Inside Wemelco, a Wonka works for weed: The manufacturing process of a thriving local cannabis company

By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer

The Easthampton-based cannabis manufacturer Wemelco Industries has seen notable growth in its first few years of operation — which is ironic, considering one of the only things it doesn’t do with cannabis is grow it.

Wemelco manufactures several brands of cannabis products, including CQ (infused drinks), Goat (infused pre-rolled blunts), Honey (vape cartridges), and Papa’s Herb (rechargeable disposable vapes and vape cartridges). Their most expansive brand is Nectar, which includes infused mocktails, seltzers and water, disposable vapes, and tablets — and all of their products are made here in the Pioneer Valley.

The company also operates two dispensaries, Dreamer in Southampton and Honey in Northampton, and is hoping to open a third, The Oz (pronounced “ounce”) Club, on East Street in Easthampton in the next few months. Since they opened in July 2022, the company has expanded from five employees to nearly 30, with products in more than 150 dispensaries across the state.

Both of the owners are also established businessmen themselves outside of Wemelco: CEO Volkan Polatol currently owns Mulino’s in Northampton and owned Bishop’s Lounge for 14 years pre-pandemic, and COO Kevin Perrier is the owner and founder of Five Star Building Corp. in Easthampton.

On Tuesday, Wemelco let this reporter and a Gazette photographer tour the company’s Easthampton facility, where nearly every part of its manufacturing process (minus cannabis cultivation, which happens elsewhere in Massachusetts, and the acquisition of wholesale products like cans) takes place.

In the beverage room, workers produce 26 cans of their Nectar line per minute. Ingredients mix together in large tanker barrels connected to the filling machine, then a worker loads empty cans onto a depalletizer. From there, the cans feed through a mechanism called a twist rinser, which turns them upside down and sprays their insides with water to get rid of any impurities. The machine then adds carbon dioxide, then the drink itself. A lid dispenser adds a lid to each can, a can seamer seals each lid, then the cans are pushed through a ringer and dried with compressed air.

A labeler adds the nutrition labels and a certificate of analysis, which shows the full cannabinoid profile and the results of an independent test for impurities. Next, a worker packages and pallets the cans. Every so often, he does a quality control check, weighing a can to make sure it’s as full as it needs to be.

That day, the company was using its smallest tank (5 barrels, about 150 gallons) to produce non-infused cases of Nectar’s Strawberry Daiquiri Mocktail, which brand ambassadors take to events and provide to dispensaries to promote Wemelco’s products.

Elsewhere in the facility, employees were processing “flower” (that is, the cannabis plant) into crude oil, then further refining it into distillate, which fills vapes in their “Papa’s Herb” and “Honey” lines, and diamond, which goes in their “Goat” line of infused nicotine-free pre-rolls. In another room, employees were sealing the ends of those pre-rolls, one of the last steps in the production process.

In the manufacturing room, Karen Duda filled up vape cartridges with a machine called a VapeJet, then put caps on them by hand. After that, she loaded a tray of capped cartridges into a machine called a “Squish-o-Matic 1000” — yes, that’s its actual technical name — which presses the caps on. (Duda puts each tray through twice, for safety.) Then, two other staff members inspected the vapes for imperfections under lighted magnifying glasses.

Her daughter, Amber Duda, director of manufacturing and inventory, showed me a Ziploc bag with a few vapes that had been rejected for reasons of quality control — one had a tiny yellow drop of distillate on the side; another had a barely perceptible speck in the middle. When vapes are rejected, she said, they have to be destroyed and filled with natural materials like sand, and two employees have to be there to witness the process on camera, per the rules of the Cannabis Control Commission.

One of the company’s next steps is to expand into a market that cannabis connoisseurs might be surprised they weren’t already involved with: gummies.

Polatol said the company didn’t initially want to sell them because the “gummy race” was already too saturated. Waiting until Wemelco had established itself with other products gave Polatol and Perrier a chance to develop their approach.

“At the end of the day, I think the vast majority of Massachusetts buyers are very price- and quality-conscious, so the best product for the lowest price,” Perrier said. “By holding off on things like gummies, we can make a substantial investment — buy the proper equipment, packaging, put time into [research and development], understand the market — we have a much better chance of having a very successful launch than if, from day one, we bought a small gummy machine and had a crew with 10 people in there in a very labor-intensive process.”

All told, the vibe at the facility felt friendly and productive without being harried, with a sense of care for quality. (At one point, this reporter made a joke about a particular lab looking like something out of “Breaking Bad”; outside a different lab, the one in which employees make the company’s infused “Daytime” and “NiteTime” tablets, was a poster of the show’s main characters, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, as Lego figurines. Amber Duda laughed that it was because those employees wear hazmat suits when they work, which makes them look like the characters.)

“I think it’s a good, relaxed environment to work,” said Perrier. “We try to treat our employees fairly, and we’ve been fortunate to have a pretty good core group of folks, many of which have been here since the beginning.”

“We try to give that family-oriented local-business aspect to it, and I think it works,” Polatol said. “You try to keep your employees happy, and hopefully they are, and off you go.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.