Faye was the operating partner at Lenny & Joe’s Fish Tale, a well-known New Haven restaurant that fell victim to the pandemic. His business partner in that venture was Linares’ father.
“I used to babysit him,” Faye said of Linares.
“I used to call him my best friend and we had a secret handshake,” Linares said.
Both Faye and Linares — a former Connecticut state legislator who is married to Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons — have worked in real estate for most of their careers. The two are now founders and owners of Rodeo Cannabis, which consists of a 250,000-square-foot outdoor cannabis farm and a cannabis production facility.
“A lot of cannabis is real estate, getting the local permits and approvals,” Linares said.
To run the production facility, Faye and Linares turned to Alex Knight-Hernandez. He’s now their vice president of operations, but he was kitchen manager at Lenny & Joe’s, and was a state Department of Correction employee working at the Bridgeport Correctional Center as a kitchen supervisor doing “a lot of large-scale food production handling.”
“A couple thousand gummies isn’t that far off,” he said.
“When we were opening this place, I told Art, ‘I got the perfect guy,’” Faye said. “It took me a while to get him out of corrections.”
The production facility is so new that during a recent tour, employees were churning out the very first vape cartridges and gummies, in the hopes of getting them on shelves by April 20.
Though they do have plans to expand into other methods of production, for now, Rodeo is specializing in what’s referred to as “live rosin,” a chemical-free process often considered a superior cannabis product as it uses no solvents in the extraction process.
Linares and Faye said they believe theirs is the only facility dedicated to producing live rosin consistently.
“Right now customers have to drive to Massachusetts to get rosin,” Linares said.
The cannabis is harvested and then flash frozen at their farm and shipped across the state to the Sterling facility in five-pound blocks. They’re planting now, and hope to harvest 50,000 pounds of cannabis come harvest time.
H/T: StamfordAdvocate
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