The combination of the pharmaceutical-grade warehouse setup and the presence of thousands upon thousands of pot plants gives it the sterile but earthy smell of a Home Depot garden department-you know, if Home Depot sold weed.
We clear customs without a word and proceed to Tilray’s 65,000-square-foot cannabis lab and grow facility, where the whiff of freshly cut marijuana floods your nostrils as soon as you open the heavy steel door. On the ground in Nanaimo, Kennedy is something of a local celebrity, having quickly become one of the largest employers in a community of 92,000 people. In the summer, when it’s easier to go via low-flying seaplane, you can often glimpse a pod of orcas swimming just beneath the surface of Puget Sound. Then again, why push your luck? As a Canadian customs officer once put it nonchalantly to Tilray employees, “It’s just like bringing sand to the beach.”įlying north from Seattle, the 360-degree view features Mount Rainier behind you, Mount Baker to your right, and Mount Olympus on the left. government still prohibits taking the drug with you-even when traveling from Washington State, where recreational cannabis has been legal since 2012. But flights crossing the border have nonetheless been warning passengers that the U.S. Preparing for takeoff, the pilot laid out a short list of stipulations: “Stay buckled, no talking on the phone, and no cannabis products on board.” Marijuana became fully legal in Canada on Oct. The day before the predawn pancakes, Kennedy and I had boarded a 10-seat Cessna prop plane at Seattle’s Boeing Field for an hour-long flight to Tilray’s official headquarters, in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the lush, rugged province renowned among cannabis connoisseurs for its “BC bud.” It was cold enough to see your breath inside the plane. Brendan Kennedy and his family, center, ring the Nasdaq bell at Tilray’s IPO in July 2018.
But AB InBev’s desire for a deal is just the latest sign of Big Business’s belief that widespread cannabis legalization is an inevitability, and that Tilray-a global operation founded by finance veterans and data geeks with minimal interest in, um, testing the product themselves-will be uniquely poised to capitalize when Big Cannabis goes mainstream. Tilray’s 50% contribution to that venture exceeds the estimated $45 million in revenue it made in 2018, a year in which its estimated losses hit $47 million. Or that after pancakes today, he’ll shake hands with officials at Anheuser-Busch InBev, the behemoth behind Budweiser, to form a $100 million partnership aimed at creating a cannabis-infused substitute for beer. The kids don’t know that the IPO-his daughter got to help ring the bell at the Nasdaq-made Kennedy not only a billionaire but the richest man in the legal marijuana business, and maybe the face of its future. It wears the crown as the hottest IPO of 2018, returning 315% for the year and valuing the Canada-based but American-run company at $9 billion today. pot, weed, and more than 1,000 other colorful nicknames, for the medical-marijuana market and, more recently, the recreational one. Of course, his children are too young to know that what their dad is really good at is-at least for the moment-illegal in much of the U.S. He shrugs as he begins scrambling eggs and frying bacon in another pan: “My kids say pancakes are the only thing I’m good at.” GROWTH INDUSTRY: CEO Brendan Kennedy with marijuana ’tissue culture clones’ at Tilray’s Nanaimo headquarters. Kennedy’s family moved into the new house a few weeks after Tilray went public, and he still struggles to find things in his own kitchen. “Papa, I think you forgot the flour,” she chides. At the moment, though, his 4-year-old daughter, in a pink tutu, is stirring the batter skeptically from her perch atop the kitchen island. In a couple of hours he’ll board his 135th flight of the year-a stat he can tell you because his assistant, knowing how he relishes data, sends him monthly analytics on his own travel (in 2018, he flew 23% more miles than he did the year before). 2 means eating alone, if he’s on the road-which is a lot these days, particularly since Kennedy’s company, Tilray, went public in July.
See, morning is a sacred time for the 46-year-old CEO, who has two rules for starting the day: Always eat breakfast.
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