Best way to sell "Bulk Distillate" under a Maine Caregiver License? (Within Legal Limits of Course)

Hello all, thanks in advance for any helpful ideas.

We are newly registered medical Caregivers in Maine, sitting on our first batch of Distillate.

Leafly Article about what Distillate is, if unfamiliar:
Can't post links yet so please Google "leafly what-are-cannabis-distillate-concentrates" If needed.

Our first batch came out amazingly well, but we are better scientists than sales guys... Now we are tasked with trying to figure out how to sell it. This seems a bit restrictive in Maine, since we can only sell directly to patients in 2.5 Oz (~70 gram increments) not to Dispensaries or other Caregivers (Guess that is changing in Dec. to up to 30% of our grow, but not allowed yet).

So what would be our best ways to market / advertise / get medical patients that can legally buy from us in bulk under our caregiver license, since we all have full time engineering / medical field jobs and can not spend the day driving around, making deliveries? (At least not until we have enough volume to support our current salaries and our families that depend on us.)

I have thought of advertising on:

Weedmaps - $300 a month basic account and only posting a limited amount of evening/weekend hours when someone could do deliveries... Seems restrictive though, time consuming and will probably only sell a couple grams at a time...

Craigslist posts... Cheaper, less exposure, but same issues....

Dispensary owners and caregivers to become patients? - Cold calling, emailing, Might work?

Trade shows/networking events - Maybe?

Any thoughts or ideas? Thinking I should have taken more sales/marketing classes and less advanced chemistry classes at college. lol

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Any distributors you can ship to now? sounds like you might want to sit on inventory until next year. Craigslist and fill orders at night and on weekends, full amount only until then.

The best advertising is word of mouth .

It sounds like you are trying to circumvent the regulations related to your caregiver license and the Maine laws. If it were me I would be very hesitant to go down that road and risk huge fines and or jail time along with being banned from ever growing again in Maine. You could keep one of your patient slots open for "rotating" customers and hope for more foot traffic, or wait till the new law goes into effect and set up a network of caregivers willing to buy the product for resale. Have you tried contacting CCM on facebook and asking the folks there? They are a very knowledgeable group of people that may have some answers for you.

Thanks for the replies. And no, not trying to circumvent the regulations, quite the opposite. (I have actually read through the laws like LD 238 and LD 1539, Maine Statutes Title 22 Health and Welfare Chapter 558-C Maine Medical use of Marijuana Act, etc several times...)

Currently we are applying for our processing licence to do larger volume, and jumping through the hoops of:

Getting town's approval to allow processing
Getting Commercial kitchen license
Complying with Chapter 38 of the NFPA
Inspections
Permits
Licensing
Setting up corporate structure
Etc.

(All while praying they pass the 2018 Farm Bill as it is currently so we can just process federally legal hemp when it gets declassified as a schedule 1 drug and make CBD oil instead. Then not have 90% of the headaches we are seeing in this industry. I mean heck most banks won't even take money from people with legitimate, state licensed, businesses on the medical side. Like I want to be standing in line next to some guy in 7-Eleven with $50k+ in cash on him because he can't deposit it into a bank. And I thought our Government tried to help stop and prevent crimes... good thinking guys. lol)

But I digress, now that we have our caregivers license I would like to legally sell what we made, use the money for further licensing and expensive safety modifications like blast proofing our processing room. Once we can get the state to license us as a processor, we can just process for people within the medical program and charge a fee. (up to 200 lbs at a time with a tier 2 license, or $80,000 per batch every 3 days at the $400 per lb processing fee our competitors are charging locally) Don't even have to worry about selling anything then. Just give everything back and charge a fee, which is perfectly legal under current laws and much easier for us.

In the meantime though, I wanted to sell the first batch under our caregiver licence (again completely legal if selling to patients, and completely legal to make distillate as a caregiver, just want the processor license to do larger volume.) But I want to figure out the most effective and efficient way for a new caregiver to move product legally. Hopefully this helps clarify my goals and intentions.

But ya, I would love more feed back on better ways to do this. I know many of you have probably already been where I am and have figured it out. Some helpful tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Capn-Crunch said:

It sounds like you are trying to circumvent the regulations related to your caregiver license and the Maine laws. If it were me I would be very hesitant to go down that road and risk huge fines and or jail time along with being banned from ever growing again in Maine. You could keep one of your patient slots open for "rotating" customers and hope for more foot traffic, or wait till the new law goes into effect and set up a network of caregivers willing to buy the product for resale. Have you tried contacting CCM on facebook and asking the folks there? They are a very knowledgeable group of people that may have some answers for you.

Click to expand...

Thanks again for your reply. My above post hopefully clarifies my intentions a bit. As for the revolving door on 5th patient slot, we read about that. Which is very helpful. We can't do foot traffic since we have no store front, nor do we intend on having one. However we can do very limited delivery. Goal is to move into the manufacturing side of the industry, most likely into CBD oil when we find more hemp sources to process, especially if they federally legalize it, which we anticipate. Our plan was to sell to caregivers and dispensaries once the laws change next year. But that is only up to 30% of our grow. Ultimately what we need is a medical processing licence, but this as you know, takes time and money and is a "process". Especially blast proofing a facility. So our intent was to get our quick and easy caregiver licence, legally make our first batch, sell it, and make a batch or two more until we had the funding to move into a processing/manufacturing licence and be able to satisfy all the requirements.

Also I found what I think is "CCM on Facebook", Googling "CCM Facebook" did not turn up much for results but did some digging. Found the forums over at MaineMedMarijuana d-o-t c-o-m... (Friending/hitting them up on facebook could cost me my job due to my position in my current company so can't exactly mix business and pleasure when tied to my name. lol) So I tried the forums which looked promising. However when trying to sign up I got the recatcha error of: "reCAPTCHA V1 IS SHUTDOWN Direct site owners to (weblink)", May want to let the admin of the site know since it is probably stopping other new members, and not just me, from signing up. Assuming that is the place you meant since I saw you had posted on their forums before. Anyways, from everything I read they seem like a cool group and I will try calling them when I get time.

Thanks again for the help.

Sorry I didn't mean to imply breaking the laws but rather getting around the gray areas. I was hoping that the lawmakers were going to approve unlimited patients and a 30 plant count cap per caregiver, but they didn't. I think that would have allowed for a more streamlined process for the caregivers. It sounds like you have a good business plan, good luck with the venture.