WORCESTER -Standing outside of 1191 Millbury Street in Worcester, only a single sign on a pole lets you know that this is the home of Resinate — a new medical and consumer cannabis dispensary in the city.
This is not an accident.
“We feel that the quality of our products and the set up of our environment will dictate consumers and the demand that we’ll have. The goal here wasn’t to be impactful to our neighbors. We want to be a good neighbor,” said Pete DeCaro, the company’s chief operating officer.
“We’ve completely renovated this building and upgraded it. But I think that, for what we’ve done so far, it’s enough. We don’t need to be too loud. The idea is to kind of blend in and not be a nuisance, and I think we’ve achieved that,” DeCaro added.
Once inside the retail space [the 5,000 square foot building also houses their corporate offices], however, you might think you’re in an upscale boutique in Copley Place or the Chestnut Hill Mall.
“We wanted to make it very easy for patients and consumers to be able to come in, buy the products that they need and leave,” DeCaro said. “We have so many displays and so many TVs. We’re going to be providing educational content on all these TVs about products that many people may or may not have ever use. We’ll have educational material, and they can do it without the discomfort of standing at a point of sale register with a line behind them, and they won’t feel rushed and anxious.”
“The idea is warmth and comfort,” he said.
The store is large and spacious, with a long counter of registers, with several specifically for medical cannabis customers.
“Patients that have registered with the Cannabis Control Commission will be able to expedite the line, they’ll have their own dedicated registers, they’ll have products that are specially designed to cater to whatever types of debilitating conditions they have,” DeCaro said. “So they’ll be able to come in, buy their own products there, they’ll have their own exit, they’ll have plenty of parking out front.”
Resinate will be selling their own products. They’ve built a 50,000 square foot, state-of-the-art grow facility that includes a lab and kitchen.
Andrew Shotts, a master chocolatier who’s been the Executive Pastry Chef at Caesar’s Palace and pastry chef at the Russian Tea Room in NYC, is Resinate’s edible chef.
The store will be hosting events like product demonstrations and cooking classes.
DeCaro said, “We’ve gone to the biotech industry, we’ve gone to the cannabis industry, the greenhouse industry. We’ve consulted with every cannabis-touching industry, to both design a facility on the cultivation, lab, and kitchen side, and identify the different strains and products that meet both the medicinal and consumer demands of customers in the market.”
After Worcester opens, the plan is to open shops in nearby Grafton and Northampton.
Resinate is the fourth company in Worcester to earn a Community Host Agreement, and hopes to have their Certificate of Occupancy this month, and then their licensing from the Cannabis Control Commission soon thereafter.
“I’m optimistic that we have done as good a job as any in meeting the criteria for our license. We’ve crossed every ‘T’ and dotted every ‘I’,” DeCaro said.
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