Adam Bierman, the 36-year-old CEO of MedMen and co-founder Andrew Modlin started the company in 2010 after their PR agency, ModMan, was called in to build a website for a small weed shop. They couldn’t believe how much money the business was bringing in, so they decided to scrape together $13,000 to start their own cannabis company.
Eight years later the pair now owns 11 dispensaries —with a 12th due to open in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. And In the next few months MedMen isset to become a publicly traded company in Canada.
Today MedMen is the first American cannabis company to be valued at a billion dollars.
After being in the works for nearly two years, MedMen’s $15 million facility east of the Reno/Sparks area, in northern Nevada’s high desert, is up and running.
Bierman calls the facility “The most high-tech marijuana factory in the world”. The 45,000-square-foot facility resembles more of a research lab than a factory. More than half the facility’s space is greenhouse, which features advanced machinery and lighting, a sterile tissue culture lab, an analytics lab, a cloning room, a Futurola grinder capable of shredding three pounds of flower in two seconds, and a 26,000 square foot Dutch designed warehouse will have 25,000 plants producing 10,000 pounds of marijuana a year. Some of the plants will be sold as buds and flowers while the rest will be used for edibles that are made in the factory’s bakery.
MedMen is currently building exact replicas of this factory in Desert Hot Springs, California, and Utica, New York.
CEO Adam Bierman said he hopes the factory will demonstrate how the industry has transformed and legitimized. The company itself transformed from a startup to a major player in the industry.