AKRON, Ohio — Growing marijuana as a business was something Geoff Korff sort of fell into.

What You Need To Know

  • Medical marijuana growers are now able to apply to expand their businesses

  • Geoff Korff is the CEO of Galenas in Akron and says he will apply grow his business from 3,000 square feet to 6,000 square feet

  • The state of Ohio is also releasing an application for more dispensaries to open​

"I'm an attorney and I worked in a handful of other capacities. I was the president of a company before this, but I've always paid attention to the cannabis industry as its kind of grown up in other states and other markets," said Korff, the CEO of Galenas.

He opened his business, Galenas, back in 2019. Demand for his products continues to grow. ​In fact, it has grown so much that he's not always able to serve all of his customers.

"We have unfortunately had to kind of dial back some of the customers that we deal with simply because we don't have enough supply to go around. And we don't want to upset any of our customers in particular, but we also just can't adequately supply everybody because we're just perpetually out of inventory," said Korff.

The state of Ohio recently decided to allow the 24 licensed growers to apply to expand their allotted growing space. That's why Korff is planning to apply to expand his business from the 3,000 square feet he can grow in now to 6,000 square feet.

"So right now, we're working on finalizing all of our designs for the expansion and then we're going to take our designs and there's a couple of other things that we have to demonstrate for the sake of the state, you know, believing us that we do in fact need to expand. But we'll be getting that submitted as soon as possible," said Korff.

Korff has a level 2 cultivator license which means he can only grow in 3,000 square feet. Level 1 cultivators can grow up to 25,000 square feet of marijuana. Korff said he's happy the state has finally given the businesses the opportunity to continue to expand.

"Our hope is that we just continue to get treated just like any other industry. We don't need to be treated better but we definitely don't want to be treated worse either. We'd like to just be thought of as a regular member of the business community in Ohio and have the opportunities to kind of create this industry and going forward but build our individual businesses based on how good our products are and how good we are as individual businesses," said Korff.

The state has also released an application that will allow 73 more dispensaries to open in the state.