Arizona Roadrunner: Fife Symington Takes Copperstate Farms into the Fast Lane

10/27/22 • 39 min

Fife Symington IV is the CEO and Managing Director of Copperstate Farms, a vertically integrated cannabis operation he launched in 2016. This year, Copperstate Farms was named to the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies in the U.S. Copperstate started as a 40-acre greenhouse; today it's a 1.7 million square foot canopy colossus. In 2019, Copperstate launched dispensary brand, Sol Flower, which now has five locations, including one that features a café and wellness classroom open to the public. In this episode of Seed to CEO, Symington will share:

Expertise from commercial agriculture that can be applied in cannabis
Developing a long-term business vision
How to upgrade, update, and expand your greenhouse grow
Keys to low cost production
The importance of community involvement, especially when you are getting your business started

Who is Fife Symington?

Fife Symington IV is the CEO and Managing Director of Copperstate Farms, a vertically integrated cannabis operation he co-founded in 2016. In the 1990s, Symington co-founded and developed several commercial scale greenhouse operations in Mexico, including International Greenhouse Produce in Culiacan, Sinaloa; Nueva Agronomia de Nayarit in Jala, Nayarit; and Apache Produce in Nogales, Arizona. Collectively, these greenhouses covered 850 acres and shipped more than 175 million pounds of vegetables to the U.S. each year. In 2016, he transitioned his vegetable growing expertise to medical cannabis with the purchase of a 40-acre glass greenhouse in Snowflake, Arizona that became Copperstate. Today, Copperstate’s greenhouse operations cover 1.7 million square-feet of canopy, and it employs more than 700 people.

Expertise from commercial agriculture that can be applied in cannabis
Developing a long-term business vision
How to upgrade, update, and expand your greenhouse grow
Keys to low cost production
The importance of community involvement, especially when you are getting your business started

Who is Fife Symington?

Previous Episode

Call of the Wyld: Aaron Morris’ edibles success story

Oregon entrepreneur Arron Morris and his partners launched Wyld, an infused cannabis edibles brand, in 2016. Morris admits their first cannabis-infused candies were terrible. But he and his team persisted, pairing a winning recipe with a bold business plan that’s made them one of the top edibles brands in America. In this episode of Seed to CEO, hear Morris talk about:

Bootstrapping your business
Branding your business
Efficient distribution
Expansion in other states and other countries

Who is Aaron Morris?

Aaron Morris the co-founder and CEO of Wyld, a multi-state edibles brand that is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Morris graduated in 2011 from the University of Oregon where he triple-majored in economics, history, and political science and had plans to be an academic. But entrepreneurship called, and in 2013 he founded Cascade Spirits – where he still also works. That experience led him to found Wyld, which is now one of the leading edibles brands in America.

Next Episode

Barbarian at the Grow: How Jim Cacioppo and Jushi are Storming the Cannabis Industry

Jim Cacioppo cut his teeth in the financial world in the early 1990s with investment bank Wasserstein Perella. The bank was co-founded by Bruce Wasserstein, the hostile takeover pioneer portrayed in Barbarians at the Gate, the book about his 31 billion dollar takeover bid for RJR Nabisco.

Cacioppo, after working at some of New York’s most storied hedge funds, broke into the cannabis industry in 2018, and co-founded Jushi Holdings, a growing MSO.

He brought a "buy big" strategy with him into cannabis, spending tens of millions of dollars on licenses and acquisitions in states like Illinois and Virginia.

In this episode of Seed to CEO, Cacioppo will share:

How his finance experience helped him in cannabis
How to identify lucrative acquisition opportunities in an ever-changing economic environment
How to pick markets for new launches
How expand and scale

Who is Jim Cacioppo?

Jim Cacioppo is the CEO, Chairman and Founder of Jushi, one of the biggest MSOs in the nation. Before breaking into cannabis in 2018, Cacioppo spent more than 20 years with some of the most successful hedge funds in finance. Cacioppo is also Co-Founder and Managing Partner of One East Partners, and previously served as President and Co-Portfolio Manager of Sandell Asset Management and Head of Distressed Debt for Halcyon Management, a global investment firm with over US$9 billion in assets. Cacioppo earned his BA from Colgate University and his MBA from Harvard University.