Caleb Counts and the Long Road from Red Cups to Regulation

The first important room in Caleb Counts's cannabis career was not a greenhouse. It was a sales office. For roughly five years after college, Counts sold production homes around Sacramento, a tidy corporate occupation conducted just as the American housing market was preparing to misbehave. The work taught him a lesson that survived the crash: people remember how a business makes them feel, especially when the product is expensive and the decision personal.

When real estate weakened, Counts returned to a trade he already knew. He had sold cannabis as a teenager and through college at Chico State. Walking into a California dispensary to widen his customer base, he saw a busy counter, uneven flower, and service that seemed designed to move people along. The opportunity was almost impolite in its obviousness. In February 2009, he opened Fruitridge Health & Wellness in Sacramento, a shop he has described as about the seventh dispensary in the city.

Downtown already looked crowded to him, so Counts chose Fruitridge Road. He expected the surrounding neighborhood to understand both the product and the proposition. The bet was local, but the operating idea would travel: give customers time, treat vendors fairly, and place quality above sheer size. In a young industry with few familiar guideposts, online reviews became a rough navigation system. Counts paid attention. Customers returned. The shop acquired a reputation.

“I didn't care about being the biggest dispensary, just the best in terms of customer service.”Caleb Counts, recalling the Fruitridge opening

There is a comic modesty to this origin. The future co-founder of a company associated with elaborate genetics and expensive flower first found leverage in decent service. Cannabis culture supplied the mystique. Homebuilding supplied the manners.

The room across the street

Retail exposed a difficult truth: excellent service could not rescue unreliable supply. Counts approached one of the growers whose work stood apart and asked him to become a mentor. In 2010, they built a cultivation facility across from the dispensary. Half followed the mentor's proven method. Half was reserved for R&D, where Counts could try techniques he had encountered on cultivation forums.

It was an unusually literal division between respect and restlessness. One side said, learn the craft. The other said, question it. Counts still describes that split as foundational. Cultivation began as a way to keep the shelves supplied. Once the team gained access to sought-after genetics, it became the center of the company.

The method matured. Early phenotype hunts involved 50 to 75 seeds in red Solo cups, fast experiments kept small enough to avoid sacrificing much production. Internal selections carried “RC” for red cup. Later came analytical grading and private sessions in which samples wore serial numbers and tasters did not know the genetics. The goal was to prevent a famous parent or a confident colleague from bullying the senses.

Counts speaks about this process with the candor of someone who has seen his own opinion fail a test. Ego, he says, has to leave the room. The enthusiasts who helped shape cannabis culture still belong in the room, however. Their taste is data of a particularly human kind.

A partner with a different eye

Counts's route through legal cannabis was interrupted when federal pressure reached Sacramento landlords. The Fruitridge operation closed for a period. Luke Coleman, another local operator, had already noticed the shop because it looked considered rather than provisional. Coleman later brought Counts into a cultivation project. Each man recognized the other's useful imbalance.

Coleman had a sharper eye for elite flower and a feel for what enthusiasts wanted next. Counts understood the public-facing side: customer experience, business partners, and the government officials deciding what a legitimate operator should look like. When Collective Efforts reopened in Sacramento in the fall of 2013, the partnership took practical form.

Counts had also stepped into policy. Around age 29 or 30, he was elected president of the Sacramento Alliance of Collectives. He worked with the city as dispensary rules developed and later participated in work around cultivation rules. That experience gave the future company a habit of looking around corners. By the time California's adult-use market arrived in 2018, Connected had years of practice translating between counterculture and municipal procedure. It was useful bilingualism.

The dry cookie that could rap

A 2014 meeting with rapper and entrepreneur Berner at the San Bernardino Cannabis Cup opened a new chapter. Connected's predecessors licensed the Cookies name, cultivated related genetics, and became an important commercial supplier. Coleman placed a $72,000 bet to secure Gelato access. The clones arrived that spring. The relationship supplied rare material and a lesson in cultural distribution: a strain moved through growers and stores, but also through Instagram posts, studio sessions, lyrics, and the private recommendations of people with very public audiences.

Biscotti condensed those lessons into a plant. The team crossed Gelato 25 with South Florida OG and selected among early red-cup phenotypes. Berner helped choose the name. Counts's first reaction was wonderfully literal: biscotti struck him as a flavorless, dry cookie that required coffee. Then he heard the cadence. The word sounded good. It rhymed.

A Southern California delivery buyer who usually purchased one or two pounds suddenly asked for ten. Counts wanted to know what had happened. The Migos were buying all the Biscotti the service could find. Mentions followed in songs. Connected later counted more than 400 references to Biscotti in popular music. Marketing had become folklore with a beat.

“Genetics get out, and that's the nature of the game.”Counts on the limits of controlling living intellectual property

The Cookies partnership eventually ran its course, and Counts and Coleman needed an identity they controlled. “Connected” carried several meanings at once: the person with access, the relationship that gets something done, and the network of people who had helped the business survive. The brand formally launched in 2018. Its partnership with Alien Labs, led by Ted Lidie, gave the company another distinct genetic and cultural vocabulary.

Counts does not pretend collaboration is frictionless. He has discussed the end of the Cookies deal plainly, just as he credits Berner's role in naming and promoting Biscotti. He also accepts that living genetics resist perfect ownership. Clones escape. Breeders build on one another. A prized line becomes a parent to someone else's idea. Trademark lawyers can patrol a name; plants remain less obedient.

Four states, one difficult promise

Connected's next problem was scale. The company raised $25 million in 2019, followed by $30 million in debt and equity financing in 2021. It expanded from California into Arizona and Florida. In 2025 it announced an exclusive partnership with FLUENT to produce Connected, Alien Labs, and Smoken Promises at a 68,000-plus-square-foot indoor facility in Buffalo. The first New York packaging and shipments followed in early 2026.

Cannabis cannot simply roll across state lines like ordinary inventory. Expansion means reproducing a method with local facilities, rules, climate, teams, and partners. Counts frames the choice of a new market around appreciation rather than name recognition. A familiar logo can open the door. Only the product can keep it open.

That standard can make ambition sound almost cautious. Counts has spoken of looking at additional states, yet the public language keeps returning to the same condition: where will quality be valued, and where can the company repeat it? The restraint is important. Plenty of consumer brands can ship the original object. Connected must transmit knowledge.

The company has experimented with under-canopy lighting, expanded its breeding program, hired specialized genetics talent, and built a seed bank with more than 500 crosses. Counts once said he was excited to double the menu across Connected and Alien Labs. Variety, however, is only impressive when selection remains severe. Five hundred possibilities are not five hundred products. The point of the system is to say no with increasing accuracy.

Still listening at the counter

Counts's story is often told as a passage from the legacy market into a regulated one. That is accurate, though it misses the stranger continuity. The teenager, the home salesman, the dispensary owner, the policy organizer, and the chief executive all perform versions of the same task: notice what people want, understand the rules of the room, and find a reliable way to deliver.

The details around him have grown more sophisticated. Red cups became analytical scorecards. One Sacramento shop became a multi-state operation. Primitive review sites gave way to social platforms and direct consumer data. The work itself remains stubbornly repetitive. A plant is grown. A group tastes it without the benefit of a famous name. A customer buys it. The response returns to the grow room.

There are flashier ways to describe a cannabis company. Counts has encountered most of them. His useful idea is the one that survived every era: quality is a conversation, and the customer gets the final reply.