![]() Left to right: Kevin Kuethe Doug Hellyar, Lume President and COO Marlon Mallas, Lume’s general manager of cultivation and Thilo Savage, cultivation data specialist, whose hiring is a point of pride for Kuethe, as Savage developed the custom tools Lume uses to process and analyze the vast amounts of data it collects on its cultivation operations. He’s always moving the chains, and that kind of person is invaluable to have on a team, especially for an aggressive startup like we are-starting from a single retail store to what we are now,” he says. In fact, Kuethe’s top attribute is “his positive, can-do attitude,” says Lume President and COO Doug Hellyar. “When he’s like, ‘Hey, we’re doing this and we’re doing that, and this is going to be great!’ and the wheels are spinning really fast, and he talks fast, you’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow, okay. ![]() ![]() It’s infectious,” says Marlon Mallas, Lume’s Evart-based general manager. “When you meet Kevin, he likes to get people fired up about the possibilities of the future. The ‘Positivity’ Factorīeyond Kuethe’s hunger for learning, another character trait has helped him successfully oversee the Evart operation’s uber-rapid growth from a few to nearly 300 employees in just two years: He’s incorrigibly positive-and it’s contagious, according to those who work closest with him. Most recently, since Kuethe joined Lume four years ago, he has guided the design, buildout and launch of Lume’s 250,000-square-foot high-tech cultivation and solventless extraction facility in Evart, Mich., along with another 33 acres of outdoor cultivation that launched this spring and “another expansion garden in the works,” according to Kuethe. This insatiable appetite for learning has helped Kuethe thrive in his cannabis roles. When I find stuff I’m interested in, I just want to know everything.” “I used to spend nights at Barnes & Noble trying to read anything I possibly could on plant science. I remember just being obsessed,” he says. “It was all so exciting and so new to me. When Kuethe, now chief cultivation officer for Michigan-based Lume Cannabis Co., first worked in the legal cannabis industry, it was like learning to juggle all over again, albeit a mountain more complex. “I just try to find the best way to do it, whatever it is,” Kuethe says. (‘It’s Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream and Virgil’s root beer, by the way,’ he adds with a proud grin.) Well, for me, I was like, ‘There’s got to be the perfect combination of ice cream and root beer for the best root beer float.’ So, I would go out and buy every single vanilla ice cream and every single root beer, and combo them until I found the right one. Usually when people want a root beer float, they’ll go buy a root beer float, right? You get ice cream, root beer, you got it. “And I immediately thought about root beer floats. “I was recently thinking about this, and I was like, ‘God, I guess I do that with everything,’” Kuethe says. He was always juggling.”Īnd Kuethe’s incessant desire to excel at everything hasn’t waned as he’s grown up. “He would pick up any objects, even if they weren’t the same size or weight or shape. “Kevin juggled everything, anywhere he was,” says Lugthart. He asked the teacher to teach him how to juggle, and the teacher agreed. “He would practice tumbling even in the grocery store.”Īround that same time, he had a teacher who was a juggler. ![]() “He was tumbling all the time, everywhere and anywhere,” says Kim Lugthart, Kuethe’s mother. When Kevin Kuethe was 8 years old, he was enrolled in tae kwon do classes and learning to tumble.
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