Sitting prominently among the best-known cannabis brands operating in California today is Raw Garden. You can find its line of concentrates—vape pens, sauces, live resin, diamonds— in nearly every licensed retail store in the state. Founded in 2011, during the medical Prop 215 days, the company has kept its operations close to the chest. Until now.
Based on the Central Coast, Raw Garden boasts over 2,000 cultivars grown on 85 acres of land in the lush Santa Barbara County. If you ask its CEO and co-founder John De Friel, Raw Garden’s ideology is farm-first. De Friel is a fourth-generation farmer as well as a chemical and biological engineer. Its meticulous, sprawling home base somehow feels more like a family-owned operation than a cannabis concentrate behemoth. It balances both realities, proving how cannabis brands can be a well-oiled agricultural machine that stays “small,” that is to say, humbled by its roots in the medical community and the need for accessibility.
Similar to De Friel, co-founder and COO Thomas Martin hails from a long line of farmers. This agricultural ideology has shaped every facet of Raw Garden’s parent company, Central Coast Agriculture Inc. The brand gives back to its local community by partnering with the Food Bank of Santa Barbara County. In 2020, they fed 1,300 kids at risk of hunger.
Raw Garden has reached mad-scientist level alchemy in its genetics, with over 15,000 distinct crosses from hundreds of unique parent lines. Its cannabis breeding program has had the biggest impact. Raw Garden has brought 827 unique cannabis strains to the consumer, including 300 new strains in 2020 alone. Award winners include Dosi Punch, Italian Soda, Banana Punch, Strawberry Mojito, and more. Today, its bank consists of over 25 million seeds.
De Friel spoke with me recently on Raw Garden’s obsession with consistency in plant breeding, his family’s 150-year farming roots, and the company’s announcement of its first expansion into a new market, Arizona, come next year.
