How Mojo Got Started

Mojo started with the pieces of a plan we thought we could count on. Then circumstances changed abruptly, and the future Angela and I had been working toward was gone. We were left trying to figure out what we could salvage and what the hell we were going to do next.

By December 2020, we were in a state-licensed home kitchen with about five recipes, building a company from what we still had. Part necessity, part belief in what we were making, part wanting a little more control over our own lives. We decided to make a go of it in the middle of a pandemic, which added a certain flavor to the uncertainty.

I came from the restaurant industry, with an interest in food science and about five years of experience in cannabis. Angela came from the medical field. She’d seen people suffering and wanted to explore other ways she could help. In 2018, she started growing cannabis with me and learned about the industry and edible production from there.

When we started Mojo, we both did a little of everything. Production, packing, deliveries, finding accounts. I leaned more toward growth and expansion, but if something needed doing, whichever one of us was available did it. We were learning how to run the business while trying to bring enough work through the door to keep it going.

We bootstrapped all of it. Whatever we could put back into the company, we did. In 2021, we remodeled our basement into a commercial kitchen and hired our first employees. By late 2022, we’d outgrown that and moved into our current facility in Morrill.

It happened in baby steps, although it rarely felt slow. We’d get one thing figured out, grow a little, and find out what the next problem was. Having more work than we could handle was a good problem, supposedly, but we still had to figure out how to handle it.

As we hired people, we started thinking more about what we wanted working here to look like. We’d wanted independence and a better life for ourselves. It made sense to consider what the people joining us wanted out of their lives, too.

We chose a facility closer to our staff. We put money into pay and brought on help earlier than we probably should have. A four-day workweek mattered to us, and we’ve worked to keep it. We wanted people to have enough time away from work to do something besides recover from being at work.

We kept coming back to the fact that we could decide how this company operated. That freedom was one of the reasons we’d wanted our own business, and we wanted to make use of it.

Sometimes that meant spending money before it felt comfortable. Sometimes it meant taking a complaint seriously enough to change a process. Sometimes it meant admitting that something we’d been doing for months was unnecessarily complicated and nobody could remember why.

We’ve made plenty of mistakes. Being personally invested in an idea doesn’t make it a good one, which is an irritating thing to keep learning when they’re your ideas.

A lot of what we’ve learned has come from the shops and patients themselves. People wanted softer gummies, different flavors, and higher-dose options. Shops came to us with requests and suggestions that sent us down R&D rabbit holes we hadn’t planned on. Some of those ideas were pretty wild. Working through them led to products that are now staples in our lineup. When we look at what we make today, we can trace a lot of it back to somebody asking, “Have you ever thought about trying this?”

That feedback has shaped the business right alongside the work happening in our kitchen. People have told us what they wanted, what needed improving, and what they thought we might be able to pull off. We’ve learned a lot by taking those conversations seriously.

Angela and I were there at the beginning, but getting out of that first kitchen took people giving us a chance, coming back, joining the team, and speaking up when we needed to hear something.

That’s the part we want to hold onto as we grow. We know what it took to get here, and how much of it depended on other people. We’re proud of what we’ve built. We’re still working on it. And we want the people who’ve been part of it to feel good about being part of it, too.