The woman-owned South Jersey company is building its cannabis business around hands-on cultivation, patient phenotype hunting, and a vertically integrated operation designed to keep the plant and the customer close.
Brute’s Roots is a South Jersey cannabis company with a simple proposition: keep the work close to the plant and keep the operation close to home. Founded by South Jersey natives Kelly Gatto and Jim DiNatale, the woman-owned company has built its business around cultivation, manufacturing, and retail rather than treating each step as a separate operation.
Romeo Dilla, wholesale manager at Brute’s Roots, says that structure lets the company “maintain quality at a hyper-specific level.” What happens in the grow can influence what gets made. What customers say about finished products can make its way back to the people producing them. And underneath it all is a cultivation operation where experienced growers still spend plenty of time worrying about roots, propagation, plant health, and which phenotypes are actually worth keeping.
That last part is where the operation gets particularly hands-on.
Brute’s Roots Starts With the Plant
The earliest stages of cultivation rarely get much attention once cannabis reaches a retail shelf. At Brute’s Roots, they get plenty. Dilla says the company’s passionate cultivators are what set its operation apart from other grows.
Tony, who manages the Mother Room and Propagation operation, is one of them. He has been growing for more than 30 years, and his history in cultivation predates regulated commercial cannabis. He still likes to show people where it started: a cell phone picture of an original sepia-toned film photo from his early days growing.
Other members of the team have committed to the field in a different way, by earning college degrees in cannabis science. The idea is not to choose between formal education and hands-on knowledge, but to put both in the same room and apply them from the beginning of the plant’s life.
That work starts with healthy roots coming out of propagation and healthy vegetative plants moving into the flower room, with the goal of getting the best possible expression from every strain. That philosophy becomes especially important when the company starts looking for its next standout phenotype.
Pheno Hunting Takes Patience
Pheno hunting sounds simple until the work starts piling up. A promising plant still has to prove itself. That can mean taking cuts, reflowering plants, evaluating them again, and deciding whether the traits that looked good the first time are actually worth preserving. For a commercial operation, the question isn’t simply which plant looks impressive. It’s which one can earn a place in the garden and continue to deliver.
“For the team it looks like a lot of care, patience and a keen nose,” Dilla says. Before a new plant enters the garden, the team needs a focused objective and a clear sense of what it is actually looking for.
The company’s most recent hunt centered on Red Lemons, a strain Dilla says he is especially excited about. “It took a long time to narrow it down to the selected pheno, and I think we did a killer job,” he says.
Most customers will never see that process. They see the finished flower. They don’t see the plants that were rejected, the cuts that needed another round of evaluation, or the time spent determining whether a promising candidate could repeat its performance.
That patience is part of what Brute’s Roots wants its cultivation operation to be known for, and it is where Tony’s decades of growing experience come into play.
The Grow Connects to the Larger Operation
Brute’s Roots’ cultivation philosophy also helps explain why the company built a vertically integrated business.
The company’s path ran through New Jersey’s emerging cannabis market. It entered the licensing process in 2019 as Greenhouse Wellness of NJ. After receiving approval in 2021, it began medical sales in 2023 and later expanded into adult use. The operation now includes a 35,000-square-foot cultivation and manufacturing facility, along with retail.
For Brute’s Roots, vertical integration means more than owning multiple pieces of the cannabis supply chain. It creates a shorter distance between cultivation, manufacturing, retail, and the people buying the finished products.
The team can make adjustments in the grow to accommodate new products as they emerge, while customer feedback from retail can travel back in the other direction. The same thinking applies to price. The company works product pricing backward with the goal of offering what Dilla calls “the cheapest flower anyone can find.”
Products Put the Feedback Loop to Work
Dilla points to the Crunch Berriez strain, Mafia Melts Gummies, and Mafia Wifes Pre Rolls as the products that best represent what Brute’s Roots does well.
The feedback loop shows up in product development, too. The company’s festive gummy flavors are one example. The team listened to customers and turned around the new fall flavor line within a month.
Pre-rolls present a different challenge, and Brute’s Roots approaches the category from the cultivation side first. “A lot of people have opinions on pre-rolls, but with our high-quality flower it’s hard to miss,” Dilla says.
South Jersey Is Part of the Formula
The company’s local identity goes back to its founders. Gatto and DiNatale are South Jersey natives, and Dilla describes the region as full of hard-working people who know how to get things done, with “no shortcuts, just hard work and pride in your work.”
That line fits the less glamorous reality of commercial cultivation. Cannabis at this scale is still repetitive, physical, detail-heavy work. For Brute’s Roots, being a South Jersey company means building the business in the region rather than simply slapping a local address on a retail operation.
Keeping the Operation Close to the Customer
There is a practical argument behind the Brute’s Roots model. The closer cultivation, manufacturing, and retail are to one another, the less distance there is between what happens to the plant and what the customer ultimately experiences. That starts in the Mother Room and Propagation operation Tony oversees, where the company’s cultivation process begins.
Brute’s Roots is betting that keeping those connections intact matters. The result is a business model built around the idea that cannabis works better when the people growing it, making it, and selling it are working hand-in-hand rather than operating at arm’s length from one another.
Photos courtesy of Brute’s Roots
Sponsored Content Disclosure: This article was published as part of a paid commercial arrangement with Brute’s Roots. Information about the company’s history, cultivation and phenotype selection practices, product development timeline, and flower pricing goals was provided by Brute’s Roots.
