Terra Tech Corp. (OTC: TRTC) hopes a soon-to-be-built facility in Santa Ana will make the area a Disneyland of sorts for the cannabis crowd.
The Irvine-based cannabis-focused agriculture company, which operates retail and medical dispensaries for the product in California and Nevada, said this month that it has broken ground on a 45,000-square-foot “cannabis complex” just off the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway.
It’s among the larger retail projects now under construction in Orange County. It should open by year’s end.
An affiliate of Terra Tech bought the existing industrial property at 620 E. Dyer Road in January last year for $11 million, property records indicate.
The company said it just received city permits to allow the new construction and renovation of the existing facility, which will include a company-run marijuana retail dispensary, operating under the Blüm name.
In addition, the site will hold an event facility “to host large-scale cannabis-themed events, such as concerts and movie nights,” the company said in a statement.
The project “is anticipated to make us a highly sought-after destination in one of the country’s most important cannabis markets,” said Chief Executive Derek Peterson.
The company notes there are more than 4 million people within 20 miles of the facility, which is about 11 miles from Disneyland.
Surf Accident Start
“This is a very exciting project for us,” said Peterson, who along with wife, Amy Oppedisano, co-founded Terra Tech with Mike Nahass in 2010.
Oppedisano has served as the marketing director since the company’s inception; she is responsible for curating the company’s image to consumers and investors. Nahass is the company’s president and chief operating officer.
Terra Tech was founded after Peterson broke his cervical vertebrae while surfing, and ended up using medical cannabis to treat the pain.
Oppedisano recounts how her husband first approached her with the idea for Terra Tech in its infantile form.
Peterson told his wife, “I want to sell weed with this dude I met online—and I was like, absolutely not” but then things changed, Oppedisano said.
“He kept pitching to me over the course of a few months until I capitulated—and I was like, let’s at least not use this dude from online.”
Several months and a business plan later, they began operations. “2012 is when we rolled Blüm into the public company and we had no idea if the SEC would go for that—so we kinda just did it, and crossed our fingers and they met about it,” Oppedisano told the Business Journal.
Terra Tech is the country’s first publicly traded cannabis company. The company has a market value of about $43 million, and employs about 300, most of whom work for Blüm (see story, this page).
Its shares have fallen more than 90% in the past 18 months.
Reno Sale
In 2016, Proposition 64 approved the use of recreational marijuana for nonmedical consumers in the state; when that regulation went into effect at the start of last year, some dispensaries wanted to remain medically oriented—Blüm was one of them.
To be a licensed medical dispensary, additional requirements were enacted to preserve the potency and composition of the cannabis for medical use. Despite the stricter compliance standards, Blüm is a fully-licensed medical marijuana dispensary.
While the company is expanding its OC presence through the Santa Ana facility, in Nevada it recently decided to offload an asset.
Last week, it said it would be selling a Blüm dispensary in Reno, along with the building itself, for $15 million.
The sale should allow the company to fund its growth elsewhere, “as opposed to approaching the capital markets more often than is necessary,” Peterson said last week when disclosing the sale.
It has three locations in Las Vegas, and is planning another big retail spot near Fremont Street.
Despite the presence in two bordering states, Terra Tech does not engage in interstate commerce. “The minute you do any sort of interstate commerce, that’s where you have a problem. “We would never do anything too risky because we have a duty to our shareholders,” Oppedisano said.
The recent sale and Santa Ana plans are part of Terra Tech’s vision of being totally vertically integrated into the medical marijuana market—for both cultivation and consumer sales.
A subsidiary of the company, Edible Garden, cultivates a brand of local and sustainably grown hydroponic produce, sold through major grocery stores such as ShopRite, Walmart, and Aldi.
“We are heavily focused on California and we love all of the quality coming out of California,” Oppedisano said.
