Canadian cannabis company picks Winnipeg for flagship growing facility

A new Canadian cannabis company announced its plans to operate its flagship facility in Winnipeg on Tuesday.

GrowForce Holdings Inc. will turn a 120,000 sq. ft. building in the St. Boniface Industrial Park into a cannabis production facility. The company, which was established last month, also acquired two other facilities in Ontario.

CEO Rishi Gautam said a number of other cities across Canada were considered for the flagship location, before Winnipeg was selected.

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“We did a lot of research on power rates and the type of folks we can employ locally and the university systems around,” Gautam said.

“It just makes perfect sense to choose this building as our flagship facility.”

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GrowForce expects to begin growing marijuana in the fall and start shipping to medical and retail purchasers in 2019.

Gautam said the facility will employ up to 200 people by the time it’s fully operational.

“You have hourly rate workers that do trimming and packaging, and then you have very sophisticated horticultural positions that are more on the cultivation and tech side, and then you have more of the lab work when it comes to extraction and tissue culture and more of the biology side of things,” he said.