How Connected Came Into Fruition, With A Goal Of Being The Best In Cannabis

While it seems like brands are entering the cannabis industry at an excessive rate, you can’t deny the high quality flower found at Connected. A true humble journey from the ground up, founder Caleb Counts has worked extremely hard to transform Connected into one of California’s most sought-after cannabis companies, simultaneously carrying a knack for genetics and all things flower.

With over a decade’s worth of time to celebrate, Connected Cannabis opened their doors to their first medical dispensary in Sacramento back in 2009. Since then, they’ve expanded to approximately 39 shops across the US, priding themselves in the aesthetic and design of their strains. And still, it’s their acquired brand Alien Labs that left stoners across the States in a frenzy, even cited as the most expensive weed in California with celebrity cosigns from the elites such as the Migos, Young Thug, and more.

Most recently, Connected collaborated with hip-hop mogul Travis Scott on Travis Scott’s Cactus Farms, aligning directly with their mantra of being the go-to “designer weed.” Smell, flavor, jar appeal, density, color, trim job, size and uniformity — they all matter, and Connected continues to deliver. Fan favorites include strains called Biscotti, Gelonade, Gelato 41, and Gushers.

Born and raised in Southern California, Counts’ cannabis endeavors began at a young age, selling weed at the age of 12. Because of that, his parents uprooted from Los Angeles to Central California, where he continued his entrepreneurial spirit and sold weed all through high school and college at Chico State. Fast forward to today, Connected embarks on even greater endeavors such as Nightshade, another recently launched line dedicated to its namesake strain, only available in half-ounce bags and released with custom snakeskin ETAI bags. 

Flaunt caught up with Counts via Zoom to discuss his background in marijuana, how Connected came to be, the pheno hunt process and picking the right strains, collaborating with Travis Scott, and what he’s most excited for next. 

You took a brief sabbatical from selling weed, then got back into it. What happened?

I was in real estate for 5 years in the Sacramento area. As the market and real estate started to tank, I started getting back into selling weed. I was never a grower at that time, I was always brokering stuff. I walked into a dispensary in California to try to expand my customer base and between the number of customers walking through the doors and the lack of product quality, I instantly knew I could improve on this. I opened my first dispensary in February 2009, only the 7th to open in Sacramento. Now, Sacramento still has the highest dispensary count per capita in the state of California, and we were part of the team that built the structure for that.

I didn't care about being the biggest dispensary, just the best in terms of customer service, treatment of vendors, product quality, every single aspect, whatever it took. In order to get our customers the best product, I tapped one of my best growers who always had unique strains and he became my growing mentor. One of his strains was The Godfather, which became one of the very first branded strains in this area. We then built a facility across the street from the dispensary, with half dedicated to production and half dedicated to R&D - so R&D has literally been ingrained in Connected since 2010, when we opened.

What's R&D? 

Trying different methods and techniques. Ironically, the method my mentor put in place is still very close to the techniques we use today. At first, our focus was on expanding the retail portion of our business. Cultivation was simply to supply our shelves, but once we secured those highly sought-after genetics, it became our bread and butter. 

We got really good at cultivating those in-demand genetics of the time - OG Kush, then Sunset Sherbert and the Gelatos. Word started to spread beyond our dispensaries and Sacramento, and we were able to place ourselves in dispensaries where people would shop for the newest trends. Greenwolf in LA, for example, gave us a chance - we sold them Gelatos before they were widely known outside of Northern California at $3600 a pound. Others saw the success and it just exploded from there. 

Why the name Connected? 

Before we were Connected, we were the first commercial supplier of Cookies genetics in the legal California market, and we licensed the name Cookies from Berner. We realized after several years working with them, we needed to develop our own brand identity. 

Connected just rang true; it has so much meaning in the cannabis space and really in the underground market of anything. You got the connection, you have the plug and that's what we became. Our strains and our genetics were so highly sought after that you had to have some angle, some connection to get our product. We connected to the people that helped get us here. It has so many different meanings rooted in cannabis and drug culture in general. It spoke out to me. 

That's beautiful. How did you get associated with Alien Labs?

It's a great story. Alien Labs was a grower out in Northern California that started to catch internet interest via Instagram Their team came into the store one day and tried to sell us some product, but we didn’t buy. Those guys knew how valuable our Sacramento shop was in Northern California. They contacted a mutual connection and paid her $1000 for an introduction to me. 

Oh my gosh, really? 

Yeah, she was a manager of a clothing store, so it was a similar model. I took the intro and the guys were super cool. They were guys I’d want to hang out with and work with, which has always been a mandate. They gave me a quarter pound of Gorilla Glue. I’d never gotten more than a couple of eighths. I wasn't even doing the buying but I took this meeting and said “these are the guys we need to work with, I've heard about them.” 

Fast forward and we’re buying almost all of their product, and I kept asking for more.  Come to find out, their entire production came out of six garage grows cobbled together in Redding, and I was buying 90% of their weed. They were blowing themselves up on Instagram so I assumed they were a huge operation and that we were only getting a fraction of what they grew

We built off of each other until 2018 came along and they didn't have any path to permitting. That's always been one of my specialties: understanding cities, understanding where this thing's going and how to work with them. I proposed that they come under our wing, but their concern was losing the heart and soul of Alien Labs. We worked together to ensure that didn’t happen. Essentially, we gave them the keys to our grow facilities, access to our employees, and let the magic happen. Especially now, there’s a lot of people with money coming in and pushing around the little guy. The little guy, the one with the quality, is the lifeblood. I don't care if you produce 10 pounds a month or 100 pounds; if people want your product, we need to build a partnership and that’s what happened with Alien Labs. 

What goes into the pheno hunt process? How do you narrow down the single strains to bring to the market?

It's an ever-evolving process. The very first time we bred Biscotti and Gushers, we popped about 50-75 seeds in red Solo cups. Back in the day, everything was fast and loose, where you didn’t want to sacrifice too much production for an experiment and you wanted to be secretive. We used to, and still do, call some phenos “RC,” standing for “red cup.”  

We analyze every part of the growing process, looking for commercial viability, looks, potency, but most importantly, loudness (smell), because the smell drives the quality. We learned from watching other people online, cultivating, experimenting, and building our own trusted group of diehards to evaluate the product. That’s how we found Biscotti and Gushers, and it took off from there. 

We've honed in and now have full on analytical grading processes. We have private smoking sessions where we use a serial number, and no one knows the genetics, like a full-on, unbiased board review. So many people in cannabis get caught in their own egos and their own mindsets, I've been guilty of it myself before. You have to bring in the diehards, the types of people that have brought this industry where it is, and that's why quality continues to be pushed to new limits in California and in our company.

Talk about collaborating with Travis Scott and Cactus Farms. How long was that in the works? 

I have to take a small step back and talk about how Biscotti really blew up. I worked with Berner on it to help promote Biscotti as this new evolution of the Gelato, Cookies genetics. One of our small delivery services was buying one to two pounds at a time, and it was very clear he sold to the who's who - famous celebrities, basketball players, rappers. One day he jumped to 10 pounds, and all he wanted was Biscotti. We said, "What the fuck’s going on?" He's like, "Dude, it's the Migos.” I said, “You're shitting me!" 

This is when the Migos were blowing up, they were huge, and our buyer said they were buying everything he had.  They started putting it in their songs, and then we exploded. Still to this day, he exclusively deals with celebrities in the space that only want the best. 

One day, he hits me up and mentions Travis Scott. After talking to a few trusted friends who reiterated how huge he is, we set up a meeting, bringing samples of different strains we were working on down to his studio in LA. 

Our teams smoked a few blunts in the studio, and Travis said "Fuck, this is it! I really like this one, but I want to see some more." So I came back a second time and he confirmed that it was the one. I'm not one who's super overly excited about celebrities. I don't live in that world, I'm a simple guy. I work hard and want to grow the best weed to make people happy. After meeting with Travis, he felt like someone we could work with, super down-to-earth and cool, and it was an amazing experience. He made me feel like he’s equally lucky to be looking for this weed, a perfect strain that could drive his creativity differently than any other strain he had smoked. We put the teams together and got to work, and it took 2 years to bring that product to market.

What’re you most excited for next? 

We've been in Arizona for about a year already, and the reception couldn't have been better, so we'll increase our production there by 120%. We're actively pursuing several other states as well, but we’ll keep things growing in our home state at the same time. We have construction projects in California right now that’ll increase our production by 200%. 

200?! Wow. 

Things take forever in California, whereas in Arizona it's a lot quicker. I'm looking to further expand because we can only grow so many strains at a time between Alien and Connected, with our current canopy in California and Arizona. What I'm most excited about is how we're looking to double the menu for both brands, for both flower and now our vapes too; since we redesigned them, they’ve really taken off. We're now allocating our carts just like we allocate our flowers. 

I'm excited to bring the market double the genetics. We hired a geneticist from Driscolls, the largest berry company in the world, and he's put our genetic production plan into overdrive. We have over 500 different crosses in our seed bank so the limits are endless. We've got about 10 new strains in the works and we’re excited for the world to smoke them.