WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — In 2022, the first recreational retail cannabis shops opened in Vermont and the industry took off.
One of first such shops in the Upper Valley was The Tea House, which opened in December 2022. Miriam El Guemri left her office job to open the dispensary where Route 4 separates from Route 5 in White River Junction.
“I’m happier,” El Guemri, a White River Junction resident of over 20 years, said in an interview at her shop. “I love waking up in the morning and going to The Tea House.”
Since then, the number of shops in the Upper Valley has grown to about a dozen. El Guemri is one of several Upper Valley residents involved in the cannabis industry who say they are finding success even as the industry has hit an inflection point.
“It’s not busy the way it was year one,” she said. “There’s been a little dip. Nothing of concern.”
But the state has taken action to curb the growth of the industry out of concern that too many businesses have opened in too few locations.
This February the market slowed down, James Pepper, the chair of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board, said.
“It’s a unique industry,” Pepper said in a phone interview last week. “This micro-economic thing.”
The state currently has 110 licensed cannabis retailers, 391 cultivators and 94 manufacturers. All cannabis grown in Vermont must be sold in-state, and retail shops can sell only Vermont products.
While cultivators can grow cannabis anywhere in the state, it can only be sold for recreational use in municipalities that opt-in through a ballot vote.
The opt-in policy has led to an “unnatural distribution of retail establishments,” Pepper said. There are clusters of dispensaries in the towns that allow them. Burlington alone has about a dozen. White River Junction has three.
There are currently 78 municipalities in Vermont where dispensaries are allowed. The Upper Valley towns that allow retail sales are Bradford, Fairlee, Randolph, Strafford, Windsor, the town of Woodstock, Sharon and Hartford.
Last fall, the state’s Cannabis Control Board temporarily closed the window for new retail license applications and this past winter, closed the window for all cultivation licenses.
The board paused retail licenses in order to put “pen to paper on a new rule that takes regional population into account,” Pepper said.
The pause in cultivation licenses is intended to strike a balance between supply and demand, Pepper said.
“If we oversaturate the market, every harvest season the price crashes and the model breaks down. If you under-supply the market then the price of cannabis increases and people revert to the illicit market,” Pepper said.
In an attempt to ensure this balance, the board plans to hire an economist to analyze the current market and see if more licenses should be issued, Pepper said.
Pepper anticipates both processes taking nine to 12 months. In the meantime, people who have staked their futures on cannabis carry on.
‘Cultivator friendly’
The operators of Strange Kloudz, an indoor cultivation and manufacturing facility based in Bradford, Vt., are no strangers to the challenges of the industry.
Before moving to Vermont in 2023, Strange Kloudz co-owner Brian Morris, 50, had tried to make it as a cultivator in Rhode Island. In comparison with Vermont’s 110 dispensaries, Rhode Island has seven, making it difficult for cultivators to get on shelves there.
“I sunk everything I had in that,” Morris said. “Tens of thousands of dollars of my personal money to keep the doors open and then I ended up getting out of it.”
When Strange Kloudz co-owner Cyrus “Preach” Mitchell asked Morris to come start a business in Vermont, Morris jumped at the opportunity.
“I felt like Vermont did it in a way that was cultivator friendly,” Morris said. “You didn’t have to prove how much cash you had. If you built the facility and you followed the rules then you got the license.”
Morris, Mitchell, White River Junction resident Joe Caramante and a silent fourth partner, whom they declined to name, own Strange Kloudz, along with Five Seasons Cannabis, a dispensary on Bridge Street in White River Junction.
Before entering the legal market, both Morris and Mitchell had grown and sold cannabis illegally outside of Vermont. While Morris, who’s white, never had any legal issues, Mitchell, a Black man, wasn’t as lucky.
After two tours in Afghanistan, Mitchell, 36, was kicked out of the Marine Corps for using cannabis, he said.
In 2015, he was arrested in Virginia, he said. “I had just gotten out of the Marine Corps. I was growing weed with a bunch of friends and I got pulled over with 12 pounds on me,” Mitchell said.
Because of his military service, the courts showed lenience and Mitchell didn’t have to serve any time in prison, he said.
When it comes to selling legally, “it’s better overall that I don’t have to worry about the authorities,” said Mitchell, who now lives in East Randolph.
Vermont offers social equity licenses to those who “are from a community that has historically been disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition,” such as Black and Hispanic people or anyone who has been incarcerated for a cannabis related offense, the Cannabis Control Board’s website says.
Before legalization in 2018, Black Vermonters were 6.1 times more likely than white Vermonters to be arrested for marijuana possession, despite similar usage rates, a 2020 study from the American Civil Liberties Union found.
Bright white light poured out of the grow room into the rest of the warehouse as Morris and Mitchell showed off their plants one day this month.
“We’re using hardware and software to grow crops,” Morris, an Orford resident, said.
The 96 plants in the grow room have tubes in their pots that connect to water and nutrients. The flow of the liquids is controlled by sensors.
With two grow rooms going at once, the Strange Kloudz team can harvest a crop every five weeks. “We have full control of the entire environment,” Morris said. “It’s a repeatable process you can predict.”
Strange Kloudz also is beginning to manufacture its own products, starting with hash, a concentrated form of cannabis made from cooling, washing and pressing the plant buds.
‘Cannabis is what made sense’
Husband and wife, Brad Macrae and Emily Bleeker, moved to the Upper Valley in 2022 with experience in the cannabis industry.
Having done “every type of cannabis grow,” Bleeker, 39, and Macrae, 42, knew they wanted to grow outside in the soil. “This is how it’s supposed to be done,” said Bleeker, the head of cultivation at Windsor’s Sunkissed Farm, which grows its plants in the soil under greenhouses. She stood near a vat of compost tea, a brew of compost and water used to enrich the soil. “It’s cannabis in its purest form.”
Emily Bleeker, part-owner and cultivator, scoops up kittens Ricky, left, and Jackie, right, before they encounter her huskies Sai, top right, and Ila, bottom right, while walking with part-owner Spencer Hayes, left, at Sunkissed Farm, where they grow cannabis for use in the recreational market in Windsor, Vt., on Wednesday, July 23, 2025. They grow in ten greenhouses, utilizing a blackout system that enables them to force the plants to bloom twice, resulting in two harvests during the May through October growing season. (Valley News – James M. Patterson) Credit: Valley News photographs — James M. Patterson
Sunkissed Farm, located on Route 5, is in its third season of growing. They started in 2023, “after the first wave of cultivators,” Spencer Hayes, a co-owner of the farm, said from one of the farm’s 10 greenhouses.
Hayes, 39, grew up in Pomfret and graduated from Woodstock Union High School. He worked in finance and wealth management in Massachusetts and then Hanover for several years. He had no experience in the cannabis industry, but Bleeker and Macrae did.
“Vermont was legalizing, and Brad and I wanted to start a business together,” Hayes said. “Cannabis is what made sense.”
The trio also wanted to employ family, friends and area residents at the operation, Hayes said. The farm currently has about eight full-time employees and another eight part-time employees, many of whom Hayes grew up with.
In 2023, they bought the 29-acre farm for $490,000 Macrae said. They renovated the 200-year-old farmhouse and spent almost $1 million putting up 10 huge greenhouses.
“We raised money from friends and family, mostly here in the Upper Valley,” Macrae said.
A few employees, including Bleeker’s father, a retired dairy farmer from Wisconsin who takes care of the handful of cattle on the farm, live in the farmhouse.
Sunkissed is permitted to grow a total of 2,500 cannabis plants at a time. The crew harvests twice a year, clipping the last buds in September. The yield varies each harvest. “There’s losses for sure,” Bleeker said. “Farming’s farming. Especially if you’re doing it right.”
Once the harvest is complete, they plant cover crops like turnips and daikon radishes in the greenhouses to rejuvenate the soil.
In addition to raising cattle, Sunkissed plans to run chickens in the greenhouses after this year’s harvest. The meat animals won’t be sold commercially, but to family and friends, Hayes said.
Because of the regulations around cannabis, Sunkissed Farm isn’t open to the public. “It’s a challenge because we want to bring people in and build community,” Bleeker said.
Hayes echoed Bleeker’s frustrations with the regulations. “They’re treating us like drug traffickers when it should be like a normal business.”
In December, Sunkissed opened its own dispensary in Woodstock. The store is located in the West Woodstock Road building where the restaurant and ice cream shop Mountain Creamery was located until it shuttered last year.
Ben Pilsmaker, owner of Mountain Creamery has teamed up with Hayes, a friend from high school, to open an ice cream shop next to the dispensary that will soon be stocked with coffee, sandwiches and cut flowers as well.
“Every well-known farm in Vermont has a farmstand,” Hayes said. “That’s what we’re doing in Woodstock.”
Hayes did not want to go into the specifics of the business’ finances, but said Sunkissed is successful. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said.
“When cannabis becomes legalized in any state there’s a boom and bust cycle. We’re in the shake out period now.”
‘Everyday people use cannabis’
Before entering the cannabis industry, El Guemri was the clerk at the Lebanon Courthouse. The job gave her regular hours and the stability she needed to raise her kids. Prior to her marriage seven years ago, El Guemri, now 41, was a single mom of two daughters, now 20 and 14.
As her daughters got older, El Guemri had more freedom to take the risk of entering a new industry.
“A couple of years earlier I wouldn’t have been in a spot to take a leap like that,” she said.
As a Black woman, El Guemri’s identity factored into her desire to enter the industry.
“There’s not a lot of Black woman-owned dispensaries in the country,” she said while walking around the sales floor of the store.
Although El Guemri had her heart set on opening a dispensary for a few years leading up to it, she still had reservations.
“I was really worried it could impact my daughters in some way,” she said. “I lost sleep over it.”
Hartford residents approved the sale of cannabis at Town Meeting in 2022 by a vote of 1,152-748. Leading up to the vote, members of the public health community expressed concerns over normalizing drug use and that the packaging of edible cannabis products that sometimes mimics candy packaging could appeal to children.
El Guemri worried that because of the stigmatization of cannabis, other parents may not want their children to be friends with her daughters anymore. But so far, “there’s never been an issue,” she said.
Since her daughters are not yet 21, they’ve never been inside the shop themselves, El Guemri said.
Breaking down stereotypes around cannabis and cannabis users is important to El Guemri.
“Everyday people use cannabis,” she said. “Moms, dads, husbands, wives … our average customer is me.”
El Guemri’s favorite part of owning The Tea House is the people.
“Ninety-nine percent of the people who come in here are really happy,” she said. “It’s nice to see people happy and to be able to be a part of giving that to them.”
Duane Williams, of Hartford, comes into The Tea House about once a week to pick up a few pre-rolled joints for his days off.
“A bunch of these people I know by first name,” Williams said, while shopping in the store on a Wednesday afternoon earlier this month and catching up with employee Denver Ferguson.
Williams, 53, likes the variety of products The Tea House carries and how the staff walks him through what to expect with each one.
Besides the usual flower, pre-rolls, vapes, dab pens and edibles, The Tea House carries everything from CBD horse treats to marijuana plants customers can grow at home.
“I’ve tried other dispensaries, but this is the one I keep coming back to,” he said.
In a saturated market, a loyal customer is all a dispensary operator can hope for.
Emma Roth-Wells can be reached at erothwells@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.
Clockwise from left: Hash, stored in jars, top, is made from frozen cannabis bud, below, by washing the flower in a machine with very cold water at Strange Kloudz in Bradford, Vt.; Parasitic wasps used to kill aphids were released from a container at the base of a cannabis plant in a greenhouse at Sunkissed Farm, in Windsor, Vt. The farm uses beneficial insects like the wasps and praying mantises, and mites to control aphids and other pests that attack the plants; A tip jar sits next to a brochure on cannabis use from the Vermont Department of Health at The Tea House dispensary in White River Junction, Vt. (Valley News photographs – James M. Patterson)
