From Seed to Sale: Steps a Breeder Must Take to Get You Your Weed
The steps a cannabis grower or processor must take to get their products into the hands of consumers in Canada are much more complicated than they were before legalization. Gone are the days when weed was grown, dried, trimmed and cured and then sold to a broker or pharmacy for cash in hockey bags.
Today’s grower not only has to pass various product tests, but also has to build a recognizable brand and work their way through a highly regulated provincial supply chain. All of this adds to the challenges for today’s legal cannabis producer, and also increases the cost and length of time a product stays in storage before it reaches consumers.
The long road to retail varies by province
At the federal level, only those with a sales license can sell products in the provincial markets. Then you must also be approved for sale in a province with a sales license and then have certain products approved for sale by the provincial board in most markets.
Those who only have a license to grow will need to partner with a processor to package their dried cannabis for commercial sale or to process it into extracts, edibles, or topicals (or obtain their own processing and sales license).
Even then, the processor must have a relationship with every cannabis establishment in the province in order to be allowed to sell into their system in the first place.
Aaron Anderson, vice president of sales at BZAM Cannabis in British Columbia, says the biggest challenge he sees is working through the various provincial distribution systems.
A company must first be approved to sell products in the province and only then can it present certain products to the provincial boards.
For example, Ontario, Anderson says, takes about two to three months to get an approved product through its distribution system and onto store shelves and into the hands of consumers. BZAM has products in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador.
Provinces like Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland allow direct shipments to retailers, but are much smaller markets, he says. BC and Alberta are faster and a little more flexible, with a turnaround time of a few weeks, not a few months. Quebec is the toughest, if at all, to qualify as a vendor, at nearly a year.
“It’s not that they’re trying to sell older products, it’s that it can take weeks or even months to get from harvest to consumer,” said Aaron Anderson, VP of Sales at BZAM Cannabis.
Farmgate is sold direct to the consumer
Robyn Rabinovich, VP, Strategic Initiatives at Thrive Cannabis, an Ontario-based cannabis producer that has the first cannabis Farmgate store in Canada, says one of the perks they have with their on-site Farmgate retail store is this To work around some of these prolonged storage and processing problems with the OCS.
Although they have to go through the first product pitch with the province every two months, once they have approved a product they can bypass the additional months of processing through the OCS system as they can store and sell their own product locally.
This means that Thrive can sell products that are only harvested around 6-8 weeks after being harvested.
“This is where farmgate’s efficiency gains really come into play,” she explains. “Instead of going to the warehouse and having to go through the OCS and the retailer then having to wait for their purchase date, where all those days add up, we can just release this product with the OCS and then take it to our retail store.
“So we can see this product sell within two days from release to consumer. So we can get some of the freshest produce on the market in our store. ”
In addition to selling its products through its Farmgate store and the OCS, Thrive has products in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and will soon be in the Yukon.
Producers prefer to work with British Columbia
“BC is my favorite,” said Anderson, who, along with several years in the cannabis industry, has a background working with provincial liquor associations.
“You can pitch every week, but it switches between flowers and concentrates / edibles every other week and is more flexible for smaller shipments. So it ends up being the freshest. Alberta is somewhere between Ontario and BC in terms of timing. “
Josh Udala, CEO of Organnicraft, a BC-based micro-producer with products in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Yukon, says in his experience BC was also the fastest.
“BC is probably the easiest because we can go to the demand planner and work with it. Saskatchewan and Manitoba are nice because you can go straight to the dealer, but the quantities aren’t huge, ”explains Udala. “As for the major provinces, BC seems to be the easiest.”
Bringing the freshest cannabis to consumers
According to Anderson, one of the biggest challenges is getting consumers to understand what growers are facing. It’s not that they are trying to sell older products, but that it can take weeks or even months to get from harvest to consumer.
BZAM is one of the first companies to include a harvest date on its product, not just a packaging date. And he says when they launched their first product in Ontario, some were surprised it was four months old.
“The fastest way from harvesting to trimming, curing, COAs, and packaging was about five weeks,” says Anderson. “If we can reconcile this with Ontario’s product call and Ontario accepts it, the product can be up to four months old at the time of purchase by a consumer. Even in a province like BC, it can take a few months for a consumer to buy it. ”
Another piece of the puzzle that Anderson says can be a challenge for new growers and processors is just getting permission to sell to a province and then even being able to offer certain products.
Some provinces even have a cap on the number of licensed manufacturers they allow, which means that any access to these markets must be through a partnership with an already licensed company.
Good weed isn’t enough, growers need a brand
With all of these competing manufacturers and brands, it’s important to make sure consumers know who you are so that they even know they need to look for your product.
For Udala, whose micro cannabis facility operates with a very small crew compared to a larger producer like BZAM, another major challenge and learning curve in bringing products to market is learning how to properly market and market their cannabis .
He and part of his team moved from the legacy market, but building a recognizable name in the legal market is like starting over.
“You really have to go out and pound the sidewalk to get retailers and consumers to see your product,” says Udala. “Especially if people don’t know who you are, don’t take the retailers off the list.”
“Trying to build your own brand is the hardest part of the supply chain and the biggest hurdle in my opinion,” he says. “The marketing, the branding, getting orders from the provinces, and then keeping sales, that’s the hard part. Those are the hurdles. “
“We know how to grow weed, we’ve been doing that for a while,” he continues. “We’re doing well. We make good products and lots of them. But putting it on the shelves and turning it into sales is the biggest challenge for us at the moment. ”
“I never thought I’d spend so much time marketing. I’ve been growing for years, but I’ve never put products on shelves like this. I really enjoyed it, but it was a really big challenge. “
David Brown
David Brown has been working in and writing about the cannabis industry in Canada since 2012. He was previously the editor-in-chief and communications director of Lift Cannabis and Lift News, senior policy advisor for the cannabis legalization division of Health Canada, and is the founder of StratCann Services Inc.
View article by David Brown
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