There are big things on the horizon in Cincinnati, aka the Queen City. In a building that formerly housed a K-Mart, a two-tiered 50,000 square foot canopy is turning out high quality cannabis at scale. King City Gardens pulled down their first harvest in January 2024, and by June of that same year, they were the third-highest selling flower brand in the state of Ohio. With lofty goals of producing craft quality at scale, King City has high hopes to turn the Buckeye State into one of the best cannabis markets in the country.
Cultivation Coming Online
The five entrepreneurial minds behind King City Gardens initially applied for licensing in 2016, but were denied. When they noticed that their two identical applications had been graded differently, they entered litigation to fight for their dream. After a laborious four-year process, King City Gardens was finally awarded their cultivation license in 2022, and in January 2023, they broke ground on their facility. As co-founder Caveh Azadeh noted, “We’re local to the Cincinnati area, so we wanted to keep the cultivation site in Cincinnati. We had to find the site in a short amount of time, so we found an old K-mart in Forest Park, which is about 20 miles north of the city, and we retrofitted.” By August of that same year, the business was operational, and their first harvest came only 5 months later.
“We’ve got eight flower rooms. Each room we did double tier. So by getting a double tier we can do about 50,000 square feet of canopy grow. We wanted to make sure we had all the advanced technology, LED lighting; we’ve got 16 dehumidifiers in every room.”
“Our goal was to build a facility that was able to produce craft cannabis at scale. We wanted to not only be able to have top-notch cannabis – we want to do it at scale. And that was kind of our mindset from the very beginning and we’ve had to dial things in.”
Maturing Market Challenges
While the whole of the legal cannabis industry in the USA is still quite young, Ohio is still very much in the infancy of its recreational program. Medical cannabis became legal in the state in 2016, while adult-use came about in the November 2023 election. The first recreational sales began in August of 2024. As Azadeh said, “[We] went rec about August of last year, but not fully rec. They basically went rec under the medical rules and we’re still living in that world right now – no pre-rolls, no advertising, etc.”
Though the state’s still-emerging market may not allow cultivators and dispensaries to offer every type of cannabis product (yet), Azadeh doesn’t see it as all bad. “I think Ohio got a very slow start, which there were some positives and negatives. The negatives were, you know, people were coming to these stores and they’re expecting pre-rolls, all these other things. They’re not getting that right now. It’s not a true rec market. But on the positive side of things is it’s allowed all the cultivators, everybody else to kind of slowly build up.”
Despite these product limitations, the end result is still positive with room for growth in the future. “I think we’re all very fortunate for the opportunity to be able to serve everyone out there. But I do think, in order for us to be really able to capitalize on a mature recreational market, you have to be able to have all the offerings.”
Focus on Flavor
For their line of hand-trimmed, craft flower, King City Gardens is meeting customers with the strains and flavors they’re looking for. As for their top seller, “We’ve got Apples and Bananas, which has been one of the top selling strains in Ohio. It’s got a great, usually strong THC, good terpene profile. We [also] have some Blueberry Muffin. We definitely have some strains that have been very effective as we’ve kind of dialed it in – we’re still on our pheno hunt.”
Beyond full flower, King City has been building its catalog with processed products as well. “We’re doing some contract processing out of a license in Wilmington, Ohio. So, now that we’re [processing], we use Grove Bags for all our packaging for our gummies, and for our vapes”
“In the beginning we were just using the mylar bags and we’re like ‘Okay just like anything else we’re learning’ and we’re like ‘Let’s find a way where we can preserve the cannabis a little bit better’, and then we learned about [Grove Bags]. We started putting all of our half ounces in TerpLoc® because we want to be able to have that quality at every level all the way from seed through sale.”
Roads to Retail
Ever since King City Gardens overcame the will-they-won’t-they road to legalization in Ohio, they’ve rapidly risen through the ranks and have their sights set on the future. Beyond the cultivation facility and becoming one of the top-selling brands in the state, the team is aiming for a truly vertical operation, and soon.
“We’ve got the process side of things off the ground now, and now we also have six dispensaries opening up by the end of the year. Those will be called The Garden. We want to be able to not only showcase our flower, but also some of the top flowers in the state of Ohio and really be able to expand our footprint within the state.” Azadeh said.
More than anything, the team at King City Gardens is excited to be pioneers in the earliest days of the state’s legal legacy. While they aspire to expand into more states as licensing and federal legalization efforts allow, for now they’re laser-focused on making a superior quality product accessible to as many Ohio consumers as they can, all while putting Cincinnati on the map as a true cannabis destination.
