The family-owned cannabis retail business Kush Connection earned unanimous approval from the Planning Board Monday night. Members voted to green light the new shop’s site plan one week after the first and only dispensary in Montclair departed for a new storefront in Wharton.
With a provisional license from the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission, and one of only three potential cannabis retail licenses allowed by the township in hand, the board’s approval was one of the few remaining hurdles to opening the new dispensary on a laundry list of requisite state and local authorizations.
“There are so many moving parts that we’re new to,” said Jake Kushner, who will head Kush Connection as its general manager. He and his parents − Patty and Steve − hope to be operational by year’s end in their location at 135 Valley Road in Montclair’s Frog Hollow neighborhood.
The timing is advantageous. Ascend, which had offered legal marijuana retail in the township since 2022, shuttered its location in Montclair on June 16 and has already opened its new storefront in Wharton while continuing to operate dispensaries in Fort Lee and Rochelle Park.
Yet, cannabis dispensaries are not like supermarkets. Customers will happily drive a town or two over to patronize a favored business based on prices, customer service and available products. With at least three dispensaries in Bloomfield ― a few minutes’ drive from Ascend’s former locale ― and another three in nearby Maplewood, it would be an overstatement to describe Montclair as a weed desert.
“It’s important that we make this an interesting destination,” said Patty, referring to the abundant competition across the region.
When describing his family’s vision for Kush Connection, the word “vibe” was rarely absent from Kushner’s lexicon. “When I look at [other] dispensaries, a lot of them feel like a CVS,” Jake said. “That’s when I thought, ‘How can we build something different?’ ”
Family in radio business
The young entrepreneur did not need to look any farther than his other family business: radio.
Patty, who broadcasts as Patty Steele, and her husband Steve, who’s professional surname is Kingston, met at a radio station in Pittsburgh, where Patty disc jockeyed during the overnight bloc and Steve was program director. The two have since worked at a number of New York stations, including WCBS and Z100.
“It was a match made in heaven,” Jake said of his parents’ vocation and cannabis. Nods to marijuana have been ever-present in American musical genres since the early 20th Century, from jazz to rock to hip-hop. “It’s intertwined into the culture,” he said. And so it will be intertwined with the menu, merchandise and interior design of Kush Connection.
Utilizing Patty and Steve’s cache of musical memorabilia, Jake likened the customer experience to “a green room backstage” at a concert, with posters and signed guitars hung along the wall. Branded tie-ins with musical artists for unique strains of the shop’s central product is a hope for the future, but ironing out those arrangements with popular musicians and growing the signature weed will take time, he said.
“It’s going to be about the store’s ambiance to start,” he said.
While Patty is the principal stakeholder in Kush Connection, Jake was its visionary. He’d gone to school in Boulder, Colorado, where dispensaries flourished in the industry’s early days. The idea of a new enterprise not yet besieged by corporate interests appealed to the young man.
Dispensary with musical motif
A chance meeting with Michael Grondahl, a co-founder of Planet Fitness, provided the inspiration for Kush Connection’s theme. “He said to me, ‘If you look at an industry and most of the businesses in that industry seem bland, do something different,’” according to Jake.
“Gyms back then were bland, white walls, they felt like a YMCA. He changed all of that,” he said of Grondahl. “He gave it a whole vibe.”
The dispensary, as currently envisioned, will span two floors. The ground floor will sell cannabis products, while the second floor will be a slightly separate shop with merchandise branded to fit Kush Connection’s musical motif, including a vintage juke box, and a lounge area. However, customers will have to keep the lids on their recent purchases, as Montclair currently forbids on-site consumption.
While the dispensary expects to be fully licensed for “adult-use” recreational sale, it will not honor patients with medical marijuana cards.
“The medical [approval] is a whole other process and way more expensive,” said Andy Sick, an attorney counseling the Kushners on their licensure.
With Planning Board approval, the family now awaits an annual operating license from the CRC and a certificate of occupancy from the township once the build-out is complete. Jake and his mother think the dispensary could open by late fall or winter of this year.
“But everything about this process is taking longer than I realized,” Jake said.
