6. Cole Cacciavillani and Vic Neufeld
- Company: Aphria
- Website: https://aphria.com/
Cole Cacciavillani knew very little about marijuana. He had never smoked it and didn’t even know which part of the plant was even smoked. But in 2001 when medical marijuana was made legal in Canada, the industry piqued his curiosity.
One thing was certain for Vic Neufeld having grown up on a peach farm in Ontario – he never wanted to be a farmer – so he chose to become an accountant and worked for 21 years as a CEO of Jamieson Vitamins. As a final career move, Neufeld decided to take on one more challenge – farming marijuana.
“It was just something that excited me. It was again reaching out to patients, and in this case, not human nutrition, but still a lifestyle and an alternate treatment for certain medical conditions. So to me, it was a natural fit.”
Cacciavillani and his greenhouse partner, John Cervini, had experience growing plants in greenhouses, while Neufeld knew about the medical world through his days at Jamieson. After a year of trial-and-error growing marijuana to achieve pharmaceutical-grade, they found the best strains and a model that enabled them to produce it at a lower cost than other licensed producers.
Their company, Aphria, is now a publicly traded company on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange and is set to become one of the Cannabis titans in the industry.