OURS enters the Illinois cannabis market as one of few Black-owned companies to make it that far

Two new chocolate bars hit the market just before Halloween last year, though they weren’t targeted at trick-or-treaters. Packaged in subdued beige, green, brown, and orange tones, both are infused with 50 mg of THC and other cannabinoids and are only for sale in Illinois cannabis dispensaries.

The timing was as coincidental as it was long overdue. Community brand chocolate bars—the first chocolate edibles in the state to incorporate adaptogenic mushrooms like reishi and lion’s mane—were launched by one of the few operational Black license holders in the state. They landed in dispensaries more than four years after corporate multistate operators hijacked the “most equity-centric” cannabis laws in the country, as Governor J.B. Pritzker described when he signed off on it in the summer of 2019.

One of the companies behind Community, OURS—which stands for Organic Urban Revitalization Solutions—has been around about just as long. It’s a Black-owned, women-led group of some nine friends that was founded that spring by Grow Greater Englewood executive director Anton Seals Jr. The goal was to create a vertically integrated, wellness-focused cannabis company, driven by the need to address the disproportionate impact the war on drugs has had on Black and Brown communities by fostering ownership and employment in the emerging industry. The group included Seals’s co-CEO, Harvard Law grad and entrepreneur J.T. Stinnette, the group’s wellness officer Jamaal Kendrick, restaurant owner Chris “Dough” Fryison, and a few silent partners.

“We were aligning to answer what social equity needed, but also choosing to form partnerships with the best people,” says Tanya Ward, who handles the group’s marketing. “We looked at this as an opportunity to create generational wealth, because for people with our skin growing up in this country, that’s not guaranteed. My family was decimated by the drugs that were brought into our community and the subsequent war on drugs. It was an effort to do for ourselves, but also to honor the people that came before us. In the case of J.T.’s family, they were pioneers in the medical cannabis space.”

During the immediate green rush that followed the passing of the new state law, OURS applied for four state cannabis business licenses: dispensary, craft grower, infuser, and transporter. “Initially, we were going after the dispensary space,” says Ward. “That was the cherry of the industry.” But they were only awarded the latter two.

This presented a new set of hurdles before the business could stand up on its own. A transporter’s license is only worth anything if existing established cannabis companies contract with transporters to do the work (there’s not enough traffic for that) or if direct-to-consumer delivery is permitted (it isn’t).

An infuser without a grower’s license is beholden to purchase cannabis from existing growers, with limited availability. What’s more, an infuser needs a brick-and-mortar facility to do the actual manufacturing of cannabis-infused products, which requires an injection of capital on the order of millions of dollars.

The principals behind OURS spent the first two years of legalization networking, doing outreach, and trying to help newer social equity applicants get their own start through a collaboration with the Chicago Urban League. “Before we got set to selling products, we had to think about, ‘OK, what about the people that are incarcerated still? How can we open up opportunities for people to work in the industry, but not necessarily have to touch the plant?’ Working in equity and justice turned out to be a great branding thing for us—we became a trusted source. We put in the sweat equity doing the right things.”

But a lot of what they encountered from the established industry was discouraging. “There’s a faction that had no intention of doing right and making people whole,” says Ward. “A lot of people just needed a social equity applicant, someone that checked all the boxes to move forward. Going to these conferences outside of Illinois, I started to notice the farmers were missing because they were scheduling these events during harvest seasons. So no farmers were ever going to be here. And the farmers are our industry. Before it becomes about money, it’s about a quality product and loving the earth. But at the end of the day, it’s capital. It’s gray suits and bankers.”

With Community, OURS became one of the first Black-owned cannabis brands to deliver a product to market, but they didn’t do it alone. “Before investors invest in you, they want to see what you can do, they want to see a proof of return on their investment,” says Ward. “We hadn’t done anything in terms of retail or creating an amazing product. We had to get to market with something that was wonderful and accessible and delicious and worked in all the ways that we said it would.”

Organic Urban Revitalization Solutions
ourssolutions.org

In 2021, OURS began eyeballing a space on the south side that could house their brick-and-mortar infusion operation. But in the midst of the pandemic, investors were running scared, and negotiations with the landlord fell through. That’s when they joined forces with Nature’s Grace and Wellness, a downstate cannabis cultivator run by fifth-generation farmers the O’Herns, to bring the Community bars to market.

Together, OURS and Nature’s Grace developed a dark chocolate bar infused with lion’s mane mushroom, vanilla, and THC along with the cannabinoids cannabinol (CBN) and cannabigerol (CBG), each with their own set of purported health benefits. When I tried a 10 mg square before a viewing of the otherwise nerve-racking film Iron Claw, an easy physical body high set in with a cerebral focus that evened out much of the tension coming from the screen. Individual squares of the milk chocolate-lemon reishi bar, with CBD and CBG, resulted in a series of particularly deep and peaceful slumbers.

Both bars are in more than 90 dispensaries statewide right now, including Mission, nuEra, and Grasshopper Club. “There’s a lot of work to do to get dispensaries interested, keep our name on the buyers’ minds, and make sure that we engage the budtenders,” says Ward. A portion of the sales from Community bars goes to organizations that support Black, Brown, and rural Illinois farmers, like Grow Greater Englewood, HEAL Food Alliance, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, and Farm Aid. While OURS continues to raise capital for a south-side brick-and-mortar, more products and collaborations are on the way.

Earlier this year, Mike Bancroft and Anne Kostroski of Edgewater’s Sauce and Bread Kitchen came on board. In 2020, after their attempts to obtain cannabis licensing to bring their own edible Nutty Buddy Munchy Bar to market fell through, they handed over intellectual property and equipment to OURS. They officially signed on early last year and continue to conduct R&D for future products.

“We’ve been noodling on a bunch of things,” says Ward. “I don’t know that I want to say what, but there’s a lot of great stuff coming in the future.”