From Commodity to Craft, Gene McCain Exits the THC Arms Race at Mello Cannabis

Gene McCain is CEO of Mello Cannabis, a dispensary and cannabis farm in Massachusetts taking a radically different – and radically traditional – approach to what has become, in parts of the industry, a THC arms race. 

Cultivators along with cannabis traditionalists have a whole language of aromas and genetic strains that is largely absent from dispensaries today, McCain explained to The Green Letter in a recent interview. Instead, customers confront tags bearing the THC content for a flower or product. “It’s what the customers have,” McCain said, and without another metric to go by, customers, store buyers, and in turn farms are “stuck in this spiral of ever greater THC content, driving prices for high-THC products higher.” This isn’t good or helpful for consumers. 

“If you go into a wine store,” McCain asked, “is the first thing you ask: What's your highest alcohol content wine, because I know that's your best wine?”

Of course not. “You would be laughed at,” McCain said. “There are incredible, delicate aromas and flavors that a sophisticated wine drinker gets to understand and to know,” and this is the case for cannabis, too.

“We have a different way of designating flower,” McCain explained, “which is by aroma profile.” 

With six unique aroma categories – cheese, dessert, fruit, gas, pine, and purple – Mello is bringing the modern commercial cannabis industry back to its roots, educating consumers about the rich history of the plant, and delivering a more personalized user experience, too. 

McCain sat with The Green Letter to share his insights into why the Mello method is the future for a mature, competitive and customer-focused cannabis industry. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To start us off, what was your background before cannabis? How did you get your start in this space?

In my early twenties I got involved in real estate, first in California and then in Hawaii. I built a big real estate brokerage firm and development company in Hawaii, and later moved to Thailand. I was there for almost 15 years, and I continued to develop real estate there.

I’ve used marijuana since I was probably 16 years old though. There've been periods in my life where I got away from it for one reason or another, but the honest truth is I never really saw a big difference between periods when I was smoking and when I wasn't smoking. It was my entertainment, my downtime, my off time from hammering through work.

I got involved in cannabis in the legal market in 2017. There was a Statewide petition to make recreational cannabis legal in Massachusetts, and medical marijuana was made legal in 2016. Some Boston businessman I knew reached out and asked me to get involved. 

We acquired a company that was just in its formation and licensing process, and I went out and found a couple of locations for dispensaries. My partner and I decided to split up in an amicable way, because we were looking at taking things in slightly different directions. He took one of the locations, and I took one of the other sites. It’s a bumpy road in this business.

That first company was medical, and I realized that recreational was a huge tidal wave coming in while the medical business was just smaller waves in front of the big one. I wanted to get on the recreational wave, so I formed a company called Cannabis Provisions.

In 2019 we opened in Lee in western Mass, near New York and Connecticut as the third adult-use store in the state. There were about 20 medical stores, some of which were in the process of converting to recreational or adult use, but we were the third recreational only store. It was sort of like in the movies: you open the doors and they will come. When we opened the doors, we had people lined up around the building. It was very high volume starting on day one.

Canna Provisions Lee has done very very well over the last few years, and we opened up the second store in Holyoke and then the grow facility in Sheffield. We built the company up quite strong, and then myself and some of my investor associates sold our interest to the management team. It’s still a very successful company out in western Mass, but it’s at this time that my investor friends, family, and myself decided to get involved in a new company, Mello Cannabis.

What makes Mello’s approach to retail cannabis different?

We first bought into a license with the site in Northeastern Massachusetts, north of Boston near New Hampshire and Maine. For anyone in the cannabis business in any of the states, it's a brutal battle to get licensed. It's heavily regulated, and the regulator's are very slow to process things and constantly change the rules. It's a battle, and many people don't get through it. It's a tough road and I went through that again with Mello.

When we got our store up and we opened the doors, nobody came. Not nobody, but relative to what happened years earlier when we were the third recreational store in the state, nobody. We were now the 80th store with three other dispensaries in our city.

No one knew we were there, whereas in Lee everybody in western Massachusetts knew we were there. All the papers, magazines, and radio stationed covered us, because it was newsworthy. 

I realized we had to go back to business 101. I told my team that this is cannabis, and it's very special in many ways. Still, we've got to provide a really good service and we have to make this store fun and attractive enough for people to come back. We've just got to do all the things right, and that's the only way to survive. We've just got to be the best, or at least we have to try to be the very best.

We had a billboard up, and we were starting to advertise. We did a lot of very interesting radio advertising that other people weren't doing, including sports radio, pop music, local radio in southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts.

To get a good store running, we also had to get our menu right in the beginning. Stores that have high volume have a lot of SKUs, because that attracts more people. It’s a factor in people deciding whether they want to go to your dispensary. We couldn't get that large at first, so we had to be really selective and curate a really good menu with a limited number of SKUs.  

We built up Mello into a very successful operation, and we have over 500 people per day come to our store.

Our plan always was to do a grow operation, also. We bought an existing grow that was struggling nearby our store in Amesbury, but just as we were buying the price of cannabis was just plummeting. All of our projects? Not happening.

We’ve built that up into a strong operation, with a presence in about 100 stores. Forty to 50 stores regularly carry our products, but the challenges are enormous. Price contraction is killing everyone. 

When a market reaches maturity, there's a pretty significant drop off in pricing. That's our experience right now, where we've got a great store and a great grow. We took a position that if we're going to be successful, we can't offer a commodity. We can't compete with the MSOs, and we have to be a craft grower.

Now, that's not like some new idea that we had, because we're all trying to create great flower as best we can. We decided to get involved in pheno-hunting, but not just in a simple way where we get 1000 seeds of some strain that's popular and then we start growing it and maybe pick out the best looking ones and clone from those. 

What we did, through my son Tyler, is sort of old school where everything is about aroma. This is how pot was sold and bought until about ten years ago, when all lab testing came into play.

While the cultivation world had a whole language around aroma, that is largely gone from dispensaries today. It's been replaced by a tag that says THC this percent, terpenes this value or that. It’s what the customers have, and without another metric to go by, customers, store buyers, and in turn farms are stuck in this spiral of ever greater THC content, driving prices for high-THC products higher.

So at our company, we have a different way of designating flower, which is by aroma profile. We have six aroma profiles tied to genetics: cheese, dessert, fruit, gas, pine, and purple.

While other growers are pheno-hunting for higher THC yield, what Tyler did in our company is he grew for aroma. We do look at the structure, the bud development, the way the branching works on the plant, how healthy it is, and how resistant a strain is to powdery mildew, molds or bacteria. All those are factors, but the driver is the aroma.

Why do we focus on aroma? If you go into a wine store, is the first thing you ask: What's your highest alcohol content wine, because I know that's your best wine? You would be laughed at.

There are incredible, delicate aromas and flavors that a sophisticated wine drinker gets to understand and to know. What you're buying with very expensive wines isn’t more alcohol.

You’ve described essentially a THC arms race, and breaking free from what. How is that resonating with your customers?

We believe that this is really more how flower should be bought, but it's not going to happen tomorrow because people are stuck. If you get rid of the THC metric, then the customers don’t know what to go by. Everyone from Leafly and all these different companies will tell you: This will make you sleepy. This will make you talkative. This will make you giggle. 

It's all subjective, and it's mostly bullshit. I don't mean it in a mean way, but it's mostly anecdotal and is about different people's different experiences.

Like wine, we're going to get there. We're not there yet, but that's where it needs to get to and there's science behind this. In 2022, Dr. Ethan Russo and several other scientists wrote a study called The Nose Knows. 

In a controlled experiment, subjects smoked or vaped 14 different strains from legal dispensaries ranging from 15 to 32 percent THC. Participants marked down how much they enjoyed the aroma, and then again how much they enjoyed the high. 

The conclusion of the study was that there was no correlation between THC and how much they enjoyed the high. Zero. But the aroma almost perfectly matched. 

That's the science, but there are some stores in Massachusetts that won't buy any flower under 20 percent THC. That’s silly. It's not science, and it's not experience. That’s selling to people without knowledge who are relying on metrics that don't carry the meaning that they think they do. To me it's a disservice to the client base.

Tens of thousands of people have gone into dispensaries in the past couple of years who have never smoked. You sell them something at 30 percent? They go home and smoke, and they are not happy. They are not feeling good. They're going to be anxious and uncomfortable.

So that's part of what we're trying to do at Mello. An emphasis on aroma. We're just one little store and grow. There is only so much we can do, but that's a position that we've taken.

For THC, we do the ski slope icons: a green circle is easy, a blue square we call advanced, and a black diamond is expert. and when it's 26% or above the middle ones 20 to 25 and below 20 is the green one. If someone comes into our store and they're not a regular user, we will recommend one of the green ones. 

Our customers have gotten to really, really like what we present. They like the quality of the flower, because all of our flower has this heavy aromatic aspect to it which people enjoy. The bud tenders are learning it, our customers are learning it, and we're selling a couple hundred thousand dollars a month of our own Mello flower. 

A Better Way to Keep Your Grinder Clean

Earlier this year, Kief Sweeper made waves at the 2024 Boston NECANN. “When users saw it, they lost their minds,” investor Eric West told The Green Letter. “They said this makes so much sense, and it was like kind of one of those pet rock moments.”

Marketed as the ideal, chemical free way to keep your grinder clean, Kief Sweeper has quickly been gaining popularity, showing up in dispensaries around the country. “It’s unique,” West said. “It cleans the grinders, keeps them going for longer, and keeps them sharp.”

Kief Sweeper sells online and in more than 200 retail locations, offering a grinder brush that looks much like a classic pot scrubber, as well as a compact brush and the grinder-brush combo in the photo above. “I've always wanted to be in the industry,” West said. “I've been a big believer in this since the 70s.”

When he was injured last April, closing the door on the handyman work he’d been doing, West got his chance. Inspiration struck. “It was one of those there has to be a better way to do this type moments,” West said.

Read our full feature interview with Kief Sweeper CEO and inventor Eric West in the next edition of The Green Letter.

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