HEXO Corp is coming to Belleville to become a member of the community.

The Quebec-based cannabis producer’s co-founder Adam Miron and his staff were in Belleville Wednesday to host an information session and Q & A at the Travelodge Hotel to introduce itself to the community, start positioning itself as an employer of choice in the area, and answer questions from participants and media.

HEXO recently acquired an interest in the former 2,004,000 sq. ft. Sears Warehouse to establish a centre of excellence for the development and manufacturing of advanced cannabis products.

HEXO creates and distributes innovative, easy-to-use and easy-to-understand products to serve the Canadian cannabis market. One of the country’s lowest-cost producers, HEXO currently operates with over 310,000 sq. ft. of production capacity with construction on another 1,000,000 sq. ft. expansion set to be complete by year end in Masson-Angers in the Gatineau Region.

HEXO serves the adult-use market under the HEXO brand, while continuing to serve its medical cannabis clients through the well-known Hydropothecary brand.

“HEXO is growing and that’s why were here and excited to be here,” Miron said. “Five years ago this started in a 150 sq. ft. basement that two 29-year-old brothers-in-law got together and started to build a business and here we are today with multiple locations. This will be our first outside of Quebec. It means expansion, it means the future of the industry and it means more jobs.

“Once we get up to full speed we anticipate 200 jobs, but things move fast, the company’s growing, who knows where we go from there. I mean we’re looking at growth in all sorts of different places and different sorts of components of this industry and sector, but it’s 200 jobs for now and who knows where it goes. The sky is really the limit,” Miron said.

“Right now we’re completing construction on a million sq. ft. building in Masson-Angers where we grow the product and that will bring us up to about 1.3 million sq. ft. of production capacity. What we need is space to transform that, package that and to get it out there and that’s a big part of what this Belleville facility will be for us,” he said.

While in the area Miron also took the opportunity to visit Loyalist College Wednesday to see its new Cannabis Applied Science Course, the only one of its kind in Canada.

“So we met with Loyalist College, had a nice lunch with the president (Ann Marie Vaughan), and a number of their deans and faculty staff. I spoke to the cannabis program students, a really great program, lots of enthusiastic students and got a tour, got to see it, it’s growing, it’s growing quickly and I think there’s potential there for them to be a great partner for us,” Miron said.

“And that’s what we’re really looking for, we’re looking for partnerships and we’re looking to be an active member of the community,” he said.

A recent partnership with Molson Coors to create non-alcoholic, cannabis-infused beverages is just the beginning.

“What we’ve done with Molson Coors is taken our proven ability to produce product, to not just grow it, but to extract it and to be able to put it into existing brands and to be able to distribute that, again all of these different components, and it’s not just with Molson. We fully intend to partner with many other Fortune 500 companies that we’ll be able to do the same thing, leveraging our inputs and our intellectual property and put our inputs into other existing Fortune 500 brands and again to be able to offer that full suite of products right across not just Canada but globally.

As for the types of jobs that will be available at HEXO, Miron said, “As the building comes together for us it’s going to be maintenance, facilities, some cleaning and then as we grow and we look to the spring when we get this building operational there’ll be things like logistics, warehousing, more security, IT, we’re looking for finance and accounting and whatever else. There will be a lot of equipment in there, so there will definitely be some lab coat jobs.”

“It’s a brave new world, so bringing it to the forefront of society and this societal shift we’re going through is quite the experience and I think that’s why we put so much emphasis on quality, that’s why we put emphasis on credibility, we’re very proud of what we do, but we’re also very proud of how we do it,” Miron said. “Cannabis is still a challenging conversation for some and I think we’re going to change a lot of people’s minds.”

There’s a lot of research that still needs to be done, and art of that process is understanding

tmeeks@postmedia.com