Taylor Giovannini founded Oceanic Releaf in 2017 as a direct result of family experience. Her husband’s grandfather was suffering badly from arthritis and was reluctant to smoke because of his old-school ways. Giovannini made him a batch of brownies, which she says allowed him to walk again within a week. This opened Giovannini’s eyes to “ the magic of cannabis.”
At the time she was living in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador’s capital St. John’s, where she earned her business degree from Memorial University. After graduating, Giovannini moved back to the rural Burin Peninsula, where she was originally from, and bought a former fish plant. The abandoned facility that formerly made fish fillets for McDonald’s was retrofitted for cannabis cultivation, as well as the processing and manufacturing of Oceanic Releaf’s product line, which includes pre-rolls, edibles and flower.
In addition to online sales, Oceanic Releaf has nine retail stores across Newfoundland and is currently seeking approval from provincial authorities to market at other retail outlets in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In a partnership with the German company Cantourage, Oceanic Releaf recently started shipping flower to Berlin for sale in pharmacies across the Federal Republic. This is its indica-dominant Black Cookies strain, which Giovannini has found most effective in treating pain. The company also grows the sativa-dominant Lemon Diesel. This activity is breathing new economic life into Burin, where 100 jobs were lost with the closure of the fish pant in 2012. Oceanic Releaf now employs 40 at the facility, including some of the former fish plant workers, as well as another 40 at its retail stores, and plans to hire even more locals.
“I could see from personal experience that cannabis has healing properties, and I’m near the ocean and that’s what heals me, so that’s where we got the name,” Giovannini says. “We’re also revitalizing a community through this whole process, so it’s been pretty humbling and grounding. It was a small family, but now we’ve become a big family.”
