After traveling the globe for military service responsibilities, engaged couple Kelsey Rivera and Nick Cimadon have put off wedding plans for now as they focus on their newest adventure: a cannabis-infused food and beverage manufacturer the duo launched just a few months ago.
Cimadon and Rivera are the co-founders of Bristol-based SoundView, which in May began supplying dispensaries across the state with its cannabis-based gummy and chocolate products. Cimadon is the company’s CEO, while Rivera is the marketing director.
“This has become like our baby — we haven’t had a wedding or anything like that yet because this has been our main focus,” Rivera said in a recent interview. “Our energy, our time, our love and attention is all towards this. … It’s been a whirlwind of craziness since the start.”
SoundView occupies a 2,200-square-foot building at 159 East Main St., the former home of medical marijuana dispensary Healing Corner, which has moved across the city to a larger building. Since making its first sale on May 16, SoundView has gotten its products in 38 of the state’s 41 adult-use cannabis dispensaries.
Gummies make up about 70% of the veteran-, woman- and minority-owned cannabis company’s sales, while chocolates make up 30%, but Cimadon said that’s beginning to even out as SoundView’s chocolate bars increase in popularity.
“We really want to establish this brand and let people in, let it resonate with the Connecticut community,” Rivera said. “We’re local, this is local. So, we want to just let it blossom in that sense.”
‘Family-and-friend operation’
Cimadon, a 28-year-old Bristol native, and Rivera, a 29-year-old from Milford, met while attending Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. Cimadon studied nursing, while Rivera majored in marketing and communications.
They graduated in 2017. Shortly after that, Cimadon joined the U.S. Navy, while Rivera took a fully remote marketing job with a medical device company so she could travel with Cimadon for military service. The couple spent time in Newport, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; and Guam during Cimadon’s six-year Navy stint.
They got engaged in 2021.
After learning about Connecticut’s plan to legalize recreational marijuana, the couple thought about their post-military life.
“When we were in Guam, I was working nights and we had a 17-hour time difference,” Cimadon said. “So, I had a lot of time to look into the licensing process. I saw it was a lottery, and I saw that we could put in an application for different license types, so we applied for food and beverage based on our statistical odds.”
Cimadon and Rivera were awarded one of five social equity cannabis food and beverage licenses in 2022. The license allows the company to manufacture food and drinks containing THC, and perform cannabis flower extractions to obtain oils used in its products.
Since getting the license, Rivera and Cimadon have worked with the city of Bristol and state to prepare for their opening this year. Rivera said the city was good to work with, and happy to fill a vacant site with a new business.
Not counting equipment, the company built out its facility for less than $100,000, Cimadon said, doing the construction internally with help from friends and family. Now those helpers make up SoundView’s nine mostly full-time employees.
“We were here morning-to-night, covered in dust with cuts and bruises everywhere, doing everything,” Rivera said. “Uncles were helping out with a lot of stuff, cousins were here — from the beginning it was a full family-and-friend operation.”
SoundView’s operation works like this: the company purchases cannabis flower wholesale from in-state cultivators, extracts the THC and other cannabinoids out of the plant matter, and infuses those oils into their products.
The company decided to source its chocolate from Belgium, after testing how different chocolate types and flavors work with their infusions. Tempering, the heating and cooling process used to make chocolate candy, and homogenization of chocolate and infused cannabis oil are the keys to making a tasty and quality product, Cimadon said.
“This chocolate has great working characteristics,” Cimadon said.
In addition to making gummies and chocolates, SoundView also plans to manufacture vaporizers in the future, and continue to research and develop new edible flavors. Their goal is to increase market share in the state.
Edibles currently account for about 11% of adult-use cannabis sales in Connecticut, while vaporizers make up about 31% of sales.
“We want a good piece of the market…. How big, we don’t know yet,” Cimadon said.
SoundView is also allowed to perform cannabis flower extractions for other companies on a contract basis, under a model called “toll processing,” which Cimadon said could be a future growth area.
“People that have cannabis but can’t extract it for whatever reason, they come to us and say ‘we’ll do a split of the oil that’s extracted,’ as our tolling fee for processing the cannabis,” Cimadon said. “So, that’s what we’re expanding this operation to do.”
A cultivation operation could be included in SoundView’s future vertical expansion, but for now, Rivera and Cimadon said they want to focus on making the best edibles in Connecticut.
“We love this facility, we love this city and we put a lot of sweat equity into this,” Cimadon said.
