MOORHEAD – Construction on Minnesota’s first off-reservation adult-use cannabis dispensary is well underway in Moorhead and if all continues to go smoothly, the White Earth Nation could open it sometime in March, the head of the tribe’s cannabis operations told The Forum.

Zach Wilson, CEO of Waabigwan Mashkiki LLC, said compacts between the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa and the state should be completed in the next couple weeks.

The dispensary will be in the former JL Beers building at 2902 U.S. Highway 10.

“Things are going along quickly. Construction and all that is underway and we’re making a lot of headway there (in Moorhead),” Wilson said Friday, Jan. 24.

The dispensary will sell cannabis flower (smokable buds plucked from a flowering marijuana plant) and pre-rolled cannabis cigarettes, he said.

Anna Paige / The Forum

The tribe is also installing extraction equipment in the facility to take cannabis biomass and turn it into CBD oils, tinctures and other desired cannabis compounds.

Some of those compounds are used to make cannabis gummies (under the brand name Souree), cannabis distillates for vaping cartridges, and live resins.

“Everything we will be selling is grown in Minnesota and grown on the reservation,” Wilson said.

The only thing to be sold at the dispensary that is not made on the reservation is a beverage line called Minobii, which is Ojibwe for “drink and be merry,” Wilson said.

Minobii is also Minnesota-made, he said.

Negotiations with the state of Minnesota for the tribe to open off-reservation dispensaries haven’t been tough, but they have been painstaking, Wilson said.

“It’s been tedious, to say the least, but not strenuous,” he said

The White Earth Nation will be the first of the state’s tribal nations to open an off-reservation dispensary, he said.

Anna Paige / The Forum

“This will be a pretty historical opportunity. It will be the first adult-use cannabis dispensary in the state,” Wilson said. “We will absolutely be the first (tribe) to do so.”

Wilson said there will be more than 30 employees working at the dispensary. He added that it has been a pleasure to work with Moorhead city officials and the police and fire departments.

“Just getting it open is exciting,” he said. “We’re happy about supplying jobs to the area.”

The White Earth Nation opened its on-reservation marijuana dispensary in August 2023 in Mahnomen. The reservation’s dispensary is across from Shooting Star Casino, Wilson said.

The White Earth Nation bought and repurposed a chip factory for indoor marijuana production, and it has greenhouses and about 10 acres of land under cultivation for cannabis. “So, right now we have a very large footprint. We’ve got a lot of great products and flower coming to the market,” Wilson said last year.

Anything the tribe sells off the reservation will have to meet state regulations, Wilson said.

He said the tribal cannabis regulatory commission “is very stringent on what we do, just as much, if not more, than the state.”