High Achiever Joyce Cenali: “Cannabis Helps Me Every Day”
For Joyce Cenali, smoking weed was a gateway — to a new career. She not only cultivates cannabis in California but also nurtures and mentors other founders.
As Chief Operating Officer of Sonoma Hills Farm, Joyce manages the first OCal-certified growing operation in California, where she works with more than 100 dispensaries and numerous collaborators. She’s also a partner and COO at Big Rock Partners, a strategic advisory firm that serves cannabis operators and investors. And of course, she’s also the co-founder of the Cannabis Media Council, which makes her the ideal subject for our first High Achiever feature, where we highlight successful people who also use cannabis.
“Cannabis helps me every day,” says Joyce. “Usually to quiet the constant churn of thoughts in my head, sometimes to energize me to cook a beautiful meal, and often to spark different thinking and strategy.”
Keep reading to learn about Joyce’s journey, how she got here, and her hopes for the future.
CMC co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Sonoma Hills Farm, Joyce Cenali.
How long have you used cannabis?
I’ve been using cannabis for 30 years.
What’s your cannabis routine? How and when do you consume cannabis?
I smoke weed nearly every day — usually from the afternoon into the evening and often to spark an evening work session to write or jam out a ton of emails. I’m pretty old school and love rolling my own joints, though I consume in every form: edibles, bevvies, topicals, concentrates, and vapes. Still, my daily ritual is a simple joint, and I use topicals on my aging bones almost every day.
Tell me how you got your start in the cannabis industry.
I’ve been growing cannabis at my home in San Francisco since 2004, when a good friend from Dublin gifted me a one-light setup for my closet. In 2012, I took my first formal steps into cultivation, partnering with a master grower to launch a collective grow in the Sierra region. We celebrated wins — including an Emerald Cup award — but as Prop 64 rolled out slowly in that part of the state, we eventually chose to cease the project.
Along the way, I co-chaired Sonoma County Women Grow, as my wife and I built a life between San Francisco and Sonoma starting in 2014. By 2015, I left my last tech job to step fully into cannabis, joining the stellar team at Big Rock Partners, where we invested in and mentored dozens of early founders in California and Nevada, including Vertosa, Cannacraft, Solful, Garden Society, Pharmacann, Henry’s Original, Kikoko, Mendi, Sava, and Octavia Wellness to name a few.
“I wish more people would open their eyes to the deep and enduring history our country — and our planet — share with this plant.”
What began as a passive investment in Sonoma Hills Farm evolved into something much deeper; our core team became the lead operators upon landing the first license in unincorporated Sonoma — a recognition of our passion for cultivating the best expression of this plant from an epic terroir and building a top agrotourism destination.
My lifelong commitment to this work also led me to co-found the Cannabis Media Council alongside Amy Deneson, where we strive to give operators — both small and large — a seat at the table in shaping how this plant is represented in advertising and media.
Tell me a little about your role/company?
As COO, I lead our post-cure production team and oversee the processes that bring our cannabis products to market — from building standard operating procedures (SOPs) to aligning products for release.
I manage sales, oversee product setup on our distribution partner’s Nabis platform, and cultivate partnerships with more than 100 dispensaries and numerous collaborators, supplying the cannabis behind a wide range of third-party brand products. Recent collaborations include Kiva’s Lost Farm Pink Jesus Strawberry Chew, Blue Sage topical healing creams, Big Pete’s Pink Jesus cannabutter, and dompen live resin carts.
In addition, I serve as our controller, overseeing accounts payable and receivable, and I manage compliance relationships at both the county and state level and oversee our Metrc track and trace interface.
“What drew me in was a lifelong love for this plant and a deep belief that access to her never should have been taken from us.”
What do you wish more people understood about cannabis?
I wish more people would open their eyes to the deep and enduring history our country — and our planet — share with this plant. The fact that stigma persists is baffling to me and speaks to the power of decades-long media and policy campaigns that have shaped public perception.
For thousands of years, hemp and cannabis were integral to daily life. Cannabis has long been a trusted source of wellness and anxiety relief. Even our founding fathers — and their partners — grew hemp; at one point, some farmers were required to cultivate it, and taxes could actually be paid with hemp. How did we let ourselves drift so far, and why are we still drifting?
Shout out to Hempitecture, who recently supplied hemp wool to insulate my basement; I’m thrilled to see products like theirs emerging on the industrial side. Though far removed in use case, industrial products remain closely tied in plant lineage to what we’re growing at Sonoma Hills Farm, to the work of CMC members, and to the broader regulated cannabis community. Together, we’re reclaiming this plant’s rightful place in the modern conversation.
What cannabis-related issue keeps you up at night?
Consumers deserve access to safe and effective products. Yet, despite legalization, the market remains flooded with inferior and unverified options. Well-meaning, educated people across many states, including my home state of Georgia, often reach out to me, assuming these readily available products are legitimate and safe to consume. It’s challenging to build in an already overtaxed and heavily regulated industry while others flood the market with unchecked alternatives.
On top of this, we face a severe lack of access to essential support systems — from fair banking and insurance to critical infrastructure and resources that most other industries can rely on. I have a great deal of respect and patience for regulators, especially at the local level, but there’s no clear accountability for measuring progress or sustaining the legal market.
“Consumers deserve access to safe and effective products. Yet, despite legalization, the market remains flooded with inferior and unverified options.”
Meanwhile, the industry is slowly bleeding out as state and federal regulators continue to demand compliance and revenue while offering little understanding, support, or meaningful action to help the businesses they oversee survive.
And when we do try to share our now legally regulated, personal stories — from the businesses we’re building to the incredible products we’re releasing — we remain heavily restricted in how we can reach consumers. Most modern and traditional media outlets act as gatekeepers, often exploiting the industry while still denying us fair access.
As technology advances to address censorship and improve traceability — giving us confidence that the audiences we reach are appropriate and verified — cannabis advertising remains stuck in reverse, often losing hard-won ground instead of moving forward. There are, of course, some forward-thinking media companies that are seeking to interact with cannabis consumers, and the CMC continues to seek those stewards and spotlight them, but the vast majority are still due for enlightenment.
What do you like most about working in the cannabis industry?
Before entering cannabis, I worked in both the tech and music industries — fields where I sometimes found passion and other times financial stability, but never both. My hope is to finally align those two in cannabis, though admittedly for pretty much all of us, cannabis has been a loss leader so far.
What drew me in was a lifelong love for this plant and a deep belief that access to her never should have been taken from us. Her prohibition was, in many ways, an early echo of Citizens United — a calculated effort by white male politicians to stigmatize minorities and suppress a plant with the power to benefit wide swaths of Americans, both personally and economically.
I’ve always been a rule follower, and the transition from Prop 215 to full legalization in California gave me the framework and confidence I needed to step into this work with integrity and transparency, but I will say that is getting harder and harder with the lack of support we have.
That all being true, as someone who has spent her life navigating the walls of patriarchy, I find purpose in waking up each day and contributing to a truly revolutionary moment in bringing this industry into the light.
