Tilton cannabis dispensary now open; cultivation center construction underway

Sep. 21—TILTON — Vermilion County's second cannabis dispensary is now open.

Parkway Dispensary opened Friday, Sept. 15, at 2 Donna Drive, off Illinois 1, in Tilton.

It had a soft opening Friday and Saturday. An official grand opening will be Saturday for the dispensary and the two other businesses of the 14,500-square feet building. The site also includes Molly's Joint, cannabis consumption lounge with couches and tables and chairs; and a bar/restaurant area with video gaming machines and an outdoor patio and grass area for bands and food trucks.

A ribbon-cutting will take place at 1 p.m. Saturday, and there will be vendors who will showcase their dispensary products, music on site starting at 6 p.m., food trucks and they also will be serving Backdoor Pizza from the kitchen.

"It's going to be a good time, food, drink, music, entertainment, the whole nine for those who want to come and join us," said Marshall Lionti, director of cannabis development for Offutt Development.

Hours for the dispensary are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.

"That's our initial expectation," Lionti said, adding that they could tweak the hours as needed.

Hours for the consumption lounge and restaurant/bar will be 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Molly's Joint is named after Paul Offutt's deceased wife who lost her battle with cancer in May 2022. It was her vision, with Paul, to be part of the cannabis development scene with the dispensary and cultivation center. The logo for the business is Molly's signature, in tribute to her. The building also has plaques in her dedication.

There also is a memorial statue in front of the building depicting Donna Offutt, Paul's first wife who passed away, who worked with Paul on numerous development projects and Julius W. Hegeler II, recognizing his philanthropy.

Lionti said as they brought Parkway Dispensary online, they wanted to add a consumption lounge and that's when Molly's Joint was formed. They branded the lounge and event space under the name Molly's Joint.

Lionti said this is only about the sixth cannabis consumption lounge to open its doors in Illinois.

"It's really new in the state of Illinois," Lionti said.

"We want to provide a social atmosphere where people can come enjoy cannabis, similar to a bar," he said. "Everybody's very familiar with going to get a drink after work. Not many places in public allow the consumption of cannabis, so this actually is one of those places where we accept it."

On the restaurant/bar side, someone can order food and drinks. They will have video gaming machines in there shortly.

It will be a restaurant/bar feel in that area, and then the VIP lounge, relaxed experience feel in the consumption lounge, Lionti said.

The businesses will have about 50-60 employees once fully staffed. Currently there are about 30 with the dispensary, 15 with the bar/restaurant and a handful to be working in the lounge.

"It's quite a bit of jobs that we've created here for Tilton," Lionti said.

He said the Village of Tilton supported them through the entire process. A village fund helped support the development of the dispensary.

A resident, Luke Ahring, addressed the Tilton Village Board in July with community concerns including the cannabis facility not being presented to residents. The board had a special meeting in March where it voted 6-0 for the dispensary, grow facility and consumption lounge.

Parkway and Offutt Development officials had hoped to open the adult-use cannabis dispensary by early August. It's not too far past that goal.

"We definitely hit the whole shot to develop this. You know five months ago, this was just dirt and weeds," Lionti said of the property's groundbreaking. "To get it all done in the amount of time that it happened, we're all pretty pleased."

There were no construction delays really, he said, about moving through a project of this size pretty quickly.

He said Parkway Dispensary is the flagship attraction of what they're trying to bring people to the site for. To support that, they also have the consumption lounge as well as the restaurant/bar in the strip mall with three separate operating businesses.

Visitors come in one central area and can go through three different doors inside the building to go into each of the businesses. The east side has the dispensary, center the lounge and west side the restaurant, bar.

"Currently the dispensary is open for business. We are receiving customers from just general flow of traffic," Lionti.

Their first sales were on Friday, and it's pretty exciting, pretty fresh, he said.

He said there's a small overlap in some of the product offerings that may be able to be found elsewhere, but a lot of the product is exclusive to this location.

Public access to the lounge and bar will come on Saturday.

The dispensary was issued its adult-use dispensing organization license on Monday, Sept. 11. A few days after that Parkway Dispensary started receiving product into the vault and the following day, Sept. 15, it had its first sales.

The dispensary will have an express window that will be going live this week before the grand opening. A customer can place an order online, have the order ready for pick up and if someone needs a hands-on experience of a budtender to guide them through the sale, employees are there to assist. Budtenders are medical or recreational cannabis dispensary employees who assist customers with their purchases.

Lionti said Parkway's operations are different than Danville's Sunnyside Dispensary's big open check-in area where you can see products, merchandise and budtenders.

At Parkway, they split that experience into two different components, where there's a first welcome area and express pickup and then the budtender experience is through a secret little entrance.

There's a secret door that looks like a bookcase that leads to the point of sale for cannabis products with the budtenders.

"It'll be a more personal experience with that transaction, kind of a private room where those transactions are occurring," Lionti said.

"On top of that, we also wanted to expand from just a basic retail experience to really create a destination, and that's where the consumption lounge and the restaurant/bar kind of add on to what has been offered in other locations locally and before this," Lionti said.

With a purchase in the dispensary, the customer is given access to the consumption lounge for the day as kind of a cross-promotion. There also will be monthly and annual memberships for the consumption lounge that comes with additional perks. There will be VIP couches and nice seating, in which there will be online reservations for the seating for annual memberships. Annual members also will be given discount prices on events throughout the year.

The lounge will have merchandise on display and product display screens, paraphernalia available for rent and purchase, a projector to have sporting and other events and karaoke and movie nights.

In addition to the three suites for the businesses, there's about 22,000 square feet of lawn area that's fenced in on the building's north side for future events, such as food truck shows, car shows, concerts and other events. No events are on the calendar yet, as they are looking to engage with the community on events.

Also, the village looks to extend Donna Drive to Ross Lane for another entrance and exit to the site. An easement hearing was conducted on the plans recently, and the extension could be constructed in the next few months.

Walls also were going up this week in the building shell east of Parkway Dispensary for Redemption Botanicals' cannabis cultivation center.

Offutt Development is developing out the inside for the cultivation facility which is under different ownership and a different license.

The craft grower applicant name is Green Card Veterans of Broadview/Redemption Botanicals Group LLC doing business as Redemption Botanicals.

Parkway Dispensary will be purchasing product from that cultivation site.

They hope to get plants inside the building by the beginning of December.

"It's a pretty short run between here and there. So, we're working pretty much around the clock to get that done," Lionti said.

They added 18,000 square feet to the cultivation site to accommodate the floor plan they're working to build.