There was a plot twist this week in the story of Smiths Falls, Ontario, and the candy factory turned cannabis-growing facility.
Few buildings exemplify a town’s ups and downs as much the sprawling brown-brick factory in Smiths Falls, Ontario, that began life in the 1960s as the home of Hershey Canada.
Twice the town has risen with the fortunes of the building’s successive owners: Hershey, and then a prominent cannabis grower. And twice it has been let down by them. This week, the town received a third shot at economic redemption when Hershey, in a surprising move, said it was returning.
The building’s continuing drama has also meant that Smiths Falls has lured me out repeatedly for various reasons, personal and journalistic, over the years.
Being a parent prompted my first visit; few families in Eastern Ontario escaped at least one trip to the chocolate factory. Our now-adult sons had scant interest in what was its main attraction for me: the self-guided tour that allowed visitors to peer down from elevated windows at pristine white conveyor belts moving battalions of peanut butter cups and chocolate bars.
They were there for the “Chocolate Shoppe.” Reached through a somewhat faded, theme-park-style entrance, it sold about $4 million of broken candy, bulk bars and confectionary misfits to an astounding 400,000 or so visitors each year. For comparison, before it closed for renovations, about 355,000 people toured Parliament’s Centre Block annually.
The water tower in Smiths Falls proclaimed the town to be the “chocolate capital of Ontario.” At its peak, the plant employed about 800 people in a community that currently has a population of just over 9,000.
But in 2007, like several American-owned branch plants in Smiths Falls, the Hershey plant became a casualty of continental free trade. Hershey wound down production, moving most of it to Mexico. Combined with other closings, the town lost 1,700 jobs within a year.
Unlike most abandoned factories, however, the Hershey plant escaped demolition. And 10 years ago it became the focus of Smiths Falls’s next great boom, one built around legal cannabis production, which, at that time, meant medical marijuana.
There were a small number of licensed growers, and Tweed, Canopy Growth’s original corporate name, was the most flamboyant and aspirational of them all. It had bought the factory for 7 million Canadian dollars from its two co-founders, a pair who had earlier been prominent in Canada’s dot-com boom and bust.
When I went out there for an article in 2014, the oldest part of the plant was a wreck. Clearly home to many animals, its had a roof that was sagging and leaking. But over in what had been a candy bar warehouse, an array of special growing rooms was fitted with blinding grow lights and deafening industrial-size dehumidifiers together nurturing 50,000 marijuana plants.
[Read: When Cannabis Goes Corporate]
Medical marijuana wasn’t a road to riches, but Canopy, despite losing almost as much money as it took in through sales, was ready to double down when the industry’s big prize opened: the recreational cannabis market. The roof was replaced and the raccoons evicted from the oldest part of the factory. It gained a handsomely designed visitor center, museum, cafe and gift shop offering clothing and marijuana knickknacks. The self-guided tours returned, and eventually there was a small chocolate assembly line making cannabis edibles.
One of Canopy’s lawyers had a bold prediction of the fortune awaiting the company.
“It’s like Seagram’s back when Prohibition was in place and just about to end,” said Deborah Weinstein, who handled Canopy’s move to the Toronto Stock Exchange. “But it’s more than that. This has never been an industry.”
At first it seemed like a dream come true, both for Canopy’s investors and for Smiths Falls. Canopy’s soaring stock price vaulted it into the ranks of one of Canada’s most valuable companies. And it employed 1,800 people in the town.
The good times didn’t last. Despite the opening of the market to cannabis edibles and beverages, profits proved elusive for everyone, and Canopy’s shares have fallen by 80 percent since the beginning of the year. Some analysts question the company’s future unless it can sell more stock — a tall order. Layoffs have brought the work force in Smiths Falls down to about 450 people.
[Read: From Canada’s Legal High, a Business Letdown]
Since April, Canopy has sold seven of its buildings across the country, the latest being the plant at 1 Hershey Drive in Smiths Falls. Hershey (which did not directly sell the building to Canopy’s founders) said this week that it would pay 59 million Canadian dollars in cash.
The remaining Canopy workers will move to a building across the street that Canopy now uses for shipping and a beverage canning line.
What Hershey plans to do is unclear.
In an email, Todd Scott, a spokesman, said that the purchase was “another step in our continuing investment in our supply chain network to enable our leading snacking powerhouse vision” and that whatever occurs, it would involve candy, mint and gum confectionary.
He added that it was premature to discuss any specifics. And he did not explain why the company decided to return to Smiths Falls.
It remains to be seen whether the Candy Shoppe will rise again to challenge Parliament as a tourist attraction.
Trans Canada
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After the evacuation of Yellowknife in the face of a wildfire, another blaze was consuming houses in suburban Kelowna, British Columbia. The situation is fluid and fast developing in both communities, and The Times will continue to follow it.
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A woman who admitted that she made deadly ricin at her home in Quebec in September 2020 before mailing it in letters to then-President Donald J. Trump at the White House and to eight law enforcement officials in Texas was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
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Shari Lapena, a thriller writer who lives on a farm near Toronto, has some advice: Get a cat.
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Morgen Mills, who last year became the first transgender woman to represent Canada’s women’s chess team at an international competition, said she was surprised by the International Chess Federation’s new regulations, which effectively bar many transgender women from women’s events for up to two years, or possibly even more.
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An ad from the Bank of Montreal appeared on a YouTube channel for preschoolers, possibly enabling Google, which owns YouTube, to track children online in violation of American law, a report concludes.
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A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for two decades.
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