Inside the Treasure Coast’s Green Rush

Brady Cobb of Martin County, founder of One Plant. Photo by Shaun Cruz

In just a few years, Treasure Coast could become an international hub for one of the fastest growing industries in the country. A large research center helps attract start-ups and other companies to the region. This may all sound familiar, but it’s not about Scripps and the biotech industry. It’s about an industry that was only recently legal but already employs thousands of people locally: cannabis.

“Martin and St. Lucie counties have deep agricultural roots and this company could be a good economic engine for the foreseeable future,” said Brady Cobb, a graduate of Martin County High School and founder of a cannabis startup that’s now worth several million. With a government-sponsored research laboratory (the U.S. Horticultural Research Laboratory) and thousands of acres of farmland potentially convertible to house growing, an area known for its largely conservative culture will soon appear to be home to a less conservative one Area to become booming industry.

Cobb calls his employees in the One Plant greenhouse a “dream team of cannabis growers and purists”. One Plant photos by Shaun Cruz

Cobb, an attorney at his own law firm, joined the cannabis business’s finance department in 2012 and began lobbying for changes to the law regarding marijuana in Tallahassee and DC. His interest in all of this was piqued while caring for his ailing father, Clyde Walton “Bill” Cobb, who became a drug smuggler decades ago after an unexpected encounter. He had been to his Pensacola farm one day when a trailer truck broke nearby. The drivers asked the older Cobb if they could keep a few things in his barn for a little while; in return they promised him $ 70,000. Cobb agreed – and this decision was the first step in becoming a major dealer for Pablo Escobar. Cobb was arrested for smuggling in 1983 and was serving time in prison. After his release, he developed prostate cancer, which would cost his life in 2010.

He smoked marijuana to relieve his pain, and seeing how much it helped his father, the younger Cobb decided to do something to help others. In 2018, he bought a small medical marijuana company that he renamed One Plant and began to grow it quickly. He started in 2020 with a pharmacy and a small grove in Ruskin on Florida’s west coast. By the end of the year he had opened seven pharmacies and built a brand new 54,000 square foot cultivation facility in Indiantown that employed 265 people across the state. He went public last year and last January negotiated a merger with Cresco Labs for $ 213 million in shares.

In a greenhouse in the One Plant cultivation facility in Indiantown.

Cobb says it made sense to start his business in the area. From a distribution standpoint, Indiantown is only a few hours from Orlando and Miami. And the local government, he says, “was a partner and the support was tremendous.”

Florida’s medical marijuana laws require that every company that sells marijuana be vertically integrated, which means that a company like One Plant must grow the plants and have its own distribution system and retail operation. A plant in Indiantown is one of the most technologically advanced in the state. The hybrid greenhouse, which is located on a 33 hectare farm, houses 10 5,000 square meters of cultivation rooms, which have adjustable climate control and adjustable shade or solar systems depending on the needs of the plants. The irrigation and fertilization system can also infuse CO2 when the plants need it. Because the greenhouse controls the climate so precisely, it can be operated in an “eternal harvest”, which means that the staff reap and replant one of the flowering rooms every seven days. “Our team is very proud of how clean the garden is and how happy and healthy our plants are,” says Cobb, who describes his greenhouse staff as a “dream team of cannabis growers and purists”. To keep track of how the assets are doing, the company has created a proprietary technology program called AllLeaves. To bring the product to customers, One Plant uses an e-commerce platform and a home delivery system.

A One Plant pharmacy in Port St. Lucie.

Cobb isn’t the only one to recognize the geographic advantages of Treasure Coast. A plant could soon be surrounded by many more cannabis companies, says Roger Brown, CEO and president of the ACS Laboratory, which has offices in Boca Raton and a cannabis research facility near Tampa. Brown says Martin and St. Lucie counties have the available farmland and farmers the cannabis industry needs. “When you drive to the One Plant, you will see that it is surrounded by farmland,” he says. “This land is owned by pretty big business farmers. All of these farms are revenue
Do they produce and will they make more money growing ornamental flowers or strawberries than growing marijuana or hemp? “

It’s a rhetorical question. Medical marijuana has only been legal in Florida since 2016, but the industry had sales of more than $ 1.2 billion last year. The industry is expected to generate annual sales of $ 6 billion here by 2030. The industry grew 93 percent in its first year, and Florida now has nearly half a million medical marijuana patients. Fifteen thousand local cannabis-related jobs were created over the past year, bringing the number of Floridians in the industry to over 30,000. The cannabis industry is so important to the state that the pharmacy employees were classified as “essential workers” during the pandemic lockdown.

Part of the reason the Treasure Coast has become a hub for cannabis startups is thanks to a St. Lucie County research laboratory jointly operated by the University of Florida and the USDA. The Fort Pierce facility, the U.S. Horticultural Research Laboratory, does hemp research, among other things, and a proposal has been made to make it a major international research center with marijuana growing areas, says Jeff Greene, a Fort Lauderdale-based company lobbyist for the Florida Hemp Council. Greene suspects this will happen soon, and if it does, it will likely bring even more marijuana, hemp, and CBD companies to the area.

Michael Cammarata, President and CEO of Neptune Wellness Solutions. Courtesy of Neptune Wellness

This new world of legal cannabis isn’t just about patients buying medical marijuana and CBD oil from pharmacies to treat illnesses. Among the many cannabis-related companies is Neptune Wellness Solutions, a Canadian company that is moving its headquarters to Jupiter. Neptune specializes in extracting compound cannabinoids from the marijuana plant for use in products from deodorants to household cleaners, says President and CEO Michael Cammarata. “This plant is a great ingredient,” he says. “It will transform beauty items, household items, and the medicine cabinet for different purposes.”

Rendering of Neptune’s new US headquarters in Jupiter. Courtesy of Index Invest

Cammarata, a Jupiter native, came to this conclusion about cannabis when he was CEO of Schmidt’s Naturals. The company was looking for herbal ingredients that could replace chemicals (like aluminum in deodorant). Research showed that cannabinoids can be used in many of the products made by Cammarata, but no one produced the number of cannabinoids that the health and beauty industries needed to make the cannabinoids

Courtesy of Neptune Wellness Solutions

Counter. In 2019, he invested millions of his own money in Neptune and turned it into a cannabinoid producing specialist. And it is clear that there is a market for it: Neptune almost doubled its growth in the past year alone. At Neptune’s new US headquarters in Jupiter, Cammarata will focus on making cannabinoids that can be used in all types of products. At the same time, we are working on federal and state cannabis legislation and educating Americans about the use of cannabis as a super ingredient.

While the Treasure Coast continues to see a boom in the cannabis industry, other parts of the state are still not as welcome for the growing business. There are currently more than 270 pharmacies in Florida – about a dozen in Counties Martin and St. Lucie alone – but Jupiter has banned pharmacies within city limits. Cannabis legal expert Dustin Robinson says this is likely to change soon, citing evidence that “70 percent of Florida voters” support legal pharmacies and that Jupiter residents are currently simply traveling to Stuart pharmacies or choosing to Have products delivered to your home by companies outside of the city.

The bottom line, Brown says, is that it all boils down to money. As long as marijuana is classified as a medicine, the state cannot tax it and enter an industry that is quickly becoming one of the most profitable in the world. If moved to recreational use in the future, Florida will open the door to hundreds of millions of tax revenues annually.

This lure of tax revenues is changing what it means to advocate cannabis laws. When Cobb first came into the business, he said he “couldn’t get a call back from the people who make the coffee” in Tallahassee, and his family asked why he got into such a controversial business. Today the cannabis industry is a powerful lobbying force, and the same family members are now asking him how to get a medical marijuana card. Cobb says, “The reactions and narratives have changed so dramatically.”

Photo by Alison Frank Photography

The cannabis publicist

Durée Ross had been in the advertising business for nearly 20 years when she received a call that amazed her. It was from a real estate developer investing in a CBD business and he needed your help to promote it. Do you remember thinking about CBD? Like in marijuana? She had little firsthand experience in the field, but had been commuting between South Florida and Colorado for years, so she knew that cannabis was already a big industry in other parts of the country. She quickly put her team at Durée & Company together and presented them with a task: They were supposed to learn everything about marijuana, from research and legal issues to science and its effects on the body. “As a publicist, when you sell a product, you have to understand and believe it,” she says. Today her agency represents all types of companies and stakeholders involved in the cannabis industry. Cannabis-related customers, including One Plant and the Florida Hemp Council, now account for a third of her company’s total business, and she anticipates that number will increase. “A whole new industry doesn’t often just pop up,” she says, “and we were able to get on the ground floor.”