Gold Crown extracts are hitting Pure Options shelves — and if you know, you know.

Starting this week, Gold Crown products are available at Pure Options — one of Lansing’s most respected independent dispensaries and a longtime pillar of this city’s cannabis scene. If you’ve been paying attention to Michigan cannabis for any length of time, both of these names should mean something to you. 

Jonathan Kellow is 34. His partner Mike Yaldoo is 29. They started Gold Crown — then operating under the caregiver system — ten years ago in the Metro Detroit area. Mike was 19 years old. Read that again: 19 years old, starting a cannabis company in the gray market, before legalization, before any of this was straightforward.

“We started off as a five-person company,” Kellow told me recently. “Me, Mike, my mom, his mom, my sister, his dad — basically family run.”

Today, Gold Crown employs 95 people. Those original family members are still around. That’s not a talking point — that’s a culture.

They started with open blasting and BHO products, moving concentrate through dispensaries and patient networks before anyone had a real framework for how any of this was supposed to work. In 2019, they became the first processing license approved in Warren, a hub of Michigan’s cannabis manufacturing infrastructure. Being first in that market doesn’t happen by accident.

I’ll tell you something else about Gold Crown that gives me confidence in the product: I know them.

When I was managing Pharmhouse dispensary in Grand Rapids, Evo Farms — the licensed entity behind the Gold Crown and Anarchy brands — was one of the first vendors to offer quality concentrate. I carried their entire product line. The quality was there then. It’s only gotten better.

What’s coming to Pure Options

Gold Crown is bringing three product lines to Pure Options Lansing, all under their flagship Gold Crown brand, and all carrying the brand’s signature commitment: everything is live resin-infused. Not distillate. Not homogenized trim oil. Live resin. That’s a meaningful distinction in a market where cutting corners on input material has become common practice.

Infused Joints – Gold Crown does infused pre-rolls right, and they do them under two distinct brand lines. Jesters is their flagship infused joint brand, and Anarchy is the sister line. These are infused the right way — layered, not mixed — which means you get a clean flower burn that opens up into something considerably bigger as you smoke it. If you haven’t tried a properly-made infused joint, this is your introduction. If you have, you know exactly why the method of infusion matters.

Gold Crown Gummies – Here’s something worth paying attention to even if you’re not vegan or gluten-free: Gold Crown’s gummies are made with pectin instead of gelatin. That makes them vegan and gluten-free. But here’s the practical reason everyone else should care — pectin has a significantly higher melting point than gelatin. That means these gummies are not going to turn into a sticky puddle in your car, your pocket, or your bag in the middle of a Michigan summer. If you’ve ever opened an edible that had basically liquefied by the time you got to it, you understand why this is a big deal.

Gold Crown Concentrates

Here’s where Evo Farms really separates itself from the pack. Gold Crown’s concentrate lineup — which includes sugar, badder, and shatter — is built on a foundation that most extraction companies don’t bother with: they start with flower from carefully selected Michigan cultivator partners, including Peninsula Gardens and Legasea. These are the kinds of cultivation partnerships that make the difference between a concentrate that tastes like something and one that just gets you high.

The collaboration model matters. Evo Farms brings the extraction expertise; their partners bring the genetics and the grow. The result is a concentrate line where the input material is never an afterthought. Sugar wax, badder, shatter — whatever form ends up on the Pure Options shelf, it starts with quality flower and gets treated right through the extraction process. Which specific forms Pure Options will be carrying is still being finalized, but if Gold Crown’s track record is any indication, whatever lands on that shelf is worth picking up.

Pure Options and the Lansing connection

If you don’t know Pure Options, you should. Owner Sam Usman has been a fixture in Lansing’s cannabis scene since before most people were paying attention — one of those operators who helped build legitimacy in this market when legitimacy wasn’t easy to come by. Kellow put it well when we talked: “I’ve always viewed him as a pioneer in the industry.”

That framing matters. Gold Crown came up in the Detroit market the same way Pure Options came up in Lansing — through hustle, through relationships, through a commitment to quality when the easier path was to cut corners. These are not two companies that found each other through a distributor. They found each other because they operate by the same code.

“It’s cool seeing these family-owned businesses get pretty big,” Kellow said. “That’s one of the things I liked most about working with Pure Options — they’re Michigan-based, they’re family-owned, and they’re not small.”

What’s next for Gold Crown

Gold Crown and its sister brand Anarchy are Michigan institutions, but Kellow has his eyes on something larger. The company is developing a national brand — separate from Gold Crown and Anarchy, which will stay rooted in Michigan — designed to scale into other markets as legalization continues to spread across the country. “Gold Crown is Michigan at home and it always will be,” he said. “But when we launch the national brand, we’ll see it everywhere.”

That kind of ambition, coming from a company that started with two kids and their mothers in a Metro Detroit basement, is exactly what Michigan cannabis was supposed to produce. The talent was always here. The work ethic was always here. The quality was always here.

It just took a while for the rest of the world to catch up.

Gold Crown is now available at Pure Options in Lansing. Go check it out.

Chris Silva writes the Lansterdam column for City Pulse. Tips? Reach him at silvachr@gmail.com.