LYNN ― With extensive experience in cultivation, breeding and therapeutic consumption, Good Chemistry, the city’s fourth cannabis dispensary, promises to make its customers’ lives better.
Good Chemistry, which opened its doors on Western Avenue on Saturday, is the second Massachusetts-based dispensary of Matthew Huron, who started the business under the same name in Colorado in 2010.
“We’re really excited to be opening in Lynn,” said Huron. “We were looking on the North Shore and as we were driving around, looking at different communities, I just kept gravitating towards Lynn.”
The team found the people of Lynn incredibly friendly and the community engaging.
“I really just liked the vibe,” said Huron. “It’s an up-and-coming city. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be part of the community.”
Huron is the sole owner of Good Chemistry and he reinvests the profits he makes into the company. The business is vertically integrated ― Good Chemistry grows cannabis, genetically breeds its own proprietary strains and operates retail stores.
Good Chemistry opened its first dispensary in Massachusetts in Worcester in 2018, where Huron spent a lot of time at his grandparent’s house growing up. Its cultivation operations are located in Bellingham and Holliston. The company has four cannabis plant nurseries and four retail locations in Colorado.
Huron, 48, first started growing marijuana plants in San Francisco in 2000 to help his father and his partner, both of whom had HIV, to alleviate the side effects of their illness and the medications that they took, such as pain and loss of appetite.
Huron taught his father to cultivate cannabis and together they started a small not-for-profit co-op, giving cannabis away to friends, assisted-living facilities and hospice-care facilities. California passed the first medical cannabis law in the country in 1996 so their operations were legal, but there was no regulatory agency for supervision and the law enforcement did not trust the growers.
“It was just not really an environment that really gave me a lot of comfort, quite frankly,” Huron said.
After both his father and his partner passed away, Huron moved to Colorado, which was developing a statewide regulatory system, and started Good Chemistry in 2009.
“I got heavily involved in those rules and regulations, helping to draft the first rules and regulations in the country. And a lot of those have been implemented in Massachusetts,” said Huron.
Because of his personal story, Huron set out to make people’s lives better with his company, and said that one client in Colorado with multiple sclerosis was able to go off opioids when she found cannabis.
“We consider ourselves farmers. We put a lot of pride in the raw flower,” said Duncan Smith, director of revenue in Massachusetts. “We want to make sure anybody who comes in can get the full gamut of things they need.”
The company grows more than 50 strains of cannabis in its Massachusetts gardens.
The star of the display is Ingrid ― the very first proprietary strain that Huron started growing with his dad 21 years ago in California.
“You won’t find Ingrid, unless we sell it to people, without the Good Chemistry name on it,” said Katie Kinne, the company’s brand director.
According to Smith, their Worcester store sees customers coming from all four corners of the state and they anticipate the same trend in Lynn.
“As the market matures, you’re seeing more and more (customers) become loyal to brands,” said Smith. “We put out a high-quality (product). We take a lot of pride in what we do. And for us, we want people to seek us out.”
At the same time, the company wants to engage with local consumers and the community and be a good neighbor.
The company has already hired 25 employees from around the area, many from Lynn, Smith said. The company offers extensive training and does not require prior experience with cannabis.
“We’re hiring people that reflect the customers that are going to come in. It helps to make them more comfortable,” Smith said.
Since Good Chemistry focuses on cannabis flowers, they work with other producers within the state to bring other cannabis products. Some edibles, waxes and concentrates on the menu are made by other companies, but out of Good Chemistry’s cannabis.
“It is a really cool way for people who don’t like flower to actually experience the Good Chemistry brand, just in a different form,” said Smith, adding that the assortment of products they offer at the store is competitively priced.
The dispensary offers several ways of payment and a pre-order system.
It took more than a year for Good Chemistry to complete its new cultivation facility in Holliston and the dispensary in Lynn, due to supply chain delays during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are really excited to get to the opening and have people experience it,” said Huron.
Alena Kuzub can be reached at [email protected].
