After Winning Cannabis Awards in the Shadows, Growlytics Is Ready to Shine

Few cannabis connoisseurs know about Growlytics, but the award-winning cultivation in northwest Denver is finally ready for the spotlight.

While Growlytics supplies about forty Colorado dispensaries with cannabis flower, most customers wouldn’t know that they’re buying strains that have set terpene records and taken multiple first-place prizes for potency. With businesses no longer able to fill cash registers on the novelty of legal pot, though, branding has become vital in the commercial cannabis space, and Growlytics is just starting to take on that challenge, according to owner John Dean.

Dean moved to Colorado from Maine in 2016 to launch a lobster-roll food truck, but the venture didn’t work out. Looking for a trade with more elbow room, Dean jumped on an opportunity to own a legal cultivation in Denver’s Sunnyside neighborhood. The first Growlytics plants began sprouting in 2019, but the harvests really began blooming in 2020, Dean says, when he found his head grower, Edriss Floyd.

Since 2020, Growlytics has been a regular participant in the Grow-Off, a cannabis cultivation competition in which licensed growers around Colorado are all given the same mystery plants. After harvesting those mystery plants, each grower submits buds to a state-licensed laboratory to measure the yield, THC potency and content of terpenes, which are the aromatic compounds responsible for the plant’s flavor.

In three years of participation in the Grow-Off, Growlytics has won six awards in all, including two first-place finishes for potency, a first-place and competition record for terpene content, and a handful of second and third-place awards.

“We started winning awards when Edriss showed up,” Dean points out. “There’s definitely a correlation to it.”

A former college basketball player from Missouri, Floyd was relatively fresh into cannabis after switching careers, just like Dean, when the two met. He’d signed with a Tunisian team in 2014, but political protests and unrest in that country at the time eventually canceled the team’s season. That was his last shot at basketball, Floyd says.

“I was depressed for a few years, because my whole life, I thought I was going to play ball. It just didn’t pan out, but that’s because I didn’t put the work in. I was partying and not practicing enough,” he recalls. “I wanted to make my mom proud, but I wasn’t doing enough at the time.”

Dealing with a mixture of professional disappointment and personal depression, he moved to Colorado the same year that his basketball journey ended, to see if his basement-gardening hobby could turn into a job. He worked with a few commercial growing staffs before getting a chance to run point at Growlytics, and that’s when “things really starting coming together,” he says.

Embracing data analysis and conducting constant LED lighting experiments, Floyd and his one-person growing staff have turned a pair of flower rooms into trophy factories – or championship belt factories, since that’s what the Grow-Off gives to winners. None of those awards have been for yield, however, which Dean and Floyd are keen on improving…but also somewhat proud of.

“For a while, it was who can grow the most, not who is growing the best. For me and John, though, it can always be better,” Floyd notes.

The two are very proud of their Hype Train, Space Queen, Spritzer and Wookie Monster strains, and are currently running about two dozen more strains from breeders like Dark Horse Genetics. But even with a strong pedigree and interesting backstory attached to Growlytics, the average dispensary customer sees its flower as one of many indistinct weed jars on the store shelf.

“As far as being a known entity and being compared to companies that have been here since the beginning, that would give us some validation to what we are doing here,” Dean explains. “I think it’s important to start getting the name out there. If I can get Growlytics in the same conversations as Veritas, Cherry and Bloom, people will see that our cannabis is just as good.”

Growlytics is preparing pre-packaged flower with its own logo in an effort to start building a loyal customer base, a marketing tool that brands like 710 Labs and Green Dot Labs have effectively used to build strong followings around their strain drops. The company has also partnered with Kaviar, a producer of pre-rolled joints, to provide kief for the brand’s popular line of infused joints. Those championship belts from the Grow-Off appeared at Spannabis, a popular international cannabis event in Spain, earlier this month, and are currently hanging inside Denver dispensary and Growlytics retailer Herbs 4 You.

“We don’t have room for mistakes here, and we rely heavily on each other. There are just four people working here, including myself, and we never take the foot off the gas,” notes Dean, who is currently trying to get a foothold in mountain towns along Interstate 40. “I’ve only lost one account in my entire time here.”

For Floyd, pushing Growlytics further goes deeper than professional accolades, though those don’t hurt. One of a small handful of Black head growers in Colorado’s cannabis industry, he’s aware of the mark he’s making inside and outside of the cultivation, which has helped him move on from a past dream.

“I had to look in the mirror and be real with myself. Dedication is what changes you. This has been important to my healing and knowing that things were going to be okay,” he says. “I got to bring my mom in here, and she was blown away.”

After smelling a cured batch of Growlytics’ Hype Train or Spritzer, you might be, too.