Jeffrey Miller, Chief Executive Officer of HoneyProjects – Interview Series

Anyone who has established and currently operates a business in the cannabis industry will attest to how critical brand reputation and storytelling are to overall success. When a brand’s story and marketing strategies are memorable and resonate with large consumer groups, they foster long-term customer rapport and drive future sales.

To gain a deeper understanding of brand building and the best practices for appealing to consumers across multiple state markets, MyCannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with Jeffrey Miller, Chief Executive Officer of HoneyProjects.

Where did your interest in documentary filmmaking first come from? Were there any documentaries in particular that inspired you to pursue producing the same types of films?

Honestly, serendipity. I never set out to be a documentarian—I wanted to be a comedian. In college I started making comedy sketch videos, got good at it, taught myself to edit, and bought a camera. After graduation I got a day job with a movie company and spent nights and weekends doing comedy shows.

Then some college friends called me up. They were working on a documentary about corn farming in Iowa and it was, by their own admission, in need of some help. They asked if I’d move out there and join the team because it could use my vision. I visited, fell in love with the project, and we stayed two years before finishing the film back in Brooklyn. That movie did well—and suddenly, almost by accident, I had a documentary filmmaking career.

As for inspirations, my taste has always been eclectic. I truly love and Ingmar Bergman’s —not two movies that usually go together. I’m a big fan of although I think is my favorite Coen brothers movie. I love Jacques Tati—the French clown films from the ’50s and ’60s like and . Errol Morris was huge for me in terms of documentary craft, but I also love Frederick Wiseman who’s sort of the opposite, as well as the Maysles brothers. Paul Thomas Anderson and Abbas Kiarostami and Robert Bresson are on my list, along with a few dozen others. It’s hard to find a thread that brings all these filmmakers together except to say that I think they’re all uncompromisingly excellent and inspiring in all different ways.

What made you decide on getting your MFA at Columbia in the medium of film? What were the most interesting courses you took at that very prestigious school?

I went to Columbia in the 2000s. By then, the program was still carrying the legacy of New York indie film from the late ’90s—the Soderbergh and Tarantino era, the Sundance circuit. That world was shifting rapidly, and I think the program was still finding its footing in what came next. But for me, the draw was clear: I wanted dedicated time to practice directing without the distractions of editing for hire or hustling to pay rent. I wanted to learn from people who had a real methodology for teaching the craft, and I wanted space to focus.

One of the most enjoyable parts for me was the film history. I TA’d for Richard Peña, who was the director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and ran the New York Film Festival. Brilliant film scholar—not a filmmaker, a true scholar. His film history overview, from silent film through the ages, with wonderfully offbeat choices, was my favorite thing at Columbia. Crazy smart, deeply influential in the New York film world. Because of his classes, I was briefly a film professor at the undergrad film school HKAPA in Hong Kong, which was a really rich experience.

The other standout was a production class where the assignment was deceptively simple: make something you like. Any length, any style, any budget—but when you show it to the class, you have to own it completely. No excuses. I thought it was the most brilliant assignment I’d ever been given. Freedom plus accountability. Every student in that class made the best work of their time at school.

Who are some of your main inspirations as a documentarian, and what are some important subjects that you aspire to cover with your films?

I’ve always been drawn to telling the deep history of things people think they know about but don’t really know the whole story. That’s the thread that runs through everything.

The project that got closest to my heart was —a six‑part series about cannabis‑smuggling surfers of the 1970s, tracing the plant’s journey from counterculture to legalization. I developed it over four years before it was shelved. I also pursued the rights to , the story of Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and Andrew Weil—the timing just never lined up. I was fascinated by R. Gordon Wasson’s journey to Mexico, his encounter with María Sabina and psilocybin mushrooms, and how that experience rippled into Western culture in ways that were both transformative and destructive. I optioned the rights to , about the early days of the internet, for a dollar.

Over time, documentary work evolved into nonfiction television, which led me to —a craft beer travel show hosted by the founders of BrewDog, the Scottish brewery that became the fastest‑growing business in the UK during filming. That experience was incredibly formative. I met every major brewer, saw the craft beer movement from the inside—how the market was growing, what was working, what happened when it shifted. Someone on that show said to me, “One day there’s going to be a show like this about weed.” That stuck with me.

What all went into receiving a Peabody Award, and what subjects did the documentary revolve around?

followed two friends who moved to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and trace where it ends up in the American food system. We put it out on PBS and it connected with people in a way we didn’t fully anticipate. It presented compelling information in an accessible, human way.

Michael Pollan was in the film, and his book came out around the same time with some of the same themes, so there was real cultural momentum around these ideas. But at that point, most people genuinely didn’t know much about the food system.

I had a head start on that awareness. My grandmother was militant about health, food, diet, and the dangers of processed food and pharmaceuticals—way before her time. She’d been talking about this stuff since I was four years old. In college, I had friends who were food activists working to get Yale to serve organic food. Through that network I got to meet people like Walter Willett, Pollan, Alice Waters—the whole farming, food, and nutrition world. My grandmother’s worldview eventually came true, and I’d been steeped in it from a young age. That background made feel incredibly personal.

When did you first enter the cannabis industry, and where did that professional desire come from? Filmmaking to cannabis business is a pretty unusual career trajectory.

I enjoyed cannabis in college, but it wasn’t until I moved to California and experienced the Prop 215 medical market that my whole worldview shifted. The selection, the quality, the education—it was a revelation. You could walk into a dispensary and buy a gram of this strain, a gram of that strain, build your own quarter with several different varieties. It was like a deli counter for cannabis. Before that, it was just “do you have weed or not?”—is it good, is it terrible, is it sticky, is it dry? Very rudimentary.

That experience opened my eyes to what cannabis could actually be. I became obsessed—learning about strains, genetics, breeders, the history. I started growing in my backyard, which taught me so much. And I could see it coming: adult use was inevitable after Oregon and Colorado. There was so much energy in the market.

What struck me most was the sensory education. The best way to shop for cannabis is to smell it. The nose knows. If you don’t know anything, learning to trust your own senses is such a big part of cannabis education. That’s what I was seeing in California—access to information, access to the product itself, a more intentional way of approaching it. It was the opposite of what we have in most places now, where you can’t even open the package in the store.

I was making , the beer show, at the same time, and I realized it was a proto version of what could happen in cannabis: expertise, accessibility, education, expansion of knowledge and options.

All of that fed into my obsession. Then came —a project that deepened my understanding of cannabis’s history and culture. I became captivated by cannabis’s story. It showcased the passion and resilience of a community devoted to this remarkable plant. When we couldn’t finish it, that setback—coupled with personal milestones like getting married—prompted a pivot.

I saw an opportunity to channel my storytelling skills, business acumen, and personal connection to cannabis, which has been a vital ally in managing my clinical depression and anxiety. In 2016, I launched a small consulting business to guide cannabis brands, which quickly grew into leading HoneyProjects. Today, I’m driven by a mission to build authentic, community‑focused brands like our award‑winning dispensaries HoneyGrove and HoneyStash, that honor cannabis’s heritage and redefine its future.

What interested you about working with HoneyProjects? What does HoneyProjects do differently from other New Jersey cannabis businesses, and how do those differences result in success?

Dave Valese is what drew me in. When I met Big Dave—a cultivator with nearly three decades of experience rooted in the Northeast’s cannabis heritage—I saw the opportunity to do something I’d believed could be done but hadn’t seen done well yet: forge an authentic partnership of integrity and mutual respect with expert, legacy operators. The idea of bridging the legal market and legacy culture sounds obvious, but building a real relationship of trust, grounded in the reality of what this industry is, with a genuine long‑term strategy—that’s rare. Dave and I shared that vision, and together we created HoneyProjects.

What we do differently is simple to say and hard to execute: we hold the line on quality, authenticity, and community. We curate the best small‑batch, craft cannabis in New Jersey from independent cultivators who share our standards. We invest in our people and our neighborhoods. We don’t cut corners to scale faster. HoneyGrove was named 2024 Dispensary of the Year by Cannademix, and HoneyStash earned Best Dispensary in the Northeast in the 2025 GreenState Consumers’ Choice Awards—because patients and customers feel the difference when a business is built on real values and real relationships.

What are some of your regular and lesser-known duties as CEO of HoneyProjects? With so many locations and employees, what are the management skills that are the most useful for the role?

At the end of the day, the health of the business is my problem—or rather, everything is my problem. My responsibility is to set things up so they work as well as possible without me. I’m the holder of the values, the culture, the vision, the mission. Literally everything. It’s about building systems so that everything is manageable and sustainable.

First, being incredibly adaptable and flexible—improvising, assuming constant change. This industry shifts under your feet regularly, and rigidity will break you. Second, developing people into doing their best work. For me, that means helping everyone find the job that only they can do—the thing they’re better at than anyone else in the organization. When people are in that role, they’re happier, more motivated, and more invested.

I’ve been shaped a lot by the Conscious Leadership Group and their framework—. It’s given me language and structure for what I was already trying to do intuitively: lead with awareness, stay curious, take responsibility, and create space for people to grow. Keeping people growing, keeping them connected to the mission, and staying flexible enough to let the organization evolve around their strengths—that’s the real work of leadership.

From your experience with cannabis brands in multiple state markets, what advantages does the New Jersey industry have over other neighboring state markets?

First, New Jersey is the densest state in the union, which is inherently helpful for retail. Second, the real estate situation creates a natural barrier to the kind of overlicensing you see in states like Oklahoma, Michigan, or Massachusetts. There’s no dead mill town with cheap, sprawling square footage that invites a flood of underprepared operators and a race to the bottom. In New Jersey, there simply aren’t enough places for that to happen at the same scale, which keeps the market healthier.

Third—and this is my favorite one—New Jersey is a sleeper. It benefits from always being the underdog. New York is right there, so nobody expects much from Jersey. But because of its proximity to New York, New Jersey has incredibly knowledgeable, sophisticated growers and producers—real people who know what they’re doing. That’s a huge advantage, because there’s less ego and more substance. It’s the opposite of the California situation, where everyone expects greatness and there’s a ton of posturing. In New Jersey, the talent is real and it’s quietly excellent.

Simultaneously, what are some of the biggest disadvantages and widespread problems that the New Jersey cannabis industry faces? How could those issues be improved?

Consumer education is still a big hurdle. There’s not enough knowledge about the product among everyday buyers—it took a long time for people to even know what live rosin is, and that lack of understanding leads to choices driven by THC percentages and price rather than quality. I’d love to see the THC myth go away.

The complete capture of the market by MSOs for several years didn’t do anyone any favors. For a long time it was essentially twelve MSOs and two independent producers. That trained consumers to have low expectations for the legal market—low quality, high prices—which fueled the unregulated market even more and made it harder for good businesses to survive. We’ve had to do a lot of proving it to consumers who had become skeptical about legal cannabis.

Standards still need to be raised across the board, and that’s what we’re trying to do. The fix is straightforward: better education, higher standards, and more independent operators who actually care about the product and the community they serve.

What do you think the future years hold for the New Jersey cannabis industry and the greater American cannabis industry, especially with rescheduling and other possible huge reforms too?

I’m cautiously optimistic. Rescheduling would be a seismic shift—it would open the door to banking access, legitimate research, and a level of normalization that the industry desperately needs. But I’ve been around long enough to know that federal reform moves slowly and unevenly, so I’m not holding my breath on timelines.

For New Jersey specifically, I think the next few years will be defined by a shakeout. The operators who prioritized quick returns over quality and community will struggle as consumers get more educated and discerning. The ones who invested in craft, in relationships, in doing things right—they’ll be the ones standing. That’s exactly the bet we’ve made with HoneyProjects.

On a national level, the most exciting possibility is interstate commerce. If and when that happens, it changes everything—supply chains, pricing, brand‑building across state lines. New Jersey’s proximity to major East Coast markets and its deep bench of talented cultivators position it well for that future.

What I hope for most, though, is that reform brings real equity. Rescheduling and legalization mean nothing if the communities most harmed by prohibition are still locked out of the legal market. Restorative justice, expungement, and genuine access for legacy operators have to be part of the conversation—not an afterthought. That’s a value we hold at HoneyProjects, and I believe it’s the only way this industry earns the trust it’s asking for.