BENNINGTON -- A new cannabis dispensary will open Wednesday on Northside Drive in Bennington, following a ribbon-cutting event Monday afternoon.
Local and state officials were on hand to help mark the opening of the first Vermont dispensary for Silver Therapeutics, which also has dispensaries in Maine and Massachusetts, including in Williamstown, Mass.
Company CEO and co-founder Josh Silver said the business at 201 Northside Drive will open for business on Wednesday morning, adding that a soft opening on Tuesday was cancelled because of the expected snowstorm.
“We are really glad to be here,” Silver said. “We have been in Williamstown since 2019, and we have served a lot of Vermont clients, so we get to cut their drive down by an hour.”
He said the company has “a good sense of what our Vermont customers want, and we will try our hardest to deliver that.”
Company chief financial officer Brendan McKee said of the opening, “You know this one for me is really special, because I am a resident of Vermont. I live in the town of Washington.”
He added, “Vermont for me has always been a really special place, and I have always wanted to open a cannabis retail here.”
The dispensary will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays.
VARIED MENU
All of the cannabis growers and producers they have worked with in Vermont cultivate plants indoors, Silver said, but that will change.
Silver said that by October, the traditional harvest month for plants grown outdoors, “we should start seeing a lot of really interesting outdoor products, which we should be able to put out to market at a really competitive price.”
He said “it really is a full-time job trying to make sure our menu is full and robust. If you go down and look at our menu in Williamstown, it is six or seven pages long, and when we opened in Williamstown in 2019, we got everything on one page.”
He added, “You know, one of the things that is fun, and often challenging about having a cannabis dispensary, is that the inventory changes a lot,” as each crop of plants from Vermont growers is harvested and processed.
PRIME LOCATION
Of the location, Silver said, “I love the site. We’ve got a ton of parking; I like the traffic circulation; we are totally visible. It is a great commercial district in Bennington.”
The recently renovated two-story building is near the roundabout and entrance to the Walmart-Price Chopper shopping center.
“We are certainly glad to welcome Silver Therapeutics to the Bennington community,” said Shannon McClenithan, president of the Southwestern Vermont Chamber of Commerce board. “They bring an amazing team – talented, educated – and bringing a different level of expertise to the industry.”
Realtor Brenda Jones, who represents the building owner, Monument Holdings, LLC, said following the ribbon-cutting, “I am working with them on real estate acquisitions around the state of Vermont. This has been an amazing relationship working for such a top-shelf company. This facet is a very rewarding part of my business.”
The building has 1,567 square feet of interior space and has been undergoing renovations in recent months while staff were hired and trained and more recently cannabis stock brought in. Silver said the shop will be in the first-floor area.
In addition to the Williamstown store on Route 2, Silver Therapeutics also operates dispensaries in Maine, including two in the Portland area. One is located in Palmer, Mass., and another is expected to open in Boston.
The company has a cultivation facility in Brunswick, Maine.