A year is a long time to spend on pancake batter. At Wildberry Pancakes and Cafe, George Archos’s team did just that, refining the buttermilk mixture in its early years. Breakfast has an unforgiving review process of its own: people bring appetites, opinions and somebody who wanted to go somewhere else. A second order is useful evidence. A second visit is better.
Years later, Archos would become known for Verano, the cannabis company he co-founded and still leads. His earlier experience involved feeding people around Chicago. Some of the people who helped him do it would move into the new business alongside him. The distance between a breakfast kitchen and a cultivation facility looks considerable on a résumé. For employees who already knew one another, there was a shorter route.
That shared history gives his career its particular shape. Restaurants supplied experience in service, production and running physical locations. They also supplied colleagues. As Verano grew, the old hospitality questions remained close: who is doing the work, what experience is the customer having, and what would persuade that customer to come back?
A year in the pancake batter
Archos is the son of Greek immigrants. He worked in family restaurants with his father as a child, an early introduction to a trade in which the owner’s ambitions eventually have to fit on a plate. He attended Loyola University Chicago, studying communications and philosophy. Corporate biographies date the start of his hospitality career to 2001.
Wildberry became one expression of that background. By 2006, its Libertyville restaurant seated 220 people, with a coffee kiosk near the entrance serving commuters and those waiting for tables. There is something pleasingly practical about selling coffee to people waiting for your breakfast. Even the queue had a job.
Other ventures followed. Westwood Tavern in Schaumburg and the South Loop’s Scout Waterhouse and Kitchen put him into different versions of the restaurant business. The Scout was planned with partners Chris Bravos and Jeff Wolff, with a large beer selection, private party space and plenty of televisions. The settings varied; each required the small decisions that let a roomful of customers enjoy themselves at the same time.
His professional background also included logistics and coordinating freight deliveries. Taken together, these were businesses with physical consequences. Food has to arrive, staff have to be ready, and a good plan has to survive a busy day. Those experiences help explain why operations occupy so much space in his later conversations about Verano.
The people who changed uniforms
His cannabis story has several starting dates. In 2014, he founded Ataraxia, an Illinois cultivation business, and pursued one of the state’s early licenses. Operations began in 2015. Verano LLC was co-founded in September 2017. The public-company chapter arrived in February 2021. Compressing those events into a single founding date loses the years spent getting an actual operation running.
Along the way, some employees from Archos’s restaurants joined Verano. Former cooks and front-of-house staff took roles across cultivation, processing, retail and corporate operations. The move offered people who had worked in one industry a chance to build careers in another. It also meant Archos could start with relationships formed through work they had already done together.
The work itself required new knowledge. Knowing how to manage a dining room does not automatically teach someone to grow cannabis or operate within a new set of rules. What traveled was experience working as a team, alongside an opportunity to learn. That distinction makes the staffing story more interesting than a tidy claim that every business is secretly the same.
Looking back on the early operation, he recalled five people working long days in a 50,000-square-foot facility. A decade later, the workforce numbered roughly 4,000. He connected that change to the opportunity his father had sought in America. In his telling, building a business meant being able to create opportunities for other people, too.
The second visit is the business
Listen to Archos describe a store and the restaurant background becomes audible. In a 2024 conversation, he discussed lighting, music, the greeting and menu displays. The experience begins before the purchase. A customer has to enter, get comfortable and find a way through the choices. A room can make that process easier or more awkward.
“Training and creating that family vibe is very important to us and then providing them a great product.”George Archos · The CEO Series, 2024
Verano’s Cabbage Club gave that interest in returning customers a specific commercial form. Discussing the paid membership program in 2024, Archos described exclusive benefits and products for members. The proposal was to give frequent customers something distinctive to return for. Even its name sounds as though somebody from the kitchen wandered into the loyalty meeting.
The company also needed to sell beyond its own counters. In Illinois and New Jersey, Archos described wholesale as an important route to growth as other retailers opened. That meant building relationships with store teams and helping them understand the products. The customer-facing habit extended to the people responsible for somebody else’s shelves.
By 2020, he was already describing Verano in terms of its people, processes and products, with customer service and retail experience among its priorities. He emphasized running an efficient business and focusing on its own operations. The vocabulary is plain. Keeping those things working together across different locations is where the difficulty sits.
A restaurant named for two Evies
As cannabis took up more of his public identity, Archos kept a place in Chicago dining. In 2023, he teamed with restaurateur Nick Nitti and chef Phil Rubino on The Evie, taking over the former Bandera space on North Michigan Avenue. The restaurant’s name belongs to both his mother and his daughter. Family made it onto the sign.
The partners wanted to bring an independent, locally owned restaurant to a corridor with many chains and outside operators. Archos and Nitti had known each other for about two decades. Rubino brought experience from Chicago restaurants including Spiaggia and L2O. Their plans combined steak, seafood, sushi and bread baked on site, with local artwork in the dining room.
At approximately 7,000 square feet, the space represented another substantial physical operation. It also placed Archos back on a familiar street: he had Wildberry locations downtown and spoke as someone who lived and worked there. His case for the restaurant was tied to residents, tourists and the prospects of the surrounding neighborhood.
The Evie complicates the usual career ladder. Restaurants were still something he wanted to build after becoming a public-company CEO. The newer venture carried two family names and involved people with long Chicago histories. His earlier career continued to generate projects rather than merely furnish anecdotes for the next one.
The opening bell has a bill attached
Going public changed the demands on his time. Archos has spoken about investor relations and travel taking him away from the day-to-day operating work he enjoyed. A company that grows large enough to attract an audience also needs someone to keep talking to that audience. The calendar becomes another operational problem.
The expansion was considerable. Verano completed 15 acquisitions during 2021, and reported $938 million in revenue for 2023. Those figures describe a business far removed from its first Illinois facility. They also describe a founder’s job becoming dependent on people and systems operating well beyond any one room he could personally inspect.
By the second quarter of 2026, the financial picture offered several measurements at once. Revenue reached about $218 million, up from about $208 million in the first quarter and $202 million a year earlier. Operating cash flow was about $31 million. The company also reported a net loss of about $13 million. A busy business still has to answer for what remains after its costs.
More through the door
Archos’s stated plans included further retail expansion, new products and strengthening the balance sheet. Verano was also preparing for a prospective U.S. exchange listing. These were objectives still requiring execution. The quarterly numbers made clear why expansion and financial discipline had to share the same conversation.
Back on the floor
Recent remarks return to the interaction inside the store. Describing a reset of hospitality and the customer experience, Archos emphasized training and personal connection. He wanted an efficient process that still left room for a conversation. Speed matters, but a customer should have a chance to be understood along the way.
He described looking at the people in place, the way the process works and whether a store carries the products customers want. Those questions are concrete enough to take on a visit. They also give employees something more useful to work with than a distant ambition expressed only in revenue.
The next stage includes unfamiliar work as well. Verano announced its first dedicated beverage brand, Easy Landings, in August 2026. In an October interview, Archos discussed preparing the Virginia operation for an anticipated adult-use transition while avoiding overbuilding. New formats and new demand bring further decisions about where to commit resources.
His old industry supplies a useful question for this stage of the business. Someone has arrived, looked around and made a purchase. What happens on the next visit? Archos has spent much of his working life arranging the people, products and rooms around that decision. Some of the breakfast crew came along to help.