bcbusiness.ca nOVEmBER 2018 BCBusiness 29
T H E p E R F E C T I O N I s T
DAn sutton
founder and managing director,
Tantalus labs
from the big operations to your middle-
aged neighbour down the street who
grows a few plants and hawks the
extras for a profit, any entity that
grows cannabis and sells it is a mar-
riage of economics and agriculture.
so when dan sutton, an econom-
ics graduate from UVic, started looking
at getting involved in the cannabis
industry in 2012, he called on his
uncle, a 40-year veteran of B.C.'s
forestry industry who worked mostly
in greenhouses, creating genetically
uniform tree cuttings for planting.
"We have some of the most advanced
greenhouse technology and farming
specialists in north america here, and
it's not actually widely known how
leading-edge the B.C. greenhouse
industry is," sutton says.
Vancouver-based licensed producer
tantalus Labs put a lot of work into its
sunLab facility in maple Ridge, which
he calls "the first of its kind." sunLab is
an environmentally controlled green-
house, engineered to grow cannabis
using sunlight and rainwater.
for sutton, the privately held
(for now), 24-person (again, for now)
operation represents B.C. bud, and the
Vancouver native takes great pride
in heading a team made up almost
entirely of British Columbians. "But
then also, it's a huge responsibility. We
have to come correct with that product
and make sure people are looking at
tantalus and saying that's a great
representation of what B.C. bud is."
sutton believes that with
legalization, his product will rise to
the top of the many offerings in B.C.
and elsewhere in the country. that's
mostly thanks to tantalus's intensive
processes, he asserts. "Our differen-
tiator is just a thousand tiny decisions
that we've made over the course of the
life of our business," sutton says. "We
flower our plants a little longer, we run
our dry times really long–these things
of forgoing a mandate of maximizing
productivity to pursue a more quality-
oriented strategy." –N.C.
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