The newer legal cannabis grower LoveGrow and Just a Woman recently released new cannabis pre-rolls in New Jersey adult-use cannabis dispensaries.
Heady NJ caught up with them at the recent Benzinga conference. We recently released a new episode of our show, The Heady Chronicle, featuring them.
Marjorie Forbes Mendez and Sam Mendez introduced themselves as the married co-owners of Just a Woman, with Marjorie as the CEO. Hatsia is with Just a Woman, helping them grow.
Cara Dawson is a co-owner of LoveGrow, which is the cultivator and manufacturer of the Just a Woman cannabis pre-rolls.
New Pre-Rolls from Just a Woman Brand
“We are doing botanical rose petals, lotus petals, and doing an organic glass tip product that the market hasn’t seen. So, we want to bring something to the market that’s different. It’s not that papers can’t be used,” Marjorie explained.
“We’re just trying to show a better model with glass tip, wood tips, which is one there with an ash tip that has vanilla in it…” she added.
“This is like a cigarillo here, if you look at it. Like a baby blunt,” I noted. “Can you tell me about the flower in it?”
“Cowboy Basil,” Sam noted.
“We also have in there lotus, it’s a raspberry leaf, a parfait. So when you smoke it, it’s actually like the flavor of raspberry with the terpenes in the flower. It brings out the cannabinoids and the terpenes in the cannabis, as well as you’re getting the terps from the botanicals. So, it really has like a flavor explosion in your mouth,” Marjorie explained.
Finding the Right Mix
“It’s very sweet. It’s a very slow smoke when you use organic petals as well as botanicals, which is also healthy for your body,” she said.
“We’re trying to use different brands and different strains that you don’t see on the market. And we’re using A & B Bud as well, instead of Shake and Trim…,” Marjorie added.
“So, is it like an Indica, like Sativa?” I asked.
“They are Indigo or Sativa dominant. But they are Hybrids that then are just dominant one way or the other. And we try to pair it accordingly with what we’re looking for each,” Marjorie explained.
“But they still lean like the Lotus one right now as well as the Atave, which is the blunt you saw. Both of those are Sativa dominant,” she added.
Marjorie noted they’re relaxing and uplifting.
“Do you want to tell us about the growing process?” I asked Dawson.
“Getting up and running is a very interesting process to do for cultivation. So we still have a bunch of work to do on both sides, cultivation and manufacturing. We’re still currently building out and still currently growing out. But we source as well as grow,” KD said.
Marjorie explained that so far, they had gotten their products into the following dispensaries:
- Puffin in New Brunswick.
- Indigo in Brooklawn.
- High Rollers in Atlantic City.
- Elevated by Canna Boss Lady in Maplewood.
“We’re starting that for our first 30 days to do our R&D (Research and Development) and just working out all the little tweaks and bumps that happen. …After that 30 days, then we’re going out to the world of Jersey and so on to other states,” Marjorie added.
I noted it will be interesting to see who’s the first local independent operator in Jersey to branch out elsewhere.
Just A Woman Cannabis Pre-Rolls Production Deal
“We’re looking towards brand licensing for since we have such a unique product that is not on the market anywhere nationally. So we’ve had a lot of offers already come in that people want to carry it…,” Marjorie explained.
“Brand license thing, it’s always like an interesting thing. is. To say LoveGrow is making it then, could you tell me about your role in the creation of the product then?” I asked.
“It’s been a labor of love. R&D, even on ourselves, sitting in our house, taking rose petals and decarbing and drying them, and going to the grocery store. Go get two more dozen roses, and go get more flowers. And using honey and hemp paste…,” Marjorie explained. “…Once we did, then it’s like, we can’t sit at home and do this all day every day.
“We wanted something to stick to our model, especially with women. We are LGBTQ and minority. (So) we wanted to really showcase that,” she noted.
Devising Pre-Rolls
“We outsourced from an organic farm in India,” Marjorie explained. “They get our petals. They do everything that we ask. It’s 300 women in a village that create and make our homes and we get our glass tips, send them to them, they put it all together, and then we now have them here.
The nature of who has a white label deal and who has a production deal gets complicated.
“We’re there packing, doing, helping, like checking out everything,” Marjorie said. “It’s the best partnership that I could say we’ve ever had. And I’ve been in cannabis a long time and seen some really bad deals.”
“… We’ve had deals ourselves that didn’t go through very well. They’re very honest. They’re very amazing, trustworthy people that we’re glad to partner and call them one of the family,” she said.
“I can go in and say I want to check on this, or I want to see this, or can I sample this. And there’s never an issue that we flow very well on integrity, what we want for her product, our product. We just blend very well,” Marjorie added.
Family Business Launched
“You say you’ve been in cannabis a while then?” I asked.
“Too long,” Marjorie joked.
“Oh really?” I asked.
“The bumps and bruises show,” Dawson joked.
“I… started out at Justice Grown in the medical days, know, lobbying for the rights of home-grow and end-of-life rights, and was in with Dr. Medivowsky of New Jersey Alternative,” Marjorie explained.
“…I went to Justice as a cultivator and so forth and so forth through the years. And just saw that I was doing so much for everyone else, and I had so much knowledge. Why not have my own brand? And my wife was like, we’ll do it. I’m like, with what? Are you nuts? And we took the leap and did it. And so she is my rock that totally said, you can do this,” Marjorie explained.
The Healing Power of the Sacred Herb
She explained she understands the medicinal value of the plant.
“Both of my daughters have illnesses. I was born with Agent Orange poisoning,” Marjorie noted. “Most people don’t tout that because they don’t live long. A lot of people that have Agent Orange were sterile from the Vietnam War, and I was one that didn’t make it. So, I was born with a lot of deformities. My whole left side is missing most of my muscles.
“And cannabis underground was helping me walk, talk and do. So, it was something I really believed …,” she explained. “I got into natural medicine and herbalism to help myself because it passed down to my daughters as well. So, Mon has MS, and my other daughter was born without a valve on her stomach. And they said she would not live after a couple of weeks. And she is 26 and a pain in my ass. She is here due to natural medicine and cannabis. So, it has helped both my daughters.”
LoveGrow Background
Dawson explained how they got started.
“I never really was in the legacy market. My husband was. I used but never sold or anything. And then, about two and a half, three, almost three years ago, he came to me and said, this is what I want to do. And I was like, okay, I guess let’s go for it,” she explained.
“We had another business, another successful business at the time that we liquefied and put all the money over into cannabis and took his legacy vision and kind of, you know, went into the legal market,” Dawson noted. “He was really the vision behind genetics, and what do you want it to do with the grow?”
“So I used to run multi-million dollar businesses for other people and thought, why the f**k can’t I do it for myself? So that’s where our journey started, and it has been one hell of a ride ever since,” she noted.
“…We have a couple different brands underneath the Love Grow umbrella. We’re very picky about who we bring in. I do want to give opportunity to some really good brands to come in and get into the New Jersey market without having to go through all of the licensing…,” Dawson added.
It’s a way to get open when so many conditional license winners have not opened. I also noted the need for more flower in the market in general.
Dawson noted they’re in Mount Holly in Burlington County in South Jersey.
Love Grow won an annual manufacturing license needed to operate from the NJCRC in July 2024 and a cultivation license in December 2023.
Just a Woman made a production deal with Love Grow afterward.
