Dear JMCC Customers and Friends,
Yes, 2020 was an exceptionally challenging year, even a disastrous one for many. Yet, it was in many ways also JMCC Group’s best year since our founding in 2016, enabling us to begin 2021 as so much more than the “best cultivator of Jamaican medical cannabis” we set out to be just four years ago.
Throughout 2020, the entire JMCC team worked through, over or around each new obstacle as it presented itself, with the quiet determination that has characterized our company from the very beginning. Thanks primarily to this determination and teamwork, and a bit of serendipity, we have moved well above and beyond the goals we had set for ourselves.
Two of our biggest leaps were the creation of JMCC Scientific last summer, a division that is creating innovative cannabis-based treatments for patients worldwide, and this month, the launch of JMCC Distribution, our global logistics and warehousing operation that completes JMCC’s vertical integration and forms the final link in our self-contained supply chain.
By the end of Q1 2020, JMCC’s executive team had realized that figuring out “a new normal” wasn’t going to deliver the kind of unique new medical cannabis enterprise required to address both the existing and emerging challenges the industry and patients worldwide were confronting.
In Canada, many companies were being forced to rationalize their operations as sales of so much product from ambitious expansions were stymied by slow retail roll-outs in some provinces and as the bloom faded from the public-markets cannabis rose. Supply chains and distribution channels were further disrupted by the pandemic. Company investments in medical research and product R&D, as well as international operations, were curtailed as stock prices fell and capital overall became harder to find for many.
At the same time, patients in countries that rely on Canadian imports were experiencing supply issues and continuing high costs while Canadian patients were also struggling to afford treatment, partially due to the inexplicable insistence of our governments to tax the safer and better-tolerated cannabis medicine many patients now prefer.
So, we did a lot of thinking in the deep, dark days of last winter.
From the beginning, JMCC has taken a different path:
Staying private was a very deliberate decision as we felt it would allow us to better control our own destiny and focus, even though that meant our company growth had to be slower and more rigorously managed, with every dollar carefully watched as we continued the slow but steady build-out of our cultivation and processing operations in Jamaica.
Taking on the challenges of building a new business in a new industry in a still-developing nation because we believed in the sustainability, quality and cost advantages of growing medical cannabis in one of the most ideal climates in the world, in a culture informed by the long-established traditions of using cannabis and other plants as medicine.
Staying true to our promise to patients: providing the highest-quality medical cannabis possible, by focusing on achieving global standards like GMP from the get-go.
Setting a simple, relatively easily attainable corporate goal of becoming “the leading provider of high-quality, Jamaican medical cannabis to the world”.
By early last year, the achievement of that goal was in sight: we’d signed medical cannabis supply agreements with customers in Canada and Australia. Our cultivation team in Jamaica had grown our first R&D crops. Our Ops team was continuing our facilities build-out and, with our Quality team, was immersed in the long, complex design and planning process involved in securing our EU-GMP certification. We’d also agreed, at the invitation of project sponsor Drug Science, to become the exclusive supplier from the Caribbean region to Project TWENTY21 in the U.K, one of the largest medical cannabis studies ever undertaken.
And then in mid-March, right around the time of the first pandemic-related lock-down in Canada and the closing of the Canada-U.S. land border, we decided that merely becoming “the leading provider of high-quality, Jamaican medical cannabis to the world” wasn’t enough anymore. So we set our sights higher, put our heads back down and continued to work – most of us from home, and keeping our teams in Canada, Jamaica and around the world safe and on the payroll throughout the lock-downs in each country.
Today, I’m proud to announce that JMCC Group is now a fully integrated, global medical cannabis company with a self-contained supply chain encompassed by our Source, Scientific and Distribution divisions. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and with cultivation, processing, R&D, manufacturing packaging operations in Jamaica, and regional distribution hubs for the Americas, the EU/U.K. and Australasia in place, we are poised to become the leading provider of EU-GMP and certified-organic Jamaican medical cannabis products and services to the world in 2021.
Please read on to discover how we made this leap in less than a year. (Hint: it wasn’t as easy as I may have made it sound but also proves you can accomplish quite a bit in Zoom meetings!). And learn what it all means for our business customers and patients worldwide.
Thanks for your support throughout our company’s early growth years. I hope you stay with us on the exciting journey ahead!
Best regards,
Comments