Aphria celebrates pot legalization with employees and investors

CTV Windsor: Aphria celebrates Leamington medical marijuana company celebrates legalization with employees and investors. Michelle Maluske reports.

A Leamington medical marijuana company celebrated pot legalization with employees and investors.

Aphria Greenhouses has been in the medical marijuana business since 2014. As of midnight, they're now in the recreational cannabis industry.

They honoured the milestone on Wednesday with a launch party for their employees as well as their investors and residents in Leamington.

“Today we have 300,000 feet, 30,000 kilos of annualized harvest,” says Aphria CEO Vic Neufeld.

Neufeld says once their next three $150-million expansions are done, they’ll be kicking out in excess of 255,000 kilos annually.

It’s expected 80 per cent of it will be for the recreational market in Canada.

Aphria has also inked contracts with every single province

“We had to curtail that back to what we thought we could deliver and even there we were not meeting the expectations that we set for ourselves,” he says.

Neufeld is undaunted, saying in the beginning, there’s bound to be problems.

“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” says Neufeld.

Aphria is considered an agricultural business and so it doesn't bring in as much tax revenue as other big business, but Leamington Mayor John Paterson says the town is benefiting from the pot producer

“On the research and development side of things, the sciences, the health and all that kind of stuff, that’s the spinoff we're hoping for and that will bring the high paying jobs and the better tax rates for the municipality for sure,” says Paterson.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced in Question Period on Wednesday that the Ontario Cannabis Store website took well over 38,000 orders just in the overnight period.

Data also shows Canadian pot websites have been taking about 100 orders a minute over the course of the day on Wednesday.