PREMIUM CANNABIS
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KIND BUD FOR THE H O L I D AY S As the race to the bottom occupies multiple licensed producers, prestige cannabis companies and their retail partners fight back this holiday season with really good weed B Y
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Cannabis users know that their recreational product of choice is not a commodity. A commodity implies fungibility; for instance, a barrel of crude oil from Calgary may be interchangeable with a barrel of crude from Texas—wherever you get it from the product is the same. Cannabis, however, a flower that’s tenderly grown with human hands, has wild divergence in quality, taste and smell. This, importantly, is one of the missteps of
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the early licensed producers who came from outside the industry: they underestimated the market’s appetite for really good weed. “There’s never enough of the good stuff, and there’s always too much of the bad,” says Vinay Tolia, CEO of Flowr, a premium cannabis grower based in Kelowna, BC, the epicentre of domestic cannabis cultivation. “If you assume all cannabis is the same and can drive customer preference based on the
lowest possible price, you’re ignoring the 80% of the legal cannabis market that are informed users like I am, appreciate the product, and know what they like.” Quality in cannabis, much like in spirits and wine, ranges metaphorically from bathtub gin to Dom Pérignon. Two years into the end
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