The town of Smiths Falls, Ontario, is having a full-circle moment as pot producer Canopy Growth announced last week that it would sell its primary cannabis cultivation facility back to Hershey Canada, rendering it a chocolate factory once more. The move will see Canopy Growth agree to sell the property located at 1 Hershey Drive at a price of $53 million. The sale was facilitated in an attempt to wind down and streamline operations. To make things more interesting, shares of Canopy Growth were trading higher at the market open Thursday following the announcement.
Canopy Growth notably used the old chocolate factory as its headquarters. In a nod to the site’s history, Canopy Growth also rolled out a line of pot-infused chocolate bars a few years ago when edibles were also legalized. Willy Wonka, eat your heart out. Hershey Canada built the factory on the street that still bears its name in 1964 and sold it in 2007, according to a spokesperson for the company. The town of Smiths Falls, which once relied on jobs from the Hershey factory, saw an employment surge with Canopy Growth’s boom. The subsequent decline in the cannabis industry saw the pot producer announce it was cutting 800 jobs across Canada, which is more than a third of its workforce, in the upcoming spring.
Shawn Pankow, mayor of Smiths Falls, said Hershey coming back to the town is significant for the community that relied on the employer for decades before it shut down in 2007. “It’s almost like that time warp effect. Are we going back in time? Is this really 2023 or are we back here in 1960 when the Hershey story first started in Smiths Falls,” Pankow said in an interview. Mayor Pankow added that it didn’t take long for calls to start rolling in when Canopy announced earlier this year it would be closing operations in the small eastern Ontario town. The mayor, as well as most of the townspeople, would never have guessed in a million years that Hershey would once again end up buying the facility.
“Of all the potential opportunities that could have landed here, the fact that it’s Hershey is probably more heart-warming for the community,” he said. The challenge for most interested parties was leasing or buying all 700,000 square feet of production space. None who Pankow spoke with were able to make such a commitment. Of course, that was until Hershey came along, laying claim to its former property. “In the end, having one purchaser, one operator is really a godsend to our community,” Pankow said.
Canopy Growth will remain in Smiths Falls in some capacity as its separate post-harvest production facility still sits across the road from 1 Hershey Drive. Jason Reiman, Hershey Canada’s chief supply chain officer, said in a statement Thursday that the purchase is a “strategic investment” in the growth of its Canadian operations. Hershey Canada’s website says its current headquarters are located in Mississauga, Ontario, with additional plants in Saint-Hyacinthe and Granby, Quebec.
