Her employer flew the company to Alberta, brought in an Olympian, and announced four years of innovation. It was a new shape of carton. She runs five cannabis companies now.
The company had flown everyone out to Alberta. There was an Olympian booked to speak. Atiyyah Ferouz remembers it as expensive and over the top, and she remembers being told there was a huge announcement coming from the fluid department, which is the part of a dairy business that handles liquid milk.
"Everyone came up on stage and it was like looking at the Steve Jobs Apple announcements. Those awkward announcements. And they were super excited."
The innovation had taken four years.
"The fluid innovation which took them four years was a different container for milk."
She did the arithmetic on the spot.
"And I went, oh my God, this is what innovation means in this industry."
She liked the job before that. She had worked at what she calls the largest dairy company in the world, doing quality assurance and recipe development. She spent a lot of her days baking. She got very good at making pasta from scratch, and better still at French macarons, which she still makes for friends' birthdays.
None of that survived the carton.
"I just realized from that moment that this wasn't really the industry for me."
A few months later a friend was running a job fair in the town where she worked, in London, Ontario. She went, without much of a plan.
"To be honest, I didn't realize that cannabis was legalizing. I just hadn't realized that Canada was that far ahead. I hadn't realized that this was the year legalization was going to happen."
One booth had a posting for a tissue culture lab technician. She had a master's degree in plant science and could do the work already.
"So I decided to just apply. And when I went in for the interview, they liked me so much that they made me head of the department."
She started with three scientists and a team of technicians reporting to her.
She now runs, or co-runs, five companies in five years. A consultancy she founded in 2018 and calls her first — quality assurance work, good manufacturing practice, tissue culture. A German importation and wholesale business. A tissue culture and genetic banking company in Thailand. A standards association she directs. And a cannabis lounge in Berlin.
Asked about work-life balance, she gives the answer and then examines it.
"When I say work is my life, I think that can kind of sound like almost sad, I guess, or like abnormal."
She does not think it is either.
"I actually don't really have any hobbies. I've had people ask me that question before, and I didn't realize it until someone asked that I don't have hobbies any longer. I used to."
"My hobby is working, and my hobby is looking at ways that I can build more companies. And I think that's an okay hobby to have. Other people's hobbies might be planting or gardening, and you're still growing something. I'm growing businesses."
She is fully nomadic and changes country every one to four weeks. People ask her when it stops. They ask often.
"I probably get, on a weekly basis, when is it going to stop? And I don't have an answer for that."
She has an explanation for why there is no answer.
"I think that's when you know you're doing something truly out of love. When it's not like, oh, when I hit this, I'm going to stop. Or when I open my 15th company, I'm going to stop. I will just keep going."
The drive is not being supplied from outside.
"It's not for anything in particular. Like, anyone's patting me on the back and telling me I'm doing a good job. It's just for me."
She traces the shape of it to her father, a professional athlete, and then corrects the target.
"Best in the class, hypercompetitive. But really, the person I'm competing with is myself, to be honest, at this point."
She will take a call at three in the morning from outside a club and go back in afterwards. She builds her holidays around her clients' time zones.
She has been smoking since she was sixteen. For years she thought she knew why.
"All through high school and university, I was smoking, and I became a very heavy smoker at one point. I used to have a whole array of bongs."
She would come home and use, every day.
"I think I didn't realize it at the time, but I realized it much later, was that I had severe, severe anxiety, and that was what I was using to cope. And I didn't realize it, like, on a conscious level. I thought I was using it quite recreationally and just for fun, because I did like how it felt."
What changed was treatment, not willpower.
"As I got older and got into more treatment and different options and stuff, I realized that was actually the big impetus for the heavy usage."
She still uses, differently. A handful of times a month.
"Now it's like I almost save up and I savor the moments. It's like the main event."
She describes the ritual with more precision than she gives to anything else in the conversation.
"When I get high, it's like I plan it for like a week. I'm like, okay, I'm going to get high on Saturday, and then I'm going to get these snacks in advance, and I'm going to watch this show."
A Saturday, done properly: wake and bake, the gym, a nap, a very large meal. Conveyor belt sushi if she is in Thailand.
"I like it more of a treat, as opposed to an everyday, chronic use kind of thing."
She notes what the change did to the experience itself.
"When I was using it every day it was kind of background noise."
She only started talking about any of this recently.
"I wouldn't talk about it before at all, because I was very frightened of my family and other people that I knew of being really judgmental about it."
She says the reason she talks about it now is not personal.
"I think it's important for people to see that people can consume cannabis, and people who are just like me sometimes consume cannabis every day. And there are so many different people who consume cannabis. It's from people who are stay-at-home moms all the way to people who are high power executives."
And she connects the private silence to the public rules, which is the through-line of everything else she does.
"That stigma actually very heavily influences laws and regulations around the plant, and marketing, and other things that we're allowed to do. And they're quite interrelated."
What she wants is unremarkable, stated plainly.
"The freedom to be able to talk about your cannabis consumption very similar to how you would talk about alcohol consumption. That's where we need to get."
The lounge came out of never having found one she wanted to sit in.
"I told them, I want the Soho House of cannabis."
She is careful not to make it a criticism of anyone else.
"There is nothing wrong with the typical smoking lounge, or that stoner archetype. There's nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't fit who I am and what I enjoy doing."
The test she applied was whether she would spend a whole day there, entertain clients there, or go in during the day and not smoke.
The design follows from an argument about safety rather than luxury.
"The concept that cannabis is a very social product, and it is not something that should be used alone. Typically actually using any kind of substances alone is where we get substance abuse issues. Having it be more public, less stigmatized, allowing you to consume with your friends, can allow for much safer behaviour around the substance."
So: an espresso machine, alcohol on the list, and a room a non-consumer can sit in.
"People can come there with their wives, they can come there with their husbands, they can come there with their non-cannabis friends and family, and they can still have a good time."
The thing she says she most wants discussed is a line she thinks has quietly dissolved.
"Basically the idea of recreational versus medical cannabis. That's something to me that's really bled together over the years."
Her association exists because of what she sees in the rules themselves.
"I consult on every continent that cannabis has been legalized. And we see so many regulations that don't make any sense. There's no scientific backing, there's no regulatory backing."
The failure runs in both directions.
"These really over-engineered rules that don't make sense. Or the exact opposite, which is a lack of rules for a product that clearly needs to have some sort of control."
She names the specific distortion she keeps meeting.
"Countries legalizing, for example, strictly for medical, and clearly having most of their patient base be recreational users."
Her prescription is not a position on legalisation. It is a request for numbers.
"In every market that legalizes, I think both should be put forward at the same time. So we can get real medical data and we can get real recreational data."
"Data is what drives law changes. Data is what allows us to develop our industry further. And to me, there's really no markets where we're getting this good quality data from."
Asked what makes her happiest, she does not name a company.
"Being able to sense or smell fresh opportunities. The promise of there being new things, new ventures, new information to learn."
She calls herself a perpetually interested person and means it literally.
"I am the person who will sit with someone who's talking about something that has nothing to do with anything that I do, and has no bearing on what I do, and be able to do a six hour conversation with them."
Video portrait coming soon / EN edition