Q&A: Celebrating 4/20 With Cannabis Brand LAX Packs

Tomorrow, (Saturday 4/20), is the unofficial holiday for stoners around the globe. However, for companies like Los Angeles-based LAX Packs, every day these days is like living in a Cheech and Chong movie.

The company, run by the trio of Joshua Granville, VP of cultivation/co-founder; Jesse Eichenberg, VP of sales/co-founder and Ben Leaf, VP of product development/co-founder, began in 2018 and now has two large cultivation sites, one in Long Beach, CA and the other more recent one, built in Sacramento.

Like many cannabis brands, LAX Packs bloomed during the COVID pandemic. While things have leveled off now somewhat, the trio tell me these are still high times indeed for their company.

The secret to their success? Meticulous cultivation; perfection in their product, design and marketing; a passion for not only the weed, but the culture as well, and sound business. I met with the trio recently, starting in their Long Beach location and then traveling by private plane to their Sacramento location for a quick tour and lunch. What I found is that LAX Packs has a lot of similarities to the artistic world in how they create their elite product.

Steve Baltin: Do you see cultivating weed as an artistic endeavor?

Joshua Granville: I would make the connection between the artistic aspect of making weed, because it is a manufacturing process at the end of the day. It's a controlled environment. So, you use those tools and those parameters to express yourself, express what you like, what you want, what you want out of the flavor, what you want out of the effect, and try to put a unique spin on it. Using those manufacturing parameters, ag parameters to try to express something more esoteric, more ethereal, more different, unique.

Baltin: I imagine a similar thing would be cooking. You talk with chefs and they'll tell you, you start off and you follow recipes. I imagine to start, you have to be able to be creative, to explore, to see what's going to work.

Granville: Absolutely. I use that analogy quite a bit when someone's asking me how to do this job. I'm like, “I can give you the recipe, but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to replicate it. That doesn't mean that now you're good to go. You have to do it, experience it. It's experiential, and you have to put your stamp on it. You have to put your mark on it. You have to do it in the way that you do it.”

Ben Leaf: Like you said, it's a perfect merge. It's connected to art, music, culture. Now this is where it gets really fun, you get to brand it and put what you believe and care about, what you want people to feel and see when you show them this. So, it's cool, it's fun.

Baltin: What are your criteria for putting a product out into the world?

Granville: It has to check all the boxes. That's our metric. It has to present correctly. It has to taste good. It has to smoke good. All those things have to be, all have to be...

Baltin: When you have one that you didn't love the coloring, what happens? Do you still put that out?

Granville: No, I can't. It has to be all of the things.

Leaf: And I'm heartbroken because that one checks all the boxes except for one. That's us being the perfectionist.

Baltin: Can you do it again with the coloring right?

Granville: This is the third or fourth time we've tried to do it because we are so impressed with it and so stoked on all the other aspects of it.

Leaf: He's the chef. He's going, “No, it doesn't taste the way I need it to, cut it.”

Granville: Yeah. So, we'll move on to the next one. That's why we're always looking for new things, new genetics, because it's like the lottery. Sooner or later you may hit the lottery. This is a little more higher chances, but it's comparable.

Baltin: How does the plant evolve?

Granville: Look can change over time on the first run you do with the seed, you're not going to get what it will end up being. It actually morphs a little bit every time you grow it for the first couple of times. So, the look is not ideal, but I have expectations that because it checks the other boxes that the look will follow. That could be wrong. That's a gamble. Some of the best strains in the world don't look right, we just can't put them out. Don't look the way we want it to. We just can't put them out. There's another one over there that's a popular one that's super good and will never look good.

Baltin: Show me an example, for you guys, of one that looks good.

Jesse Eichenberg: Lighter in color, it has a higher frost content, perfect flower structure. It does the things we want it to do. Has a high terpene profile, strong effect. Tastes good. The smell translates to the taste when you're smoking it. Frosty. The presentation is important on the rec market. If customers can basically only judge what they're buying on the way that it looks. Can you hit that button on that? Those would be the presentation points and the main points that it has to hit to make the cut. This is what we want it to look like. To have a direct consumer expects it to look like this. It has to have all of them. It can't just look good, I think is what you're saying. And there's infinite combinations of the terpenes and the flavor and all of it. That's why we keep trying new combinations of things.

Eichenberg: This eventually gets prepackaged into our branded jars and goes into dispensaries. We're in about 200 of them. We're climbing pretty fast. We want the experience down to an eighth level. We've packaged this into like an eighth amount that everybody gets a good experience, it's checking all the boxes we've talked about and try to win the brand loyalty.

Granville: We want them to smoke it and come back for more. We want them to experience what we're experiencing, what we like about it, and continue to come back for more. We believe that if people smoke it, they will come back.

Leaf: It’s like the musician thing. We're never going to stop looking for strains because we're never going to find the perfect bud. We're never going to arrive and it's done. So we're going to keep looking and keep looking, and then we'll find something we really like and we're super stoked on. We'll ride that wave for a couple months and then it's like, “All right, back to the drawing board, guys. We're still not there.”

Granville: Yeah, there's always something new.

Baltin: How many strains would you say you come out with a year?

Granville: Keepers? Four to six. That's on the high end of what we would actually produce in a year.

Baltin: How many would you say you attempt in a year?

Granville: Hundreds. The margin of success is very low. It truly is a lottery in that way. You can control some aspects of it by making the parents something that you like, but it's pretty random by the time it gets to the progeny. If you have a hundred kids, they're not going to be similar. I have four kids, they're completely different. Every one of them is different. You get some characteristics from the parents but not all. And what combination you get, you don't know. But on the building tip, when you find something that works, for me it's the terp. When you find a specific terp that works and you can see how it came from the parent, you look for some other combination from another parent, another strain that would complement it well. I like this terp, but I don't like the way it grows. What if I combined it with this, where I do like the way it grows and it has this other positive trait that you can increase your likelihood of success that way, knowing the parents well. But it's still a lottery. You still are looking for the one out of a thousand, easily.

Baltin: When did you guys start?

Granville: I started growing in 2009. My mom grew and she's a horticulturist, so she grew weed all when I was a kid. I started professionally in 2009.

Baltin: When did LAX Packs form?

Eichenberg: The story of how we got together is pretty cool. Ben and I being from Venice, I feel like it's in our DNA It's like how we just got by as like little kids in Venice. There was always weed, and it was a source of income. If you smoke weed, you fell in love with the plant.

Leaf: And the culture around it.

Baltin: Because you started 2018, did your growth explode during that period?

Granville: Oh yeah.

Leaf: Exponentially. It was a booming market during COVID. You're stuck at home, what are you going to do? You're either going to drink, smoke, something that gets you out of yourself.

Eichenberg: Everybody had a lot of free time, limited entertainment options. We couldn't make enough during COVID. It was a good time. It was a good time from the weed perspective.

Baltin: Do you find that there still was a brand loyalty that was formed during that period?

Granville: Absolutely. That was a good time to get into the market, get people familiar with the brand and continue on till today.

Eichenberg: There were cool things happening. Like, at the time our packaging was in a Mylar bag and you would see someone repost our stuff in London. So, we got globally recognized at that time. There weren't a lot of people traveling. The people who were, were just entrepreneurs and creative individuals. Things kind of happened that were out of our control and that really brought strong brand awareness.

Baltin: Going back to the story of how you got together, you two grew up in Venice together. How'd you three meet?

Granville: Business, we had a mutual friend and like-minded individuals and uniting around a common goal.

Eichenberg: This is how it happened. We've been doing this since we were teenagers. Growers are weird, just like musicians. I'm sure like the best musicians are just f**king weird. So, when we met Josh, we're like, “Holy f**k, this is the coolest grower we've ever met.” Number one. Number two, it was the best weed we've seen. Ben and I started buying his flower wholesale. We came up to him, we had an idea, we're like, “We're going to build a brand around your flower.” We were just concerned about allocation. “Make sure that you have this amount for us because we're going to do something.” He was like, “Let's do it together.” At that moment, all the stars aligned and we were like, “Cool.” So he was our partner. Then we built a cultivation together. Then we built a few more. As we were doing that, our brand was in high demand. We merged our background, which is like graffiti art, Venice, that culture, with this cannabis. We had really dope artists doing designs on our bags and what we would name the strain. We rolled it out like that. To this day, we still have some staple strains that Josh had when we met him. That's how the brand started. Us meeting Josh, thinking he's badass and cool and having the best flower. Now we're family. This is more than just a partnership. It's really a family.