In the winter of 2020, we started growing cannabis in Arlington Township, Michigan. We did not start with a pitch deck, a brand guide, or a theory about the plant. We started with soil, a license, and a bet that the operators who survived the next 5 years would be the ones who built their business on cost discipline, not margin.
That bet played out. By 2025, Grip had scaled to over 100 acres of active outdoor cultivation across 3 farms, backed by 60,000+ sqft of indoor and greenhouse canopy for propagation, vegetative growth, and environmental buffering. Annual production capacity exceeded 600,000 lbs. Cycle counts crossed 102,500 plants. Every pound, every plant, METRC-tracked, CRA-reported, harvest-weighted. Not theoretical. Not modeled. Run.
In 2023, while competitors were shutting down, Grip won the LeafLink List award for Fastest Growing Brand in Michigan and Top Product by GMV in the concentrates category. Those awards are pulled from verified wholesale platform data. They are not marketing claims. They are market signals.
This is how the operation was built, what it survived, and why that shows up in the product.
The site
Arlington Township was year 1. The operation was small and the lessons were expensive. What strains finished before October frost. What pest pressure looked like on 10 acres instead of a tenth of that. What happened to a fertigation schedule when a storm parked over Southwest Michigan for a week. Year 1 was paid in yield.
When the operation outgrew Arlington, we moved to Cass County. That is where Grip became Grip. The acreage could match the ambition. The infrastructure started to carry weight instead of being tested by it. The cultivation framework, environmental control protocols across 60,000+ sqft of enclosed canopy, the genetics evaluation pipeline that decides which cultivars earn field placement and which get cut, all of it scaled inside a single integrated operation.
Three seasons later, we had tripled the canopy and doubled the plant count. The weather still mattered. Pests still mattered. Labor still mattered. But the operation had a spine, and the spine was built to bend without breaking.
The market
To understand what we built, you have to understand what Michigan’s market did between 2020 and 2025.
When adult-use sales launched in late 2019, wholesale flower sold for over $2,200/lb. Retail ounces cleared $400. Margins were enormous. Michigan issued cultivation licenses without a cap. Everybody with access to capital rushed in.
By 2023, the average retail ounce was under $90. By early 2025, it had dropped below $66. Wholesale pound prices fell to roughly $1,042, a 28% decline from the prior year alone. Michigan had become, by most measures, the cheapest legal cannabis market in the United States.
By the end of 2024, the state had nearly 2.8 million lbs of fresh-frozen flower sitting in cold storage, a 228% increase year over year. PharmaCann shut down 207,000 sqft in Warren. Pincanna idled 31,500 sqft. Fluresh closed a $46 million facility in Adrian. Cultivation license totals started declining for the first time in the program’s history.
It annihilated the ones who built on margin. It rewarded the ones who built on cost discipline.
We had built on cost discipline.
The re-engineering
As wholesale collapsed, we did not slow production. We re-engineered it.
We targeted cost-per-pound reduction through process improvement, not through cutting corners on input quality. We analyzed trim-line automation architectures. We built harvest process flow diagrams that tracked every touchpoint from cut to cure. We modeled space utilization across warehouse, cold storage, and trim room to catch capacity breaches before they became bottlenecks. We tightened fertigation. We reworked IPM. We pulled data out of every stage of the operation until the operation could tell us where it was leaking money, and we could plug the leaks before the season turned.
None of this shows up on a product label. All of it shows up in the jar.
Why it shows up in the jar
When wholesale is $2,200/lb, a grower does not have to be good. Margin covers mistakes. When wholesale is $1,042/lb, every mistake is paid for out of operational discipline. The cultivators, processors, and packers who survive at that price point are the ones who built their process tight enough that the plant never has a bad day it could have avoided.
Grip’s process was built to survive $1,042 flower. That means cure times are not cut when demand spikes. That means genetics are not held in rotation because they are easy, they are held because they earn placement batch after batch. That means trim-line throughput is measured in grams per minute per operator and rebuilt when it falls.
The reason a buyer who knows what they are looking at can tell the difference is that the difference was paid for at the operational level, years before the jar was sealed.
The team
Grip is not the work of a single grower.
Corey Lord, Director of Cultivation. Started in the plant in 2012. 13+ years across indoor, greenhouse, and outdoor formats with teams ranging from 5 to 50+ operators. Environmental control, genetics pipeline, cultivation framework, and yield modeling run through this seat.
Joseph Gordhamer, President. Joined cannabis from the outside in. BS Economics, Brigham Young. MBA in Strategy and Marketing, University of Michigan Ross. Career at KPMG as a consultant, then Cargill as Global Strategy Lead and Global Trading Manager across aquaculture, edible oil, steel, energy, and bulk port terminals. Then CEO of Al Dahra ACX, a subsidiary of the $1.5 billion Al Dahra Holding, where he oversaw 11,000 acres across 3 farms producing 850,000 metric tons of forage annually under international supply-chain frameworks. Most cannabis operations have never had someone with this background inside the building. The ones who do, don’t go back.
Dennis Wallace, Director of Operations. Joined Grip in 2022. 18 years in advanced manufacturing before cannabis. Procurement workflows, inventory systems, MRP, site logistics, the infrastructure that lets a multi-site operation function at scale under real capacity pressure.
Logan Hey, Director of Farming. 3 legal markets, a decade of hands-on cultivation management that started in controlled medical environments and scaled into large-format outdoor.
None of these people learned operational rigor in cannabis. They brought it in.
What’s next
Michigan’s cannabis market in 2026 is defined by consolidation. A new 24% wholesale tax is compressing margins further. The state’s inventory still includes nearly 240,000 lbs of flower at retailers, over 788,000 lbs at processors, and 251,000 lbs of test-passed flower sitting at growers. Total annual revenue slipped from $3.29 billion to $3.17 billion. Demand is steady. Pricing is not.
The operators who come out of this market intact will be the ones who already know how to run lean. Grip already ran lean. We intend to keep running.
If you are a dispensary buyer looking for product built inside that discipline, the strains in rotation are listed on the site and our wholesale team is reachable through the Find Grip page. If you operate in another market under the same compression we ran through, our consulting firm Continuum Advisory & Innovation exists to hand over the exact playbook we built here.
Either way, the math is the same. The market is the market. The operators who built on cost discipline are the ones still standing. That list is shorter every quarter.
We built Grip on cost discipline.
Corey Lord is Director of Cultivation and Joseph Gordhamer is President at Grip Cannabis in Michigan. They are also co-founders of Continuum Advisory & Innovation (continuumadvisory.xyz).