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, “Hey, it wasn’t you.” What does it look like to lose and then try to get Harvest’s license? How did that play out?

Bijan Sakaki:
I think it’s a longer journey than that. Helping stand some things up and then stepping away from it, and then really digging in with Beehive once retail came through. So, everything comes back full circle, and I wouldn’t say that this was an overnight thing, this is, we’ve been putting in 10 plus years into this thing. So it’s just like the re-evolution of it. We missed out on cultivation, we got retail, and we had a fortunate opportunity to help manage and operate one of them early on. And then given that multi-state operator situation, divestiture of assets, et cetera, we were able to then, while we were already managing it, we were consuming all the output from it anyway. It gave us the ability to now throw metaphorical gas on the fire, and then start increasing the quality and some of the output in the SOPs.

Paul Henderson:
The story is interesting too because I’m kind of a nerd in the cannabis space in the sense that I’ll listen to earnings releases, and I’ll read MDNA, what the companies put out as part of their quarterly earnings releases. And I actually saw in one of those that a Harvest had said that their board of directors and management had come together and decided to divest of a bunch of assets in non-core states. So states out of Arizona and California, and a couple of, where they wanted to double down. Because they only have limited funds and bandwidth, and they can’t be everywhere.

Paul Henderson:
And so when I saw that High Times had actually done a deal with Harvest to buy some retail stores in California, so I reached out to the M&A guys saying, “Hey, I see that you guys are going to divest of non-core assets, you didn’t get retail in Utah, any chance you want to sell your Utah cultivation?” And he’s like, “I don’t know, maybe.” And then that just started the conversation, and it took a good year or so.

Bijan Sakaki:
Year and a half.

Paul Henderson:
A year and a half to actually go through, mostly because it was kind of the first transfer of ownership license in the state of Utah, and nobody wanted to run afoul, didn’t know what to do. So they really took their time from a regulatory process to understand-

Tim Pickett:
That is the department or health over that, or the department of ag over that?

Bijan Sakaki:
That was department of ag.

Paul Henderson:
Department of ag.

Bijan Sakaki:
And they work hand in hand with the attorney general’s office, and it was, they really went through, and the first time you do anything is going to be the most challenging. And so it was a good experience for both people to know what kind of undertaking that requires.

Tim Pickett:
But since you, that transition of ownership with Harvest, and now you’re vertically integrated, you’re not the only ones who’ve done that, right? Then-

Bijan Sakaki:
That’s correct. Curaleaf-

Tim Pickett:
Curaleaf did that with Tryke.

Paul Henderson:
Correct.

Bijan Sakaki:
And then-

Tim Pickett:
Well, and then it did, we went the opposite way with Zion and Bloom.

Bijan Sakaki:
Correct. Zion worked in alignment with-

Tim Pickett:
With the retail operation. And now I guess if you drive down there, their sign even says Zion Medicinal, on the wall.

Bijan Sakaki:
Well, okay. So technically then, the number then would be six, six vertically integrated operators.

Paul Henderson:
I guess, yeah.

Tim Pickett:
Huh.

Paul Henderson:
Wow.

Bijan Sakaki:
While a lot of people think vertical integration is the solution to everybody’s problems, it pauses its benefits, absolutely, but it also has a lot of challenges because then people have a different market strategy. People are cultivating with different intent. Some cultivators here are cultivating strictly for extraction for gummies and distillates. Other people-

Tim Pickett:
I’ve been there.

Bijan Sakaki:
… And there is no right or wrong, it’s just a different strategy.

Tim Pickett:
That’s what’s been so fascinating for me to be on the medical side, but then to also start to get relationships with all these, both retail, the processors, the growers, the vertically integrated, the non-vertically integrated, and see the different personalities of their companies, and what their skillset is, right? What type of products they believe are going to benefit the market or the patient base, and that’s been as fascinating as anything.

Bijan Sakaki:
It’s hard, and it’s hard, and everyone is going to have an opinion. Like what we do-

Tim Pickett:
We do it right, we’re the only ones who do it right, we’re the only ones who make medicine. Oh, no, we’re the only ones [crosstalk 00:09:55].

Bijan Sakaki:
Or if you go this way, you’re going to have five people that say, “Great, they went left.” And half the people say, “Why didn’t they go right?” So no matter what you do, people will always have an opinion. So our strategy is different than other peoples, we want to have, our motto internally is, no buff. No mids, we don’t want any mid grade. If I’m not going to consume it, if our team is not going to consume it ourselves, we don’t want it coming out of our facility.

Tim Pickett:
Do you feel like that’s what somewhat sets you apart from some of the other license holders in Utah, is that history of being somewhat of an expert consumer or in this space, longer than other people?

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, I think so. Bijan, from a consumer perspective, but even, I’ve been in the California space for six years, so understanding just the market and what works, what doesn’t. If you’re everything to everybody, you’re nothing. And so you need to pick a lane, and you need to stick with it, and that’s what we picked. If Bijan won’t consume it, if I won’t consume it, then we’re not going to sell to our patients, even though that’s a low price point, maybe a much lower price point, it just, we don’t feel it’s the right thing to do.

Bijan Sakaki:
And so with that, we’ve got, in our garden we’ve got 60 lights right now, and we’re putting out a decent amount of flower, but over the last six or seven months like this Green Crack that I just cracked open, has definitely, this is our number one. That’s our number seller.

Tim Pickett:
Hand that to me Paul. We’re just sitting just far enough away, oh my God, in the conference room.

Bijan Sakaki:
And then the Ice Cream Cake too.

Tim Pickett:
I love-

Bijan Sakaki:
Like they’re very, very different, and they do very different things.

Tim Pickett:
They’re both so different in the smell.

Paul Henderson:
But it’s also a different, it’s a different growing style, right? So our patients are seeing the difference in what we took over, which was the Harvest brand, and then coming out with Buzz and seeing genetics just different process, right? Layering in some skills and growing from different operators, bringing in some of our friends to overlook things and give us advice and making tweaks, and all of a sudden, the output becomes that much better. And so it’s fun.

Tim Pickett:
How does your background in High Times, well when did you become CEO of High Times? Because we interviewed Stormy-

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, Stormy. Yeah [crosstalk 00:12:23].

Tim Pickett:
He was here in Utah, right?

Paul Henderson:
So I actually joined and consulted with High Times in October of 2019, until January of 2020. I then became president and COO at that time, and I held that position until January of 2022. So about two years, and I was just named CEO recently.

Paul Henderson:
So, fairly new in the CEO role, but I joined High Times to pivot them from just media and events, into plant touching. Retail stores, branded products, and we’re doing a bunch more licensing now. I’ve been there through the whole evolution, so taking on the CEO role was a pretty simple transition.

Tim Pickett:
What do you, we all know High Times is the magazine, originally.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah.

Tim Pickett:
And the events that they put on, like the competition events. And I don’t know much about that. What’s that like?

Paul Henderson:
So we have basically, think about it as business verticals. So we have media, we have events, and then now we have the plant touching world and licensing. And so the media is also the magazine, is still is the magazine, we still produce 10 physical copies a year, we’ve talked about going all digital, but it’s like a staple on a coffee table, people love it. So we still produce that. And then we have hightimes.com, which is online, and then we have all the social media, which I believe we have about 12 million followers across our media channels, social media. And so that’s one business unit.

Paul Henderson:
And then the events, mostly we’re known for cannabis cup events, which basically crowns the best weed by market across the country, and sometimes globally. And so we would, I’ll tell you historically, we would go into a market, the brands would submit all of their entries, which sometimes they are collabs between companies to create the best flower or best concentrate. They submit it to the Cup. We would have 20, 25 well known judges which would consume all the product, and then we would announce the winners at a weekend festival, right? Music, and vendors, and food and all that.

Paul Henderson:
So COVID shuts that whole world down, we had a whole slate in 2020 of those events, so we canceled them, and then we actually pivoted very quickly and we productized the Cannabis Cup. And what I mean by that is we actually had, went to every market again, we had the brands contribute their products to be judged, but we built those into kits, which are actually a Cannabis Cup bag pack, and then we worked with retailers to sell those kits to the public for the first time ever. And then the public actually had the chance to submit their entries for judging. So the public became the judge, so we called it the Cannabis Cup Peoples Choice Edition, and we’ve been running those incredibly successfully over the last two years during COVID.

Tim Pickett:
Do you think the people choose better weed than the judges?

Paul Henderson:
I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I’m not the one that’s going say, but at least now we give a voice to the people and it’s all aggregated, and it’s thousands of entries, versus 25. So maybe.

Tim Pickett:
It is the peoples plant, right? Maybe we get to choose.

Paul Henderson:
So we have the events business, and then we are now operating seven retail stores in California, and two delivery hubs which are non-storefronts. So we deliver in Sacramento area and the Los Angeles area. And then also-

Tim Pickett:
How’s that going?

Paul Henderson:
It’s going well. So California is in a bit of a flux right now, it’s in an interesting point in time, mostly around the competition with the illicit market. And I will say-

Tim Pickett:
There’s still a bunch of competition with the illicit market?

Paul Henderson:
Yeah. You’re looking at California’s probably a 10 billion dollar market, and there’s three billion of legal sales, so probably 70% is still in the illicit market there. So it’s pretty wild.

Paul Henderson:
I would say last year you saw stimulus checks being given to people. People were at home, so they were consuming weed even when they were working. The sales-

Tim Pickett:
We definitely had a bump in visits that week, and for the few weeks after. Like a noticeable, every time those checks would come, and-

Bijan Sakaki:
There’s an influx of people.

Tim Pickett:
You’d have an influx of people [crosstalk 00:16:29].

Paul Henderson:
We saw that in stores, people coming in. They had money to spend, they spent their disposable income with us or with the general industry. The problem now is that, that money is gone, and you see the overall market in the legal space down about 20% year over year in the retail sales.

Tim Pickett:
You’ve seen that with stock prices-

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, that too. Even more so, and the market caps are down 50 or 70% of cannabis companies.

Paul Henderson:
And so we feel fortunate because we’re not down that, we’re basically either even from last year or up in many stores. And so I prefix that to say California is in a tough spot, we’re actually doing quite well, and for example, we launched a line of High Times branded products. So flower pre-rolls, vape cartridges, and the brand was selling extremely well in our own store, but we didn’t know if that was because, oh, people are coming to a High Time store, and they buy High Times product. Okay, that makes sense. But we took over a store in downtown Oakland that we did not rebrand as High Times, but we are managing it today. We put the High Times branded products simply on the floor just to see what happens. No marketing push, not budtenders pushing it, and it became a top three selling brand against all the legacy California brands, overnight.

Paul Henderson:
And so we know that the name holds cache, you know people know about it, you just don’t know if it translates into actually buying products in a physical storefront, but it does.

Tim Pickett:
It does make sense, and you’re the only company that I’ve ever heard of that went that direction. Went from the marketing, the advertising, the content, into retail end product branding. And its got to be an advantage-

Paul Henderson:
Obviously it’s a massive advantage.

Tim Pickett:
… You just told the story. Is that coming here?

Paul Henderson:
Not yet. High Times is I think is too recreational for the Utah market, the name just simply-

Tim Pickett:
It probably was in the bill, I’ll have to ask.

Paul Henderson:
You can’t use high-

Bijan Sakaki:
That gives off a recreational disposition, but that also just because Paul works at High Times, we’re not going to try and backdoor a High Times deal out here just for regulators [crosstalk 00:18:42]-

Tim Pickett:
Just for the regulators, right. Okay, got it. That wasn’t the point of bringing Paul.

Bijan Sakaki:
No, no.

Paul Henderson:
I was not at High Times when we first started working on this, I was the CEO of another company.

Tim Pickett:
And I think… So that everybody hears this as a listener and the regulators, we try, we on the medical side, you on the production and the retail side, we do try to keep well within the guidelines of the regulations. We don’t necessarily, of course we want to push the access for more and more people, because we’re all believers and advocates that it’s a safe substance that we should all be able to safely use it in an educated way. But we’re not trying to break the rules, right? We’re trying to live within those rules, and we’re just trying to do what the democracy was designed to do, change the system from within.

Bijan Sakaki:
And on that too, when we have such red tape around what we can do, how do you differentiate yourself between other operators? Like we said before, there is no right or wrong, everybody, every retailer, every cultivator, every processor, [crosstalk 00:19:54] different.

Paul Henderson:
Well you’re trying to tell that story of what makes you different and when you can’t market that story, then how’s anybody supposed to find out, right? So it’s a little bit of a conundrum.

Tim Pickett:
And quickly, you get retailers with reputation without doing anything.

Bijan Sakaki:
For good or bad.

Tim Pickett:
For good or bad.

Bijan Sakaki:
For good or bad.

Tim Pickett:
I think Dragonfly had some good things and suffered in some ways in the beginning, everybody seems like they’ve had that.

Bijan Sakaki:
And to that point, they were the first. So there is, everything, there’s pros and cons to everything. Every operator, every group has their strong suits, I think every store has a different vibe, and so that attracts different patients for different reasons. And I think when you look at home delivery, and I think that is a different experience than what you’re used to right now in the stores. So when you talk differentiation, you lose that experience factor, so you have to go with either product or availability.

Tim Pickett:
We’re going to vape a little on that.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, let me load up this volcano here.

Paul Henderson:
Going back to the differentiation though, what’s interesting, most people don’t realize, one, we took a lot of heat at High Times early on about being a media company and moving into retail, right? We were told, “Hey, stay in your lane, do what you do,” which is media.

Tim Pickett:
Who told you that?

Paul Henderson:
A lot of industry people, because I think they were worried about the competition [crosstalk 00:21:30]-

Tim Pickett:
Of course.

Paul Henderson:
… Crossing over.

Tim Pickett:
They don’t have, yeah. They don’t want, you’ve got 12 million followers, of course they don’t want you involved.

Paul Henderson:
And so it was funny, right? Because, and I always explain that we’re a media company-

Tim Pickett:
You learned how to advertise.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, we’re a media company that’s becoming a cannabis company, and people like, and I use the example of the time of MedMen, they’re a cannabis company, but they were trying to become a media company, right? So every cannabis company tries to become a media company because it’s an acquisition, it’s a customer acquisition game in California and beyond, in the recreational market. So they, like MedMen launched Amber Magazine, and they’re pushing their social media. Those are all assets we already have, we’re just now slowly transitioning into the actual cannabis space.

Paul Henderson:
So anyway, its been a phenomenal change, and I talk a lot about going horizontal across our business verticals, so what I explain there. For example, we run a cannabis company in California, we crown the best winners of let’s say, the Southern California market, we then guarantee distribution of those winners in our stores and we actually create a separate section for the winners that year, their products in our retail stores. So we’re doing things we’ve never been able to do before, and we’re going across our cannabis vertical and our retail vertical.

Paul Henderson:
Now another perfect example too is Cannabis Cup, if anybody’s listening, has ever been to one in California or beyond, we historically made money through ticket sales, sponsorships and vendor booths, just like any other event company. But now because we’re a retailer in California, we can actually sell the weed directly to the people. So historically, other vendors would have their own retail license, they would sell and we would just say, “Hey, you can go ahead and sell, no problem,” with all the people. So if we bring 50,000 people to an event over a weekend, those vendors going forward, this year and beyond, are going to check their product into us as the retailer, and then we’re going to manage sales across the whole venue. So instead of generating a million in sales per Cannabis Cup, we’ll generate six million over a weekend in cannabis sales and tickets.

Paul Henderson:
So again, horizontal across verticals, we have the audience, now we’re monetizing the audience.

Tim Pickett:
Wow.

Bijan Sakaki:
It’s risky, plant touching honestly sucks from a regulatory perspective [crosstalk 00:23:42]-

Tim Pickett:
I know.

Bijan Sakaki:
… You’re a plant touching [crosstalk 00:23:45]-

Tim Pickett:
No, I’m not plant touching, but I cannot bank, they don’t believe me. They don’t believe me when they look me up online and they’re like, well, you’re a marijuana company. I’m like, I don’t touch the plant, I don’t process, I don’t do anything, just please…

Bijan Sakaki:
Do you need a bank?

Tim Pickett:
No, I bank with you, I bank at the same place you do because they’re the only bank in Utah that understands both sides of it because they understand the producer side, they know a lot-

Bijan Sakaki:
And that’s honestly a big silver lining of our market is you have operators like that in California, it was cash all day, and you imagine the risk you take.

Tim Pickett:
Even in the medical side of things, we’re down, we take a small, a much smaller percentage of cash now than we did before. But in the beginning of the program, people were coming to me for medical visits and expecting they had to pay cash, just right off the front. And I take their HSA card. And that was really wild for people.

Paul Henderson:
Wow. And even before plant touching, even as an advertiser, media and events company, we had bank accounts shut down all the time because you are affiliated, right?

Tim Pickett:
It’s the affiliation, you promote, you sell or tell people where to find it, or something like that and it’s like-

Bijan Sakaki:
But Tim, Paul and I, we’ve both been banned from major banks personally-

Paul Henderson:
Personally because of it.

Bijan Sakaki:
Which is weird.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it is. It’s still, I think there’s a growing group of people who think this is normalizing, and they’re really caught off guard when they find out how redundant your businesses have to be, two merchant accounts, two bank accounts. Two of everything that just in case-

Paul Henderson:
Factor.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah.

Tim Pickett:
And I think, and High Times probably did that for [crosstalk 00:25:37]-

Paul Henderson:
For decades, yeah. People, they see a state legalize and expect that you can operate like a normal business.

Tim Pickett:
Like a normal business, right?

Paul Henderson:
Forget about the federal rules around 280E and tax deductions, like just simply, I used to have service providers like website development companies refuse to work with me at my previous cannabis company saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not willing to take your money.”

Tim Pickett:
Yeah. [Davie 00:26:04], by the way, Davie won’t take your money. Davie won’t take a normal person’s money if you find somebody online whose related to it. And just, I don’t know. Email, you’re right. Website providers.

Paul Henderson:
So there’s still a long way to go. A long way to go. We can’t advertise, even in California, forget about the Utah rules around advertising, but in California, I wish that I could put up a Google ad to drive people to my storefront. I can’t do it, Google won’t take my money. I can’t advertise [crosstalk 00:26:32], any interstate that crosses state lines, you can’t put up a billboard. So they made that more challenging. But every company has their own rules in what they want to do, and most of them don’t want to deal with cannabis, so they don’t.

Tim Pickett:
What’s High Times, so High Times is now vertically integrated in a way that no other cannabis company really is.

Paul Henderson:
Correct.

Tim Pickett:
With the media company.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, exactly. So vertically integrated, people generally think of growing, manufacturing, retail. We’re a different vertical, right?

Tim Pickett:
You’re also content.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, exactly. It’s content and events, it’s customer acquisition really.

Tim Pickett:
How do you do, one of the things I was going to ask you with these events is, when you have them in-person, you can’t have product from multiple states?

Paul Henderson:
No.

Tim Pickett:
How does that work in the US? It’s just like all a regional, meaning a state-

Bijan Sakaki:
State by state.

Paul Henderson:
All state by state. So when we host an event in Detroit or around Detroit and Michigan, we can’t have a vendor come with product unless they show that they’re licensed by the state. We verify, everything has to be a state specific. Then you go to Nevada, California.

Paul Henderson:
So it makes for interesting things because it’s all demographics, right? It’s some weed in California, there’s just different products there than you might find in different states. And we’re crowning different categories of the best cannabis, and it will be all different brands. Some brands through licensing deals, [crosstalk 00:27:58]. So you see the same brand, but it will be different growers.

Tim Pickett:
Do you still see the same genetics?

Paul Henderson:
No, not generally.

Tim Pickett:
Almost-

Bijan Sakaki:
I would say almost never.

Paul Henderson:
Some companies that are working with groups like Seed Junky or others, are trying to create this base of having the same genetics in multiple states, starting from seed. And okay, this brand you know is always starting from the same genetic material, but that’s far and few between right now.

Bijan Sakaki:
But also even then, when you pop seeds, you find a pheno, there’s such a different, there’s a difference in this phenotype.

Paul Henderson:
Or even grower conditions, right? An indoor grower isn’t built the same.

Tim Pickett:
Altitude, or all kinds of things. It’s like coffee, right? Just-

Paul Henderson:
It’s very regionalized.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So with Beehive, what products, you’ve got Buzz, is this the only flower you’re growing?

Bijan Sakaki:
No, we’ve got Ice Cream Cake there, we have Green Crack, we’ve got some Mochi Gelato, we’ve got some Lavender Jones, some the of the older legacy strains that-

Tim Pickett:
Lavender Jones.

Bijan Sakaki:
Afghan Kush, Hindi Kush-

Paul Henderson:
But they’re all under the Buzz brand right now.

Tim Pickett:
All under the Buzz brand?

Bijan Sakaki:
All under the Buzz brand right now, and then we’re working through some regulatory speed bumps regarding the Cookies launch.

Tim Pickett:
Oh, right. Yes. How would you, because of the name, because there is some-

Bijan Sakaki:
Well, with this recent legislation, it’s defined as a recreational disposition. Well, that name was included in that piece that would prohibit-

Tim Pickett:
So, for those of you who didn’t hear, that was the episode with Rich [O’Born 00:29:38], where we discussed this in detail, so go back to that one, a couple of weeks here, and listen to that discussion.

Bijan Sakaki:
And so that then puts rule making authority, department of ag, to determine what is recreational or not. And so-

Tim Pickett:
Got it. But that is one of the most popular strains in the country.

Bijan Sakaki:
It is probably the biggest brand in cannabis right now.

Tim Pickett:
Cookies is one of the most well known pain control strains that exists because it’s full of beta-caryophyllene.

Bijan Sakaki:
Strain two. But the brand ultimately, the brand Cookies-

Paul Henderson:
High level brand, and then there’s multiple strains underneath the Cookies kind of parent, right? One of those strains will do something different, but your point well taken, Girl Scout Cookies initially created by that company, together with some of their other strains, are incredibly popular amongst certain patients. And I just heard the same [inaudible 00:30:38] and Maryland as well, as exactly that. Is there’s a certain demographic, or the state also has some regulatory issues, Maryland is very a medical state as well, but once the patients spoke out and they realized what those strains did for patients, they gave the approval and it’s like the top selling strain in Maryland.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I think that. But that again with High Times or something that the public or the department has decided sounds too recreational, then they’re really trying to put a… I don’t know. We can get into this-

Bijan Sakaki:
No, no. What it is, everyone’s trying their best. Regulators are moving quickly, laws passed, people have to have a position, it’s just, I think we’ll come to a solution. Because again, by all means, we do not… People have a really big misconception of a medical market of cannabis. Everyone thinks, medical pass, one is regular pass. Honestly, I hope reg never passes here, because things happen in that marketplace that you can’t undo in the medical market. Right now people are saying-

Tim Pickett:
From the medical side, it de-legitimizes it as medicine, when you move to recreational, especially when you move that way too fast.

Bijan Sakaki:
100%.

Tim Pickett:
Right? And that’s I think, what you saw in Oregon, their medical program goes down 20% or 70%, after the adult use passes. But there is, I keep telling people, there is a third of the users here who’ve never used before in their life, and they would not have found cannabis unless it was medical.

Bijan Sakaki:
Medical, right.

Tim Pickett:
Right? So there is an expansion of access with medical.

Bijan Sakaki:
But you also have to look at it from, put your patient hat on now and think, what does recreational tax and the additional burden pass through to a customer? Now these $60 [ates 00:32:37]-

Tim Pickett:
That’s right.

Bijan Sakaki:
Now become $85.

Paul Henderson:
Correct.

Tim Pickett:
Because of regulation.

Paul Henderson:
We [crosstalk 00:32:43] this bill in Utah will have a tax, and excise tax or some type of extra-

Tim Pickett:
You’ve got a really good point. We did the calculation for [crosstalk 00:32:51].

Bijan Sakaki:
There is no adult use Utah bill, just for [crosstalk 00:32:54]-

Tim Pickett:
No, no, no. And there is no plan, there’s no-

Bijan Sakaki:
Correct. But any adult use bill typically, because that’s one of the things that move the needle for people is, okay we can have this additional income.

Tim Pickett:
Well, and you look at the cost, if you’re complaining about the cost of the Utah program, the cost of the medical visit you’ve got, and the cost of the product, you’re thinking is high. If you compare that to driving all the way, even Windover, with gas prices now especially-

Paul Henderson:
And time, and risk.

Tim Pickett:
… And all that time and risk, and then you’re crossing state lines, and then you’re buying it at 22% tax there, and bringing it all the way back, breaking state laws, federal laws. Even the numbers work out to be as inexpensive here already.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, for sure.

Paul Henderson:
And I remember when Utah program, the medical program launched and there was kind this recoil of the pricing, and yet Missouri went live about the same time with $100 ates, that was the cheapest you could find. And so you’re looking at it like a 60 versus 100, it’s like I’d rather be in the Utah program. I feel like because we’re surrounded by recreational states, and states that have had programs for many, many years with prices coming down little by little, year over year, people get accustomed to that’s what you should pay, and so the price is a little bit of a shock. But if you compare it to a state that’s around dry states, if you will, then prices are sky high.

Tim Pickett:
Boy this, I’ll tell you I used Ice Cream Cake when I hurt my back two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, my back totally locked up and I couldn’t walk for a couple of days. It happens once every couple of years to me. I should get it looked at. But I had to, I’ll be honest, I had to really use a lot of cannabis to get the pain pretty bearable, which I was surprised about. It seems like we’ve talked to patients and we tell them to use as least amount as possible. But there’s a time and a place, and this is not medical advice folks, but there’s a time and a place where you just got to get basically as high as you can stand, to get through the pain.

Bijan Sakaki:
How’s your back now?

Tim Pickett:
Well, it’s way better. Three days of complete, like I can’t do anything, because the first day I couldn’t walk at all, second day I could make a cup of coffee, and third day I could watch Olympics and eat lunch. But both the muscle relaxation, the pain control, and then keeping my mind away from work, I couldn’t have done that without it. Totally.

Bijan Sakaki:
No, that has been… We were putting that in rotation a little more, so you will see more Ice Cream Cake. I’m excited for peoples reaction on the new menus because I think it’s also important to keep putting out different stuff. It’s challenging too when you have a small garden because you’re also limited, so until we get our expansion up and running, we’re going to be trying to maximize what we have, and [crosstalk 00:36:05]-

Tim Pickett:
Grow really good flower, and the Green Crack.

Bijan Sakaki:
And the Green Crack. The Green Crack is a great one, I think we’re going to maybe put that on ice for a little bit and then bring it back. But we’ll see.

Tim Pickett:
I’m such a lightweight.

Bijan Sakaki:
You’re good.

Tim Pickett:
I’m trying to work on my tolerance.

Bijan Sakaki:
This, I mean the volcano, is very, very effective.

Tim Pickett:
Absolutely. So, what else should we talk about? You guys, dealers choice.

Paul Henderson:
Well, Bijan just mentioned expansion, so for those that don’t know, if you have one cultivation license in the Utah, it allows you to grow in two different locations, so we had been searching high for an industrial warehouse, but with COVID, all the big companies snatched up every warehouse you could find. So that’s been made very difficult. So, we’re working on some options, we might be able to expand at our current spot, and so that will just increase canopy, allow us to bring out more varieties, more strains at the same time.

Bijan Sakaki:
To feed more stores, because right now it’s also a little bit harder where we sell so much at retail. So, if our output is X and our sales are Y, we also have to make sure that other people have enough to eat as well.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, because if you get… We have a lot of patients move a lot. We’ve been surprised at how people are moving around.

Bijan Sakaki:
What do you think is the driver there? Because a lot of stuff is priced differently at different stores, same stuff priced differently.

Tim Pickett:
Priced differently.

Bijan Sakaki:
Is it-

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I think people are learning that they can go, if they’re headed home to [Tooele 00:37:41], they’re going to find you. Whereas in the beginning, they were all-

Bijan Sakaki:
People are still finding us though.

Tim Pickett:
They are, but people were going to Dragonfly for a whole year because they didn’t know anybody else was open. Now, God bless him, I love you Kevin over there, but they really didn’t know anybody else was even open. And they would live by one, like [inaudible 00:38:09], they were driving all the way down to Salt Lake. So that’s the problem with the advertising, nobody can really-

Paul Henderson:
Get the word out.

Tim Pickett:
… Nobody can get the word out.

Paul Henderson:
[crosstalk 00:38:17] website, but I can count on one hand-

Bijan Sakaki:
Not to mention Paul, we just got our Instagram shut down.

Paul Henderson:
Oh, that’s [crosstalk 00:38:25]-

Tim Pickett:
That’s right.

Bijan Sakaki:
All you haters, thank you, because we’re just going to make another one, and we will just get that one shut down again.

Tim Pickett:
Every time your reach increases, kaboom, somebody flags you and then you’re suppressed. I’m surprised on Instagram, we’ve had okay success on Instagram, it’s Facebook that we cannot get any reach on Facebook at all.

Bijan Sakaki:
It’s hard, but-

Paul Henderson:
Same company though, just different internal policies, and no armor reason, you do everything right, you follow the rules, you don’t sell anything on Instagram, and you have your license numbers there, so they know you’re legit. And it doesn’t matter, shuts you down, and that is the one voice we had to kind of speak to our patient base, so this is what’s going on, come in. So we’ve just got to start over and do it again.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, that’s so crazy, how they can even do that.

Bijan Sakaki:
Technically, it’s federally illegal, so they report to bigger people than we do.

Paul Henderson:
Anybody wondering, it’s Beehive Farmacy, with an F, Backup, is our new. Beehive Farmacy Backup is our new Instagram handle, so go check it out.

Bijan Sakaki:
Hopefully we get Beehive Farmacy back up. No, but it is Backup.

Tim Pickett:
Are most people coming through the drive through now?

Bijan Sakaki:
People still do. People still do. People still come drive through.

Paul Henderson:
50% of orders or so, coming through [crosstalk 00:39:48]. Is it that high right now? I don’t remember the numbers.

Tim Pickett:
Do you have delivery yet?

Bijan Sakaki:
We’re about to do delivery.

Tim Pickett:
What’s the name of the delivery service, do you know?

Bijan Sakaki:
We’re going to do it internally.

Tim Pickett:
You’re going to do it yourself?

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah. It was a build versus buy decision, and-

Tim Pickett:
You decided to do it.

Bijan Sakaki:
We decided to do it.

Tim Pickett:
Can you sell space in your car for flyers for Red Hanger Dry Cleaners?

Bijan Sakaki:
Or for Utah Therapeutics?

Tim Pickett:
Not for me, I’m just thinking like Mo’ Bettahs Food.

Paul Henderson:
I don’t know.

Bijan Sakaki:
I think, well I don’t think, I know all the driver stuff needs to be discrete, non-marked. It’s not like this is a truck delivering weed, and you can get a menu at Mo’ Bettahs.

Tim Pickett:
Right, yeah. I’m always interested in what else can you do at the point of sale.

Bijan Sakaki:
I know originally the advertiser requirements were a little bit undefined for those third party couriers, so we’ve seen our friends, love the billboards, love them, they’re everywhere.

Tim Pickett:
They are.

Bijan Sakaki:
I think it helps raise awareness for everybody.

Paul Henderson:
That cannabis is legal in Utah. I still talk to people every day that have no idea there’s a medical bill in Utah.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, that’s my billboard, and it’s, no matter how much exposure any other Q&P group gets, it’s totally great for us, because it’s just exposure is that they talk to four or five people, they learn it’s legal here and where they can, if it’s an option for them.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah. We talk a lot about how we’re not really in competition with the other licensed groups, our main competition is the illicit market. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in, I talked about California, but Utah has a big underground market with IED coming through, I don’t think it’s any surprise. So it’s us really educating patients here that, or our potential patients that, hey, this is legal now, you can go through and get your card and come into a pharmacy.

Bijan Sakaki:
But for a lot of people too they’re like, “Why would I do that?” And if you truly are mindful of what you eat and what you put in your body, what you’re consuming, then you want to know that this has been tested. We want to talk about lessons in California, so a lot of things in California that never would pass testing, would allegedly get destroyed. And those things allegedly appear in other markets. So if you really don’t have a grip-

Tim Pickett:
Didn’t we have something like that here coming out of Tooele or something? A huge, huge bust.

Bijan Sakaki:
So Paul’s comment about the 80 and the 15, it is where the 80 and the 15 meet, and so there’s people always getting caught with, you agreed on KSL, 300 pounds of [inaudible 00:42:43] or whatever, and that guy’s going back to Auburn in New York, or wherever he’s from. So you get a lot of questionable product. You have these vape pens back during, “Vape Gate,” the vape gate stuff. So those are full of dillutants, vitamin E acetate, a lot of the actual oil itself had Myclobutanil, pesticides. If you have a dirty flower that doesn’t pass and then you extract it, now all those pesticides are concentrated in that distillate.

Tim Pickett:
In that distillate.

Bijan Sakaki:
And then that’s what’s being used to then make gummies and fill vape carts.

Paul Henderson:
And even before that, if you have a flower in California that pops for a pesticide that Bijan just mentioned, Myclobutanil, or it’s called Eagle 20 as well, and it’s sprayed on fruits and vegetables in California, so it’s not dangerous if you eat it. But if you put flame to the weed, it turns into cyanide and you’re inhaling that.

Paul Henderson:
Talking about being careful about what you’re putting in your body, there’s dangerous chemicals that you can be inhaling if you don’t know where the flower is coming from.

Bijan Sakaki:
And even on the edible side, because we get a lot of people that come into the store and they’re like, “Hey, I bought these gummies and,” they’ll pull a picture on their phone, and they’re like these gummy bears that are rolled around in distillate. And it’s like, you don’t really know what’s in that. With these, you know how much is in one serving and one product.

Tim Pickett:
Are these in your store?

Bijan Sakaki:
These ones are not, we’re actually going to start producing these here the next few weeks. These are going to be, I think a really good product for this market.

Tim Pickett:
You want to talk about them? They’re just empty packages right now, but they’re tablets, yeah?

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah. So these are pro-tabs by LEVEL. LEVEL was started by one of the smartest guys in cannabis that I know, Chris Emerson, he’s a PhD. Brilliant guy, brilliant team, he and his wife run the company, and they have really formulated a great product, it’s a small form factor, it doesn’t digest in your liver, so the effects are very similar to a flower high. It doesn’t convert into 11-Hydroxy, so it’s not like that meme when an edible kicks in and then you’re like riding that rocket ship. So it doesn’t give you that, it’s a very familiar experience to what you would get if you medicate with flower.

Bijan Sakaki:
So we’re going to drop these, we’re going to have 100 milligram tabs, 25 milligram tabs, single packs, four packs, 10 packs. So I think it will be a really good alternative for people who are familiar with the edible consumption, but are also new to cannabis and maybe don’t want to take something with sugar and gelatin and food coloring and all the other stuff in there, when this is simply just-

Tim Pickett:
Well the tolerance will be a little different because if it doesn’t convert to 11-Hydroxy, then the high, the level of high or that level of psycho-activity, is different.

Bijan Sakaki:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tim Pickett:
Right?

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah.

Tim Pickett:
But consistent dosing, we do need more products in Utah with consistent dosing, so that you know exactly how many milligrams you’re taking, what it’s likely going to feel like from a medical standpoint. That’s just how medicine should be taken.

Bijan Sakaki:
Understood. And that’s the same approach. That’s why, I’ve known these guys for five plus years, and when this market opened up, we have what, the third or fourth opioid problem right now?

Tim Pickett:
Yeah.

Bijan Sakaki:
And-

Tim Pickett:
It’s huge.

Bijan Sakaki:
And so for a lot of chronic pain people, this is not an unfamiliar method of consumption. Whereas, vape rising flower or vape rising cartridge-

Tim Pickett:
Or even taking a gummy, some people are like, it’s like I’m eating candy, like the gummy vitamins.

Bijan Sakaki:
True.

Tim Pickett:
They feel like it’s not real. Pills are just so much easier for people to understand when it comes to medicine.

Bijan Sakaki:
And part of it too is just watching a lot of these variable doses of edible sell really well and really poorly. And so we’re coming out with a smaller dose market, more of that micro-tier single digit milligrams.

Tim Pickett:
You can see, so as a retailer though, that’s a good point you bring up, you can see what patients want, where the demand is, and then even if you’re a little smaller with the production side now, you’re kind of coming into it in a better spot, where you can develop products that-

Paul Henderson:
It’s just market research, right? It’s like you know exactly what’s selling, you can go back, and you can build what people want to buy. So you don’t have to guess and check, you don’t have to come out with something and test it.

Tim Pickett:
Has that been something that you personally have been able to really influence in Beehive, because of your experience in the marketplace?

Paul Henderson:
A little bit, but I wouldn’t say to that extent. But I think I helped a lot early on, on what eCommerce business, to go with duchy on the front end, so we can take orders online. And like our big sign, instead of the brand name, just put a big green cross, and it’s like the bat signal, right?

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it is.

Paul Henderson:
Anyway, it was just a lot of those little things that-

Tim Pickett:
It is going down the 201, right? [crosstalk 00:48:13].

Bijan Sakaki:
That’s 201.

Paul Henderson:
And so it was more kind of business related stuff to like, I actually tried and failed and iterated and went through multiple versions of things, to kind of figure out what works. And then we just go the benefit on the Beehive side of like, hey let’s skip all that. And these guys built the best website for cannabis retail stores, so let’s go there.

Tim Pickett:
Sounds cool.

Bijan Sakaki:
And that, again, a lot of how we ran things are relationship based. We work together because we want to work together, it’s not because it was like, oh, this is the only opportunity at hand, and this is a forced relationship. So we’ve got a lot of trust there.

Bijan Sakaki:
But also too, to the earlier point, we can listen at the registers and be like, “Yo, people are asking for more concentrates.” So now we’re going to take all of our trim and we’re going to now make concentrates that everybody that’s going to Windover, doesn’t need to go to Windover anymore. It’s like, we’re going to now have some good cured live resin, we’re going to have some cured resin, we’re going to do some solventless. And again, it’s that comment Paul made earlier, you can’t be everything to everybody.

Bijan Sakaki:
We can’t sell mids and also pretend to sell top-shelf. And then also pretend to sell little [chinsy 00:49:30] like snake oil type items. And so it’s like picking what’s really important to us, like we’re super passionate about the brands we’re bringing, LEVEL is one of them, Cookies is another one. You’ve seen a couple of the other brands that we’ve launched at Beehive, like Proper, like Release Society.

Tim Pickett:
Those two are great brands too. And that Release Society is [crosstalk 00:49:55]-

Bijan Sakaki:
And they have great products too.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah.

Bijan Sakaki:
And part of our strategy on the Release Society carts was, we see a lot of carts come through the store with returns. Bad hardware, bad inputs. So how can we make that tweak a little bit.

Paul Henderson:
And this is the stuff we saw in California, that one dollar Chinese cartridges, they have a failure rate, and you know what it is. So yeah, you can save a couple of bucks, but then your brand gets a bad reputation of your hardware failing all the time. So do you spend some more money? Do you upgrade the hardware? Do you just kind of work with people like Release Society to let them know, this is exactly what works, we’ve already tested it, I’ve already been through all these iterations in California, and use this manufacturer for your hardware, and no returns yet, I guess [crosstalk 00:50:36] today.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, its been great. And so we have the luxury of also, again, put our patient hat on like, would we use this? What issues do we have because we’re using it? Does this hardware need better improvement, let’s try and do something. Is the flower testing well enough? A lot of people are either flavor chasers or potency chasers. So with flavor, you need more [inaudible 00:51:03], you need more resin production, which adds to the medicinal benefit of the actual plant itself. So how can we double down on our environmentals? Let’s change the way we feed, let’s change our schedule, let’s… I’m generalizing here, but the changes we’ve made in cultivating in the last six, seven months, look completely different. And so over the next couple of months, you’ll see the flower quality starting to increase, because once you make a change, you’re not going to see it until the end product, six, seven months later.

Bijan Sakaki:
So, things that we’re doing now, you’re not going to see in market until July-ish.

Tim Pickett:
You guys really are, now that I’ve been talking to you for the hour, you guys are the only owners who know the business top to bottom. You realize that don’t you? Like from clear out to the consumption side, nobody is doing it all the way, or nobody is really involved all the way in the vertical. They’re either involved heavily in the retail and not in the grow and the producing, the production. But you guys seem to be involved all the way.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah, I don’t know enough of the other operators to know that actually, so it’s interesting. But before I was running High Times, I was CEO of a company called Grupo Flor, which was one of the larger vertically integrated companies in California. So I have run 230,000 square feet of cultivation in dutch glass greenhouses myself. I actually worked with the greenhouse companies to convert them from cut flowers to cannabis, so I had to learn everything from lifecycles and we’re talking about environmentals with lights and humidity, and everything Bijan just mentioned.

Paul Henderson:
So, well I’m not doing it at High Times, bringing all those skills together with what Bijan knows and some of our other partners, we’ve been at every single level from-

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, from the first [crosstalk 00:52:59]-

Paul Henderson:
… I had the first ever hydrocarbon extraction license in the state of California, it was in Salinas California, it was me because when we brought the Colorado department, marijuana enforcement division med, spoke with them, brought their fire department consultants out to California, worked at the facilities. You didn’t have a choice but to actually build it, right? So we’re doing the same thing here but we can benefit, Bijan was in California for a while too, so he saw all that. So we’re now owners operators, we now have been involved in every single thing from genetics, through to retail delivery. And I think it shows in our product here in Utah, that we care a lot about what we do.

Bijan Sakaki:
And while we’re not in the garden every day, we’ve got a really solid team up there, and we’re getting better at figuring it out. But when we do make a change, we all know what we’re changing. So, it’s double edged sword though because while we are involved, that may inhibit our growth or our ability to scale to that degree. But I think right now when you’re juggling chainsaws, it’s better to be careful.

Tim Pickett:
You’re juggling some pretty good chainsaws though. You’ve got a very successful, in my opinion, you run a really great pharmacy. Your pharmacies in both locations are excellent.

Bijan Sakaki:
Thank you.

Tim Pickett:
Really involved. Mindy and I talk all the time-

Bijan Sakaki:
She’s great.

Tim Pickett:
… And are involved in a group from Brigham city. And yet your, it almost seems like the best is yet to come still, because you have all of this expansion of grow, the product side, the brands you want to bring on.

Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, and on top of that it’s just, double down on customer service. Everyone’s trying, so we don’t want our spot to be a place people come because they feel like they have to, it’s because it’s a place they come because they want to, they trust the people that are there as the pharmacist, as the pharmacy agent, as us the owners, because there’s not a lot of people that… I’m very open about, know who you’re supporting. It’s like that whole, know where your food comes from campaign. So we have a pretty small team and I’d say we’re probably the mom and pop underdog.

Tim Pickett:
You will always be.

Paul Henderson:
And you mentioned Brigham city, we haven’t talked a lot about that. But that’s the second location of the retail store, for those that don’t know. We are in Salt Lake off of 201, Brigham city, right in between kind of what Logan and [Ogden 00:55:38], if you will.

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, you’ve got to make the turn off of the freeway to go up the canyon.

Bijan Sakaki:
Take the 1100 South exit, we’re right in the same parking lot as Walmart, next to Subway and the Supercuts.

Tim Pickett:
Yep, right in between there in that strip, like this little strip mall. Your sign’s on the back of the store. I see it every time I drive up.

Bijan Sakaki:
You’ll see the green cross, and if you’re a patient in Salt Lake, all your information is in Brigham city, so you don’t have to see the pharmacist again, unless you want to.

Tim Pickett:
And there’s probably no line there most of the time.

Bijan Sakaki:
Honestly, its been getting a lot busier. Mindy’s been doing a really good job of, she-

Tim Pickett:
She comes by, and make sure our patients know that she’s up there.

Bijan Sakaki:
Well she took over her own ordering.

Tim Pickett:
Oh, does she?

Bijan Sakaki:
So we were trying to run thing central to Salt Lake, and this is an example of areas where we thought we knew, hey, this is the right strategy, we learned it’s not. And so centralizing ordering was great for vendors, but kind of a nightmare for us because the frequency of what was happening in Brigham city-

Tim Pickett:
Was different. Or it would be totally different.

Paul Henderson:
Different, different product selection and stuff.

Bijan Sakaki:
Different demographic. We look at the ratios of what sells flower, [crosstalk 00:56:55], vape carts is different in Salt Lake than it is in Brigham, and we have the same products on the menu. So yeah, Mindy and the crew said Zed, Landon, we had a couple of new hires up there as well. They’ve been holding it down, it’s a new pharmacist, and we’re hoping that we can be kind of that specialty location for, again, that high end top-shelf medicine that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get at other pharmacies.

Tim Pickett:
Hmm, yeah. Cool.

Paul Henderson:
Yeah. And its been growing month over month, so I think really just as patient count has gone up, we see the results at the end pharmacy.

Tim Pickett:
That’s cool. So tell me your Instagram again, the new one.

Bijan Sakaki:
Beehive Farmacy Backup.

Tim Pickett:
Beehive Farmacy Backup, with an F.

Bijan Sakaki:
Farmacy with an F.

Tim Pickett:
Farmacy with an F. How else can people get a hold of you? What’s the address of the locations?

Bijan Sakaki:
So, beehivefarmacy.com, from there you can either make a registration appointment as a new patient, you can view our menu for both stores and place an order there. Salt Lake’s location, 1991 South, 3600 West Salt Lake City, 84104. So that’s right off the 201, right near [inaudible 00:58:07] Highway. Brigham City is, 1150 South, 870 West Unit C.

Tim Pickett:
I’m testing you right there.

Bijan Sakaki:
I know. Unit C-

Tim Pickett:
I can tell [crosstalk 00:58:21]. Just follow your nose. When you go to Subway, just stop by the medicine store.

Bijan Sakaki:
But you can also call us if you have any questions.

Tim Pickett:
And you can find you at utahmarijuana.org/dispensaries, for anybody whose just looking up dispensaries in Utah, and not medical cannabis pharmacies, you tend to run into us. And we have all of your information, both locations too, and some really good reviews actually.

Bijan Sakaki:
Well great. And I know we’ve got some-

Tim Pickett:
And we’ve done some articles on some of the stuff on utahmarijuana.org.

Bijan Sakaki:
I know we also have some deals for some of your patients-

Tim Pickett:
Oh yeah, new patients if you see us in West Valley especially, you’re going to get a coupon to the pharmacy straightaway. So we did have some patients, we’ve had patients come in, in the morning, and by the time they leave our office, have their card, and be able to come across the street. We’ve actually had that happen.

Bijan Sakaki:
That’s great. So it’s almost the same [crosstalk 00:59:25]-

Tim Pickett:
Because the department of health has been so, almost everybody gets a same day turnaround now, but some people get a two hour turnaround, because the department of health has been really on top of-

Bijan Sakaki:
That location, your location was really popping during the Letters.

Tim Pickett:
Oh, the Letters is great, because you can walk over-

Bijan Sakaki:
You could walk over, yeah. It was…

Tim Pickett:
Yeah, there are some things with the system right now that are, I’m squinting my eyes right now people. Okay, Utah in the Weeds podcast. If you’re not subscribed, then subscribe to the podcast, utahmarijuana.org/dispensaries, Beehive Farmacy. Man, its been great talking to you Bijan and Paul. Congratulations with your store in California, [crosstalk 01:00:09] and your new role here. And-

Paul Henderson:
And for those who don’t know, I live in Utah, so I just never clarified that. This is my home base, I travel for High Times. So my office for High Times is in Venus Beach, but I’m on the road generally three to four weeks out of the month.

Bijan Sakaki:
Didn’t you go to BYU?

Paul Henderson:
I did go to BYU as well. [crosstalk 01:00:28], that’s what I’m saying, I’m not the outside guy coming in, I live here.

Tim Pickett:
And there’s the bells. There’s the church bells. That’s it, all right everybody.

Bijan Sakaki:
Thanks Tim.

Tim Pickett:
Be safe out there.

 

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By UtahMarijuana.org
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Published April 19, 2022

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