AMAZE IS A FAMILY OWNED AND OPERATED BUSINESS

OUR STORY

If you met Jay Patel before 2018, you would probably have never guessed that he’d one day be the CEO of a cannabis company. 

Jay left India when he was just 19 years old. After spending a little time in Canada and Tennessee, he landed in Moberly during August of 2007. There, he bought a struggling convenience store, fixed it up, and discovered he had a natural talent for retail — so much so that he eventually expanded into multiple locations across Missouri. 

Growing up, Jay’s entire family was against the use of cannabis. It wasn’t until Jay’s grandmother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2018 that his anti-cannabis mindset began to shift. 

After hearing about his grandmother’s cancer diagnosis, Connie at Wise Women Botanicals offered Jay samples of her hemp-based products. He reluctantly passed them along — and after just a month of using the products, Jay’s grandmother reported back that it was making a big difference. 

Shortly after, Jay’s son was diagnosed with autism.

As he began Googling the word “autism,” Jay was shocked to find that cannabis kept popping up as a treatment for autistic children and began to dig deeper into the history of cannabis. That’s when he realized that there were two opposing stories about cannabis — and that cannabis had been used as a healing medicine for thousands of years in his own culture, Hinduism. By the end of his research, Jay decided to try giving his son a blend of hemp-derived CBD and CBG oil.

The benefits that both his son and grandmother experienced from the use of cannabis were impossible to ignore, and Jay became a believer and advocate for the plant he once could not tolerate.

After medical cannabis was legalized in Missouri in November 2018, Jay attended a seminar led by Dan Viets at the University of Missouri. He was captivated by the idea of entering the exciting new cannabis industry, and in 2019 he applied to be vertically integrated.

Jay was initially granted dispensary licenses, which now operate as Green Releaf. But the ability to grow cannabis was crucial to Jay’s vision for having complete control over the quality of product he was sharing with Missourians, so he continued pursuing the cultivation license — and eventually secured the second to last medical cannabis cultivation license in the state. 

Jay’s ability to stay calm and collected throughout the inevitable chaos of owning a business in the cannabis industry is admired by his colleagues.

Jay attributes his even-keeled energy to his daily grounding and incense-burning rituals that support his never-give-up mindset. “Everything in my life has always come the hard way — so when it does come the hard way, I know it’s going to happen. It’s as if the universe is teasing you: give up, give up, give up, and you don’t. And then it’s like, ‘Okay, you can have it now.’ So when I see issues, I actually get excited; I think, ‘Oh, it’s coming!’”

After beginning construction in September 2021, the AMAZE Cannabis facility officially opened on April 21, 2022.

Now, most of Jay’s family is involved with AMAZE Cannabis.

You’ll find Jay’s grandmother cutting clones and his cousin cleaning water tanks alongside nearly 80 other hard-working members of the Moberly community. In addition to bringing new genetic profiles to Missourians, AMAZE Cannabis is working on a new line of products specifically designed for children with autism.