On the day Sam Hachey received his cannabis cultivation license, he stood outside an Alaska state building, hooting and hollering. “I thought it was the proudest moment of my life,” he said.
It was 2016. Alaska had recently legalized recreational cannabis, and Sam and his brother Joe — along with friends Leslea and James Nunley — had just secured one of the state’s first six cultivation licenses. They had no outside investors, no contractors, and a budget Sam would later describe as “laughably small.” But they did have a bare, 1,500-square-foot warehouse; Sam’s electrical experience; Joe’s background in mechanical engineering and construction; and a stalwart refusal to slow down.
Nine years later, Tanana Herb Company operates out of a 48,000-square-foot facility in Fairbanks, runs a ten-week harvest cycle, and produces forty to forty-five strains at a time. The company’s products reach retailers from Juneau and Ketchikan to Bethel, Wrangell, and Dutch Harbor, a fishing port at the far end of the Aleutian Islands. The road to get where they are now — literally and metaphorically — was long, often treacherous, and occasionally involved a moose.
Building a cannabis company the hard way
The Hachey brothers moved to Alaska in 2015, just as the state legalized recreational cannabis. Sam had worked in the legal industry in Colorado before relocating to Washington state. Heading to the Last Frontier with his brother just made sense, he said…