5/1/2025
The world of cannabis business is so weird in Minnesota right now. We’ve reached essentially two years of legalization and it’s still illegal to buy or sell a personal amount of weed in any non-tribal setting in the state. We all knew it would be slow but my god…
But that’s not what this is going to be about. You’ve been reading that story from every source for over a year now. I’m going to write presumptively for the prospects of what will soon be a blossoming market. We’re going to be growing and selling cannabis in Minnesota very soon. But there’s an abundance of hurdles to overcome and I want to document the process for my own sanity and for you to follow along.
Here’s where we stand right now:
Last year, there was a social equity verification process to preapprove and begin early licenses, especially for cultivation operations. We attempted to build a case for our own social equity status but ultimately didn’t meet the criteria the state was looking for. Then the lawsuit held it all up anyways. However, the candidates who were supposed to be part of the canceled lottery have begun to receive license preapproval status. This means they can begin their on-site work – preparing a location to meet all of the now-official rules, getting a background check, and confirming zoning compliance with local government officials. This is huge – it’s impossible to say how long those steps will take for most applicants but I could imagine it going pretty quickly for applicants who already have appropriate locations.
That brings me to us. Where are we in that process? Well, anybody who didn’t become a social equity applicant had the opportunity to apply as a general applicant. The window to submit applications closed in mid-March and we applied for a Microbusiness license which is unlimited and, therefore, not part of the lottery. As of this morning, we have not heard from the state since we submitted our application. The state still publishes an estimate of “May-June” for lotteries. So….. any day now? Here’s why I’m optimistic but concerned:
There were a few thousand applications all-in and each application required significant documentation. Our submission was more than fifteen multi-page documents detailing processes and plans, ranging from security to finances to operations to storage to databases to environmental provisions to human resources and on and on. If OCM gives due credit to each application, we’re talking thousands of human-hours just to read them all. It’s hard to estimate how big the OCM operation is to be able to complete this review, but I bet it’s daunting to them.
If OCM is giving fair review to each application, there will be some back and forth between applicants and the state before the lotteries are held. Each applicant paid a fee to apply and has the right to a fair review process and the lottery can’t move forward until each application has a clear status – YES or NO. If there are going to be lotteries in June, the state needs to be sending communications on applications in May. That’s now.
Now, imagine the next step. Each “qualified applicant”, the applications that are sufficient to move on to the next step, will require dozens of external human-hours to become an official licensee. Each site will have to be inspected – OCM officials, local authorities, building inspectors (electrical, plumbing, structural, fire, etc.), landlords, etc. – and each of these inspections will take time to schedule and complete. Most actual grow operations are not even built yet and that’s going to take weeks/months. Building out commercial spaces doesn’t happen overnight.
We’d love to imagine that local authorities are all going to cooperate and work swiftly to approve their local small businesses, but let’s be honest. Most of your suburban, exurban, and rural local authorities are going to be openly hostile towards this advancement. They’re given thirty days to respond to OCM on zoning compliance and I bet most will take all thirty.
It’s important to remember that none of this work can be financed the way most businesses would finance new operations. If my former employer wanted to build a new assembly line, they could just flex a line of credit and it was done. Grow rooms for cannabis need to be funded entirely in cash – business loans are not available in the cannabis space. If you can find one, it’ll be absurdly expensive. Most cannabis businesses are happy just to have a bank willing to hold their money at all. Each applicant needs, I don’t know, let’s say a bare minimum of tens of thousands of dollars in cash on hand. Grow rooms will cost a lot more than that and a first grow operation will not produce any sales for at least four months.
Regardless, let’s just hope OCM is capable of handling this amount of work in a reasonable amount of time because I don’t think most consumers, or even businesses, grasp how gigantic and ambitious this is. The state will not have a functioning market without several hundred cultivators and the amount of work that needs to be completed for that to happen is massive.
So, optimistically, we should see qualified applicants from the general application pool and licensees from the social equity pool within about a month, around the top of June. I can’t begin to explain how badly I hope we’re one of them.
BUT WHEN WILL WE SEE THE FIRST DISPENSARY!?!?! If you guys had any idea how many times our store employees are asked that question…
Well, nobody’s legally growing yet. Not at the scale we’ll need to supply the whole state. But I have to assume a lot of applicants are like us – sitting in a building, ready to go, waiting to flip the switch. If you take clones off your eight legally-allocated personal plants at home, you could flip them fast and harvest about two and a half months later, then dry and cure for a couple weeks, test, package, label in another couple weeks.
Here’s my call: from the day that you see the first official licensee, you’ll start to see products about 3-4 months later. I think you’ll see the first licensees in early June, and that brings us to sales in September/October 2025 if everything goes smoothly from here. You will see real dispensaries in Minnesota by the end of the year. They will be limited but it’ll almost certainly happen. They’ll become more widespread early next year.
There’s the breakdown. It’s my best guess – October 2025.
Aurora Cannabis – The Prior Lake Dispo will sell its own flower by the end of 2025. Come along for the ride.
Randy Beuc
VP of Ops at Aurora Cannabis LLC