40 Under 40: Samantha and Will Seagaard

As a liberal arts student in Portland, Oregon, Samantha Seagaard was already considering a career in cannabis, but she felt a responsibility to join after seeing the industry firsthand in 2007.

“I started at a trim camp in California, and I was amazed at how much waste and trash there was. It was really shocking,” Samantha says, adding that the grow was being patrolled by machine-gun-wielding men riding ATVs. “I came away saying, ‘I’ve got to do this full time so idiots like this don’t end up running the industry.”

Seagaard was also driven into the industry by seeing firsthand the medical benefits of cannabis, including the positive effects it had for herself after a severe car crash and how it could have reduced her father’s suffering while he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

“It was like a calling,” she says.

Samantha spent 15 years learning how to run a cannabis production company before returning home to Massachusetts and co-founding Fresh Connection with her younger brother, Will Seagaard, in March 2022.

“The hardest part of getting the company up and running would depend on the week you asked me,” says Will, who was working as a financial planner before joining the company as chief finance officer. “I think just having reasonable goals and expectations and not trying to overextend ourselves has been critical to our success.”

With the help of Zach Swanson, the company’s head of cultivation, Samantha and Will have since grown the company to a team of 15 employees that supplies 60 stores and counting. And while the family-owned business is quite happy with the progress it has made thus far, the Seagaards are now aiming to get a retail license to better serve Fresh Connection’s customers.

“Initially, we were laser-focused just on the cultivation because that’s where a lot of our skills are,” Will says. “Now that we’ve got good systems in place and great staff to run things generally on a day to day, we’re trying for more rational progression.”