8 Wednesday, March 3, 2021 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon Sisters company garners national attention By Bill Bartlett Correspondent If you bought shares of Laird Superfood (Symbol LSF on NYSE) on September 22 last year, at the opening price of $22, you could have sold them the next day for $40.80 and popped some fine cham- pagne. That was the Initial Public Offering (IPO) price of the Sisters plant-based food- products company which is frequently a topic of con- versation in Sisters Country. The IPO caught the atten- tion of Barron9s, Forbes, Fox Business Channel, Market Watch, The Street, and Yahoo Finance, among others. The shares reached a high of $60.80 since inception. Last week they traded as high as $45.65. This is all the more interesting, considering that despite its explosive sales growth, the company had an operating loss of $8.35 mil- lion in the first nine months of 2020 on sales of $18.7 million. Comparable sales in 2019 were $8.9 million. Prior to its public offering of 2,650,000 shares, the com- pany had six rounds of private funding totaling $51 million. Its total shares outstanding are 8.87 million, translating to a market capitalization of $378 million on February 24. The fast-growing business currently employs 150 work- ers. It projects a total work- force of nearly 500 in the next three years, as it meets rapidly expanding demand. The com- pany claims to exceed mini- mum hourly wage require- ments for all workers. Many in the community originally embraced Laird9s ambitious hiring plans, given the lack of living-wage job opportunities in Sisters and dependency on cyclical tourism jobs. Two-thirds of the jobs are filled by workers residing out- side of Sisters, mostly from Redmond and Bend. Fifty- five employees list ZIP code 97759 as their residence. Paul Hodge, CEO, lays the lower proportion of local hires to the lack of affordable housing. He and Paul and Carla Schneider of Sisters have purchased 31 acres from the Forest Service about a quarter-mile from the Laird campus and intend to develop it into a multi-use project with as many as 250 cottages, town homes and multi-family units, partly in hopes of alleviating work- force housing shortages. Laird9s growing pains come with a price. A number of citizens have been vocal in their concern at how Laird is changing the composition of Sisters. And, as the com- pany9s footprint becomes larger, it no longer resembles the little coffee creamer outfit created by world-famous big wave surfer, Laird Hamilton, in Hawaii. Neighbors in Clearpine, the 97-unit housing subdivi- sion whose southern bound- ary is immediately across the street from Laird9s operations, complain about the noise from the 53-foot refrigerated trailers the company has been forced to position in its park- ing lot that run generators 24/7. The trailers are a tempo- rary solution for product stor- age until its 27,000-square- foot warehouse is completed. Ground has been broken for the building scheduled for occupancy by summer9s end. One neighbor on Forest Edge Drive remains dissatis- fied, saying,