MICHIGAN—The trimming room at Society C’s Lake Orion facility hums like a machine.
Dozens of workers line three long steel tables, heads down, hands moving with the kind of quiet precision that only comes from doing something over and over until it’s second nature.
Everyone is masked, gloved, and absolutely locked in.
Untrimmed weed goes into one bowl, trimmed goes in another, and the finished product moves down the line to a window where another team tags and tracks every bud.
Nobody wastes a motion. It’s efficient in a way that’s almost hypnotic to watch.
Pounds are bagged, dropped into bins, and loaded onto pallets bound for hundreds of dispensaries statewide. There are millions of dollars in product in this room at any given time.
This is Society C—one of Michigan’s largest and most decorated cannabis operations.
The 54,000-square-foot facility, tucked into an unremarkable building off Liberty Drive in Orion Township, stretches across nine indoor flowering rooms. With roughly 15,000 plants, the team here produces about 450 pounds a week, with an on-site processing lab handling concentrates and vapes. Their products are now sold in over 200 dispensaries statewide.
This looks like corporate cannabis. But the people running it have roots in Michigan’s caregiver market—and they’ll tell you that makes all the difference.
Built by caregivers
Natrabis—the parent company behind Society C—was founded by childhood friends Nick Simpson and Ben Puraj, Oakland County natives who spent time in California during the early days of legalization learning the trade, and Mike Thomas, a friend they picked up along the way.
All three came up through the caregiver market before breaking ground on the Lake Orion facility in 2020. The ribbon cutting was in 2021. The first harvest came six weeks later.
Running the grow day to day is Murant Delli, Society C’s director of cultivation and operations—and one of the more unlikely figures you’ll find managing 15,000 cannabis plants.
Delli is a physical therapist by training, a Wayne State University doctorate in hand. He graduated in 2019, built a career treating patients, and then watched the pandemic dismantle his plan. In the summer of 2021, he moved to Society C and hasn’t looked back since.
It’s a fun backstory. But when I asked Delli whether his physical therapy background actually translates to managing a cannabis grow—or is just a good icebreaker—he didn’t hesitate.
“Plants are alive,” he said. “We may not be healing, per se, but we’re definitely monitoring and keeping those plants as healthy as possible so they can produce to their full potential.”
It’s a perspective that’s shaped how Society C approaches the grow—methodically, obsessively, and with a level of attention that’s hard to maintain at this scale. The facility runs 24/7. Every one of those 450 pounds gets hand-trimmed. No shortcuts, no exceptions.
“It’s about doing whatever it takes to provide an excellent experience for our customer,” Delli said. “That’s really what the phrase ‘craft cannabis’ is all about, in my opinion.”
The word “craft” gets thrown around a lot in Michigan cannabis. With several hundred pounds produced a week, it’s a claim worth scrutinizing. But Society C has the receipts—four years of operation, consistent awards, 200-plus dispensary accounts, and a trimming room that never stops moving.
The receipts
The awards have helped.
Society C has racked up multiple High Times and Best in Grass awards over the years—including several for Gastro Pop, one of their flagship strains. Delli credits the public-judging format of those competitions for making the wins meaningful.
Consistency is the other word that comes up when you ask about what sets them apart from other brands. Everything is always the same quality, the same experience, harvest after harvest.
Every strain in rotation has to clear a specific internal checklist. That includes bag appeal, terpene profile, yield, and—reluctantly—THC percentage.
“I hate that this is a thing,” Delli said. “But being that this market is so driven on THC percentages, a little bit of that has to go into the checklist.”
Not every strain survives. Phil Lampron, who runs post-harvest operations, got wistful talking about Ambrose Sour—a “gorgeous” strain with great effects that just couldn’t clear the THC bar. Spritzer also won a High Times Cup and still got retired; it was too unwieldy to grow at scale.
“Wonderful terpenes. Wonderful effects. Beautiful strain,” Lampron said.
But in Michigan’s cannabis market, beauty isn’t always enough.
Still standing
One thing worth addressing: Nathan Mathers—Eminem’s half-brother—works at Society C in a cultivation role. He wasn’t present during my visit and the team didn’t surface his name unprompted. And to clear up the Reddit rumors: Eminem has no affiliation, investment, or involvement with the company. Consider this the first time that’s been confirmed on the record.
Now, back to the weed.
Michigan has roughly 900 licensed cannabis growers right now. Some of them won’t survive.
Major multi-state operators with deep pockets have already packed up and left the state. Prices have cratered. The market is brutally, almost comically, oversaturated. And Society C has been sitting in the middle of it for four years, holding a price point of about $85 an ounce.
That’s not cheap enough to be a budget brand and not expensive enough to be on the top shelf.
It is, as Delli puts it, “arguably the hardest lane to dominate” in the industry.
So why are they still here? Low turnover, long-tenured staff, above-industry-standard wages, and a team that by all accounts seems to genuinely like each other. The trimming room, for all its factory-floor efficiency, is full of people who have been with Society C since the beginning.
“We do this ’cause we love this,” Delli said. “For the love of the plant.”
The bottom line
Society C isn’t the flashiest brand in Michigan. They’re not chasing the ultra-premium solventless crowd, and you’re not going to find them in a Reddit thread about the “most exclusive” drop of the week. But what you will find is consistent, reliable, award-winning cannabis at a price point that doesn’t require you to do math before you buy an ounce.
The people behind the brand came up through Michigan’s caregiver market, built something that looks a lot like corporate cannabis, and have spent four years insisting that those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. The attention to detail—and the trimming room—backs them up.
READ MORE: 9 quick hits of cannabis news from across Michigan
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