On the surface, King City Gardens may seem like other successful up-and-coming cannabis operations. The Cincinnati-based company cultivates 25,000 square feet of double-tiered canopy within an 88,000-square-foot footprint, giving them plenty of room to grow.
But dig a little deeper, and you’ll discover the path to where they are today was anything but easy. In their quest to cultivate premium craft cannabis “on a grand scale,” the challenges the King City team had to overcome were grand as well.
Entering the Market in Record Time
King City Gardens managing member Bill Foster had his eye on Ohio’s cannabis potential 10 years ago, as the state moved toward its failed ballot initiative in 2015. It would take six years, state approval of a medical marijuana program, two denied cultivation applications, and litigation challenging the denials before Foster and his group prevailed and won their license.
While the 2021 milestone was cause for celebration, it came while global supply chains were still reeling from COVID-19. Ohio regulators gave King City a nine-month timeline to become operational, but the team pushed back and won some flexibility when that timeline would start in light of the pandemic’s impact.
It was May 2022 before they found a location. Six more months passed before they had their architect and engineer. When they broke ground in January 2023, the countdown began, and King City wasted no time; the business was operational by Aug. 15, 2023.
“We were aggressive in pushing to get the goal accomplished, which was to get open,” says Foster, a seasoned executive in the warehousing industry. “We were already four years behind the industry here in Ohio, so we had some catching up to do.”
Though King City’s construction timeline was impressive under normal circumstances, it’s even more remarkable given additional hurdles the company faced.
Overcoming Supply Chain Challenges
Sourcing equipment turned out to be the biggest challenge the King City team faced in meeting Ohio’s mandated timeline. With supply chains unpredictable at best, they were pressed to be creative in securing whatever equipment they could to avoid a two-year lead time on what they were looking to buy.
“We purchased all of our equipment—our lights, our HVAC—before we designed our facility, because we were bound by the supply that was there or what was available to us. So we had to engineer it backwards,” Foster recalls.
HVAC was the toughest buy. The company pieced together units from five different HVAC suppliers. “Then we had to try and find a software that would integrate with them all, so that we could use the designs and software that we wanted to use to control our systems,” Foster says.
King City Vice President of Operations Richard (Rick) Mursinna, Ph.D.—who has worked with Foster for more than 20 years in other businesses—adds, “We have nearly 100 tons of HVAC for each of our grow rooms. Ideally, we would have one unit or something similar where Room 1 and Room 2 look the same. One of the challenges is none of our rooms are the same, because we had to pick up a 10-ton here, a 30-ton there, a 50-ton here, and make it work.”
To read what King City Gardens learned from its Ohio experience click on Cannabis Business Times
