Two Retirees Create Marijuana Packaging Business in Colorado

Most businesses in the marijuana industry require a large investment to get started, but with lots of hard work and a great idea anyone can succeed in a thriving market. Two retired women are proof of just that after they started their child-resistant cannabis container company and filled an important need in the Colorado cannabis community. With the marijuana industry still new and growing, regulations often change, meaning the businesses have to adapt quickly to remain in compliance with local law, and thats exactly what these ladies have done. When regulations prompted for child-resistant containers, they started their business, Higher Standard Packaging, and took the product a step further with food safe FDA approved containers made out of milk jugs. Higher Standard Packaging never hired any new employees outside of founders Ms. Baker and Ms. Diner, and their family-owned delivery vehicle has made it easy to keep costs low and profits high. 

“We thought consumers would want to store their edibles or medicines in containers that were F.D.A.-approved to store food in,” said Ms. Diner, “so we looked into making them from recycled plastic milk jugs.”

They decided to start Higher Standard Packaging in the spring of that year, and since then, they have sold nearly seven million units of packaging to Colorado cannabis dispensaries and beyond.

The initial set of products consisted of plain white canisters in different sizes with child-resistant caps, made by manufacturing partners in California. To find customers, they cold-called more than 100 businesses, mainly in the Denver area, and visited them with samples and price sheets.

Within the first six months, the company began selling other items: tubes, child-resistant caps and more recently, child-resistant, single-serving barrier bags (made of heavy-duty plastic that requires scissors to open). But their mainstay remains plastic containers for flower — the term for dried marijuana that is ready to smoke.