Starting this week, Gold Crown products are available at Pure Options — one of Lansing’s most respected independent dispensaries and a longtime pillar of this city’s cannabis scene. If you’ve been paying attention to Michigan cannabis for any length of time, both of these names should mean something to you.
Jonathan Kellow is 34. His partner Mike Yaldoo is 29. They started Gold Crown — then operating under the caregiver system — ten years ago in the Metro Detroit area. Mike was 19 years old. Read that again: 19 years old, starting a cannabis company in the gray market, before legalization, before any of this was straightforward.
“We started off as a five-person company,” Kellow told me recently. “Me, Mike, my mom, his mom, my sister, his dad — basically family run.”
Today, Gold Crown employs 95 people. Those original family members are still around. That’s not a talking point — that’s a culture…