15 Companies Hold 10% of All Cannabis Licenses in California
Marijuana was legalized in California long ago, so there are companies doing business in the state that have already established brands and expert management. As a result, some of these companies are early winners of many licenses. In fact, just 15 companies hold nearly 10% of the 1,273 licenses awarded as of January 15, 2018 in California. Here’s the leader board to date:
Honeydew Farms LLC = 29 licenses
Harborside = 12 licenses
KindPeoples = 12 licenses
CA Systematize = 8 licenses
Airfield Supply Co. = 6 licenses
CALIVA = 6 licenses
ECD, Inc. = 6 licenses
P & S Ventures = 6 licenses
Purple Lotus Patient Center = 6 licenses
The Genezen Project = 6 licenses
Theraleaf Relief, Inc. = 6 licenses
Canna Culture Collective, Inc. = 5 licenses
Event Horizon Technologies = 5 licenses
NC3 Systems, INC. = 5 licenses
The Apothecarium = 5 licenses
Of particular interest are license holders who are bundling licenses to create larger sites or stacking licenses by obtaining them from different regulators. For example, CA Systematize obtained its eight licenses from all three issuing agencies, including small medical and adult cultivation licenses, adult and medical extraction licenses, and retailer and dispensary licenses. Suffice it to say, this strategy certainly required a highly effective compliance team who had to coordinate multiple licenses from the three different regulators in a very short timeframe.
Another example is Honeydew Farms, which operates in Humboldt County, California. The company pursued a two-step strategy to compete with large grow sites that had permits with other municipalities. First, it secured conditional use permits in Humboldt County. Second, it applied for and received its 29 small/medium outdoor cultivation licenses bringing it to the top of the California license leaderboard at this time.
