You must be 21+ to enter. This site shares information about cannabis products available only to adults through licensed Colorado dispensaries.
From budtender to lab owner without a dime of outside money. This is what happens when you can't afford the easy way — and refuse to quit.
Most brand pages are written to sell you something. This one is written to somebody: the budtender on a slow shift, wondering if there's more than the counter. That was our founder in 2011.
Everything below actually happened — the trophy, the eviction, the $7,000, the crash. If you take one thing from it, take this: the constraints aren't the reason you can't. They're the recipe.
Ryan started as a helping hand with the Allgreens group — a family-run business owned by Sean Foote and Luke Rehurek. And Ryan was family too: Sean was engaged to his sister at the time, and to this day they're brothers. When Sean and Luke bought the first medical dispensary license in Colorado, Ryan helped rebuild the grow and worked it, helped reopen the store — then took a spot behind the counter, budtending.
Family-run is where he learned the trade — and fifteen years later, family-run shops are still who White Mousse runs for.
When the shop would sell him shake, he ran it at home — hash for himself and his roommates, nothing more ambitious than that. Until he noticed his yields were coming in close to double what the store's trim was bringing back from their processor.
So the budtender walked into the office and told Sean and Luke straight: your numbers are wrong — you're probably getting robbed. Their answer wasn't a pat on the head. It was: go find a licensed facility and make it yourself.
Around the same time he pressed a batch of Original Cheese × Kong into the Secret Cup. Dropping off the entry, he caught a sneak peek of the competition and knew on the spot he was going to win. He did. The trophy was a heady rig. He still has it.
The entry looked like white chocolate mousse — and in the Allgreens breakroom, with Jess (@missgreenthumb), Luke's younger sister, White Mousse got its name. The logo was harder: every sketch of white mousse looked like a white poop emoji. So mousse became moose, and Ryan drew it himself — part Joe Camel, part Broncos, all melting moose. Retired now. Never forgotten.
Product hit the Allgreens shelf and the race was on. Cannabis 4 Health came asking for the same treatment on their trim, and from that day it was a non-stop snowball of expansion — until the first lab kicked him out to make room for a bigger brand. The search for a new home started the same day.
Closed-loop machines were becoming the standard, and he hadn't made enough to afford one. So the entire inheritance from his late grandma Leora — $7,000 — became a used ETS closed-loop machine, and that machine convinced Palmer Lake Wellness to let him run under their license.
Every gram of White Mousse since traces back to her.
In 2018, the saving paid off: Ryan bought into the Caregivers For Life lab as a partner — the move that finally put a rec license in his hands. In 2019 he doubled down and bought a dispensary and grow in Colorado Springs, staffed the lab to run itself, and went empire-building. In 2020 he bought his partner out. Nine years after the counter: his license, his walls, his name on the door.
Here's the part most brand pages would skip. While his focus was on the grow and the store in the Springs, the industry shifted underneath him: dispensaries stopped paying to have their in-house material processed — and the service model White Mousse was built on, the budtender making wax for the shops, crashed with it.
Sales slipped. The brand fell off. The thing he'd built from a home kitchen was dying while he commuted past it.
Burned out on the commute, he made the call: sold the dispensary and the grow, and came back to the lab. The rebuild started ugly — dramatic layoffs, down to one employee and himself, selling off old inventory to keep the lights on.
No investors. No rescue. The same move as always: start from what's left, and go.
The rebuilt lab needed two large-scale machines and two weren't affordable at $60–80k apiece. Old trick, bigger scale: peer-review one design, build two — that's COT, Champagne on Tap, running daily with zero bells and whistles, because the bells were never the point.
Today the solventless bench is in-house, the AIO lines run dialed and consistent, and a small crew runs the whole show under one roof — even the software running the lab was built in-house. From one employee and a pile of old inventory to 73 Colorado storefronts and counting. Some habits don't retire.
"Persevere the constraints.
Never give up."
If you're the budtender, the dreamer, the young entrepreneur reading this on a slow shift: the gap between you and this page is not talent, money, or luck. It's the decision to keep going after every no. We're proof.
