FALL RIVER — Aura Cannabis, the latest company to receive the local approval needed to open a marijuana dispensary, closed Tuesday on the property where it will build its retail facility, and sales could possibly begin as early as October.
“We just closed on this property today so everything's good to go. In the next couple weeks we’ll submit our application to the state,” said Aura Cannabis President Jason Delamater.
Mayor Jasiel Correia II signed off on the company’s host community agreement and letter of non-opposition last month. Delamater said, pending license approval from the state, renovation of their space at 353 Mariano Bishop Boulevard could begin as early as July and would likely last 90 days.
“The building is pretty much good to go as it is now,” he said. “Best case scenario is we open in October.”
The building Aura Cannabis has closed on is a roughly 8,000-square-foot building that had been the former address of Corner Sleep Shop. Roughly 5,000 square feet of that space will be used for retail purposes.
Delamater said the company is also planning to open a cultivation facility on South Beacon Street in Fall River that would grow the cannabis sold at its proposed dispensary. Though the exact dimensions of that building have yet to be determined, it will likely range between 20,000 and 40,000 square feet.
Aura Cannabis is the 11th company to receive local permission to operate a recreational marijuana-related business in Fall River in the last year. Of those, eight are looking to open dispensaries.
When asked how his company might set itself apart from local competitors, Delamater said he was confident that it would be able to do so. However, he declined to elaborate specifically how Aura Cannabis would differentiate itself.
“There’s definitely a need to do that. We can’t give out everything yet, but I can say we’re going to change the way this industry is operating,” he said. “We have some things in place that we’re keeping close to the chest, but we’re going to create an experience that will make it hard for others to keep up.”
For the time being, Aura Cannabis has some ground to cover before it can keep up with the businesses further along in the process. Northeast Alternatives was the first dispensary approved for recreational sales earlier this year. Since then, two more businesses, Hope Heal Health and Greener Leaf, have been approved by the state’s Cannabis Control Commission for provisional recreational sales licenses.
Unlike many of the area’s other proposed and existing dispensaries, Delamater said Aura Cannabis would forgo medical sales and sell only recreational marijuana.