Fire and Flower Q and A
Michael Patterson was one of the lucky few who won the “lottery” to own and operate a dispensary in Ontario. Him and his brother in law currently own and operate Fire and Flower, a provincial dispensary located in Ottawa’s historical ByWard market. He is an accountant by trade but is passionate about drawing the benefits of cannabis into Canadian society. He’s keen on the usages of cannabis outside simply rolling it into a joint and smoking it. Above this he is a skilled salesman, having come dangerously close to selling me a $200 weed vaporizer but I kept my professionalism. And my grocery money.
Tell me a bit about fire and flower, and its history
So, Fire and Flower it’s a western Canada company they have multiple stores out in western Canada. Myself and my brother in law, we were the ones who won the lottery here in Ontario, so we had a very short timeline to be able to get a store up and running. We sort of interviewed a couple players that were already in the game and ended up finding out that fire and flower is by far the best fit for what we were looking for, so we ended up basically partnering with them. They’ve been amazing helping up on or journey of getting this store up and running.
What about the other cannabis stores in Ottawa, what does competition look like?
As far as competition goes, Ottawa needs a whole lot more stores, like right now we serve an incredible amount of customers every day. The other two stores also serve an incredible amount of customers every day, I think if there were more stores particularly in different locations to give Ottawa good coverage with stores I think the customer base could really benefit from that. I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s competition at this point it’s just trying to cover the city to make sure the customers are able to get that shopping experience that they’re looking for.
So, the industry isn’t really competition based, its more focused on customer service
Yeah well basically, all three stores at this point in time, were essentially selling as much as we possibly can, you know what I mean. If there were one store or three stores, we’d all be selling as much as we possibly could. We are limited to how much we can purchase each week, there are some items that can be purchased above that limit, but it’s not like I could have an unlimited amount of the most in demand products in stores and have customers lining up to come to my store
Why is there a limit?
The province has done the responsible thing by putting realistic limits so that one, we can expect them to supply us with what they say they’re going to supply us with, and two is that it allows each of the stores to be able to offer an appropriate selection to the customers. If it were the other way around, we could look at Newfoundland and Labrador and Alberta as example. Who have great coverage with stores because they’ve let the market expand as fast as the market would like to expand the products just haven’t been there. They had staff, they had customers, they had the location, but they didn’t have enough product to cover the overhead and the stores actually went out of business because there was just not enough product to give a reasonable quantity to each of the stores.
Other than retail stores like this, how do you envision the cannabis industry growing?
I think eventually what you’re going to see is like the bars we have now, some kind of cannabis consumption place. It would be the same kind of concept that people would be able to go and have that social element of hanging out with friends while they drink beverages with THC or CBD in it as opposed to alcohol. Now will this be two years from now five years from now 10 years from now I have no idea but eventually I think as it becomes more accepted in society it’s just going to be integrated into all of the ways we use social drugs now.
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