Spotlight: Chris Marmion of Carmel Cannabis on discovering a distinct segment

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“I think it’s important to be hyper-focused. We can’t be everything to everyone.”

“If you grow good flower, you can just let it speak for itself, “If you grow good flower, you can just let it speak for itself,” Marmion says. Photo by submitted

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Welcome to Spotlight, a new series by The GrowthOp. Published weekly, Spotlight provides commentary and insight from experts operating in the cannabis and psychedelic industries. This week, we chatted with Chris Marmion, head of sales and marketing at Carmel Cannabis. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Carmel Cannabis bills itself as a flower-first company.

The Ontario-based craft cannabis producer makes dried flower and pre-rolls and only dried flower and pre-rolls.

Chris Marmion, head of sales and marketing, says the company isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel. “We look to serve the customer that’s interested in whole flower and that loves the plant,” he says. “I think it’s important to be hyper-focused. We can’t be everything to everyone.”

It’s a strategy that’s working. Earlier this year, Carmel was recognized with four awards at the inaugural Kind Magazine Awards, including Best Indica Flower, Best Sativa Pre-roll and Craft Brand of the Year.

Carmel currently produces eight cultivars and in May the company added a first-of-its-kind infused pre-roll to the product line.

Animal Face and Tiger Cake flower are mixed with ice water hash in a one-gram King Palm wrap. It is the first infused product featuring the handmade palm leaf wrap on the Canadian market and it aligns with a brand that has built a reputation by highlighting its growing process and dedication to flower.

“If you grow good flower, you can just let it speak for itself,” Marmion says.

What is the philosophy of the grow team?

Our grow team comes from a legacy background. The team is constantly pheno-hunting and always looking to bring new products to market. Last year, we launched over eight different strains. The guys love growing new stuff and are always bringing new

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to market and doing unique things, as well. For example, three out of the four products that we launched with were cultivars that were unavailable in the market previously.

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We have a huge seed bank that the team’s amassed over the years and we wanted to make sure that we were selecting something that was always going to be unique and always going to stand out. We look for incredible flavour and terpene profile, as well as flower that yields well and grows well in our facility.

A lot of companies just threw out the playbook when it comes to flower. Most producers are not hang drying, they’re not curing their product and they’re not growing in small batches. These are the things that our grow team has always done.

What’s your facility and location like?

We built our facility around the way the grow team grows cannabis. Drew, our master grower co-designed our facility — how everything would flow, the room size, all those details. Whereas other producers just took a large commercial agricultural lens to things and try to get products through the facility as quickly as possible.

The location, it’s an agricultural area which has its benefits for setting up that type of facility. Our hope in the future is to be able to have more on-site experience-based initiatives. Being right off Lake Simcoe, in Oro-Medonte, I think is pretty advantageous for that, and being on the way to cottage country, as well. But the municipality has opted out of retail. We’re working on getting a retail component, but that’s a long-term initiative.

If the municipality opts in for retail, do you have plans for farm gate sales?

That’s definitely something that will be part of the future. We’re pretty close to the Greater Toronto Area, we’re pretty central for a lot of our retail partners and that has been a huge asset. People are always really excited to come check out the facility and meet the team. So the location has been a real blessing in terms of letting people experience the brand, which has been a huge driver in terms of getting people to know what we’re all about.

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Having people being able to connect directly with us in that capacity has been huge. We’re hosting retailers twice a week at the facility and constantly having people in.

Carmel has found success in the pre-roll category. Has it surprised you at all how popular pre-rolls have become in the Canadian market?

Pre-rolls are definitely our top-selling format. We really didn’t expect it to be as big of a thing, but people love the convenience.

We believe our consumers are a little more discerning in terms of what they’re looking for. And pre-rolls have traditionally had that stigma around them, not perceived as a connoisseur product, but we’ve been blown away by the reception on pre-rolls. We’ve also done the pre-rolls the right way, we’re only using whole flower and we’ve got long, slim cones whereas a lot of people went with the stubby, fat cones, which I don’t think are as nice of an experience and don’t burn as well.

Traditional formats are where it’s at, I think.

How have you approached building the brand and developing name recognition in this highly regulated industry?

Everyone for so long has talked about how the regulations in our industry prohibit you from being able to build a brand and we never agreed with that. We just thought that how companies were looking to build brands in the past just wasn’t resonating with consumers and just wasn’t hitting the target.

No one was thinking about consumer experience as a way of differentiating your brand. So for us, like, we were one of the first producers to put lineage, appearance and aroma and all these key product attributes directly onto our packaging because we knew that consumers had previously been able to experience those things at a retail level.

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For us, it was really about creating unique experiences for consumers. We wanted to bring people into the company so we’ve really showcased our team, showcase our grows and really show everyone the behind-the-scenes look at what a producer does. And I think it’s really ended up cutting through in terms of helping establish the brand. We’re most definitely one of the top recognized brands in Ontario and we’ve done it all without much of a marketing budget and being a really small grow from Oro.

If you know someone that you think could be a good fit for this series, please get in touch at sriches@postmedia.com.

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