Is There a Cannabis Middle Class?
Well, I made it back from NECANN Maine, not that I wanted to leave. Maine in the summer is pretty good. Lobstah rolls, the smell of the ocean, dark night skies — you get it. And while I enjoyed my time there the conference definitely had an under current of exhaustion. Vendor stories of businesses not paying, operators’ stories of price compression and the never ending 280E saga.
This particular market is made up of smaller growers and the sentiment was very anti-MSO. This really got me thinking about what the next few years have in store for the industry.
I saw a lot of good weed in Maine and a lot of pride in the craft of growing. Most of these operations are under 20,000sf. More and more that seems like the line of demarcation between craft and commodity. Operations bigger than this are going to have to specialize in joints and biomass for edibles and extracts.
The quality gap is just too big for an MSO to be a craft cultivator.
But more importantly, no one accepts it.
You may have SOP’s and standardized facilities (which I have yet to see), but that’s not enough to make up for the amount of variation between regulations, staff and genetics from state to state.
I see a day when operators caught in the middle will have to make a choice — acquiesce that what they produce is a raw commodity used for finished products or down size and focus, really focus, on quality. Much like the US in general, the middle is shrinking fast.
