DETROIT – A line of THC-infused edibles and drinks is coming from Short’s Brewing and medical marijuana company Green Peak Innovations.

“Our partnership with Short’s involves creating marijuana-infused products that mimic the taste of the popular Short’s beers for people who enjoy them but without the alcohol,” said Jeff Radway, Green Peak CEO. “Some of our first products will include Soft Parade-flavored gummies and vape pens that taste like Huma Lupa Licious.”

The licensing agreement allows GPI to use Short’s beer formulations to create any type of cannabis-infused product.

There will also be nonalcoholic infused beverages, such as cold brew coffee, sparkling waters, “mocktail” tonics, teas and lemonades.

Michigan law doesn’t allow THC to be added to alcoholic beverages.

The Michigan-based companies said that, when the law allows, they will work to infuse Short’s beers with CBD and/or THC.

The first edible products are expected to debut by the end of the year, with infused beverages following shortly after.

Metro Detroit marijuana aficionados are in for a new experience when Gage Cannabis Co. opens its doors to the public at the end of the month.

The nascent cannabis company recently wrapped up construction of its first flagship store in Ferndale, transforming a warehouse in the industrial part of town into what looks like from the outside like it could be a big-box retail store. Inside, everything feels hip and high-end: Guests are greeted by a street art-style selfie wall, a refrigerator with free water bottles emblazoned with Gage’s bright orange logo, and a reception desk and waiting room with sleek couches and chairs. Even the name, “Gage,” is jazz-era slang for pot, explains Donnell Cravens, the regional retail manager for the brand.

“I’ve been to countless other dispensaries in the area, and you do often get an almost uninviting vibe,” says Cravens, who previously worked as the general manager for Detroit’s Utopia Gardens provisioning center. “That’s what the initial intake area here is supposed to be — a welcoming landing place, [someplace] that you would feel comfortable sending your mother or whoever.”

Beyond the reception desk is Gage’s main retail floor, what Cravens describes as a “store within a store.” The retail floor is clean, with bright colors and electronic dance music thumping in the background. Unlike other provisioning centers, Gage’s products aren’t behind a jewelry store-style glass case. Instead, there are hexagonal tables topped with jars containing strain samples, which customers can inspect up close — the jars even come with magnifying lenses and holes built into the lids for a sniff sample — and there are informational cards at hand with the strains’ THC levels and terpene profiles.

Like some other marijuana provisioning centers, Gage is moving to destigmatize the marijuana shopping experience in other ways, too. For one, they’re eschewing the term “budtender” for “product specialists,” who are paired with shoppers for a one-on-one experience. The product specialist takes the shoppers’ order on the floor, and at the end escorts the customer to a large cashier counter in the back to pick up the products and cash out. In the end, Gage’s layout calls to mind the experience of shopping at an Apple Store instead of what many customers might associate with a marijuana provisioning center.

Cravens says Gage’s products are fully vertically integrated, and grown in small batches in the company’s four cultivation centers, which total 150,000 square feet across facilities in Monitor Township, Harrison Township, Lenox Township, and Warren. The company is poised to be one of Michigan’s biggest players, having secured 20 “Class C” cultivation licenses. But Cravens says the focus is on quality, not quantity.

“A lot of other large cultivators will drop 200 or 300 plants in a room, or even a thousand plants in a room,” Cravens says. “We won’t do that because it’s too hard to control and inspect and maintain the quality level that we like. So we do a smaller batch, which is more time-consuming and more labor-intensive, but it produces a much higher quality product.”

In another distinction, Gage will also be the exclusive Michigan retailer of Cookies, the California-based marijuana company owned by Gilbert Milam Jr., aka Mexican-American rapper Berner, who has developed his brand into a line of cannabis products and a popular streetwear line. Cravens says Gage will soon open a separate Cookies-branded store on Eight Mile Road in Detroit.

When we visit, Gage has bused in employees from a sister location set to open in Adrian next month for a week of corporate training. As we tour the floor, the crews had just wrapped up a training exercise where they play the roles of customers to help familiarize each other with explaining Gages’ products. Cravens says the company plans to hire 100 employees across its stores by the end of the year, and additional provisioning centers are also in the works in Detroit, Battle Creek, Bay City, Buena Vista, Center Line, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Traverse City, and Lenox Township, among others. Despite the “Gage Cannabis USA,” moniker on his business card, which hints at national aspirations, Cravens says Gage “is very much a Michigan company,” with its founding members all having Michigan ties.

As with Michigan’s other marijuana provisioning centers, for now Gage Ferndale is only open to medical marijuana card-carriers ages 18 and up; recreational adult-use retail stores aren’t expected to open in Michigan until early next year, but Cravens says the company is on track to get its licenses as soon as possible.

Cannabis-related businesses are coming to Michigan. With adult-use marijuana now legal in Michigan and the state scheduled to begin processing applications for adult-use licenses later this year, folks are jostling to get in line to do business here when the market officially opens up. Brands that have established themselves elsewhere are rushing to establish themselves here. They may not be getting in on the ground floor, but they are taking advantage of the great expansion.

The High Times brand, one of the most recognizable in the business, started running medical marijuana Cannabis Cup competitions shortly after that became legal. This year they had the first straight-up Cannabis Cup events without the medical moniker, returning to Michigan’s Auto City Speedway in Clio in June. Then they took it one better this past weekend by holding a second Cannabis Cup in Michigan this weekend at the Russell Industrial Center.

High Times tried to run a Cannabis Cup here early on, but the Detroit political establishment wasn’t happy with it. An antagonistic police presence at the event held in the Eastern Market area spoiled the fun and sent organizers to settle at the Auto City speedway in Clio. It’s good to see that the Cup came back.

Another cannabis brand used the Cannabis Cup to launch its expansion into Michigan. STIIIZY sells distillates in California, Nevada, and Washington state, as well as vaporizers and gear to a wider audience. STIIIZY claims itself to be California’s fastest-growing cannabis brand. We’ll see how it does in our state.

Confident Cannabis, a marijuana exchange platform already operating in Oregon, plans its own Michigan grand opening this month. CC’s product is business-to-business software that links the marijuana suppliers, testers, and processors to the marijuana sellers. Provisioning center owners will be able to go online to find the origin of a product, view its lab test results, see the price, and compare products to other producers. According to Brad Bogus, CC’s vice president of growth and marketing, the company’s research revealed the need for developing “trust and transparency.”

“There’s a real problem in the process of finding vendors and finding product. The biggest thing that prevents cannabis business from buying online is they can’t trust what they see,” says Bogus. “Cannabis businesses won’t buy cannabis from someone before they kick the tires. You don’t do business with anyone who walks up to your door.”

Come to think of it, the ability to order online makes sense for a business. Provisioning center customers can order online and have it delivered. Businesses should be able to do that too. In an industry traditionally shrouded in secrecy and built on personal trust, buying online from somebody across the state that you don’t know is a revolutionary concept. The patchwork of suppliers that has been stitched together will become a marketplace exchanging commodities.

“We have 100 percent of [the] licensed cannabis suppliers” in Michigan, says Bogus. “Anyone who creates a product, extractors, cultivators, everyone in the supply chain that is creating a product, all licensed labs, they all have accounts.”

Provisioning centers or processors would be able to see, for instance, that a certain grower has 25 pounds of Durban Poison available, where it was tested, what those tests results are, and the price. They could order some or all of the product.

That issue was complicated last week when the Marijuana Regulatory Agency suspended the license of Iron Labs in Walled Lake due to allegations of numerous testing violations. Iron Labs was among the first testing facilities in Michigan, and also has facilities in Oregon. No one is reported to have become ill from products tested at the lab, but the state advises caution. Whether the allegations are true or not, it throws a lack of trust into the system. Having a central source of information might be helpful to everyone involved.

“Trust and transparency,” Bogus repeats several times during the conversation.

Bogus seems to have done his homework on Michigan. He sees that extract sales are higher here than in other places but wonders whether that is due to the lack of legal flowers in the system. In a Confident Cannabis system, a business might offer a higher price to a grower.

“Sellers should be getting a higher price,” says Bogus. “A lot of growers in Michigan that we talked to are, like, pre sold out. Everybody’s having a hard time getting a hold of licensed flower.”

That situation is not likely to change soon. Even though the MRA has begun issuing licenses at a faster rate, for growers it can easily take up to nine months to finish a build-out and then grow plants. It’s still going to take a long time for product to catch up with demand. We’re just talking about the medical market here. The adult-use market is several times larger than the medical market, so it’s possible that several times the confusion will reign in the market.

Not only do Bogus and partners hope to lower the marketplace confusion, they hope to educate the public about an increasingly sophisticated approach to cannabis. Most folks have a pretty simplistic and overly prescriptive approach the idea of indica, sativa, and hybrid. Folks generally believe that sativa has an energetic result and that indica gives you couch lock.

“Indica, sativa, and hybrid have no chemical designation or meaning,” says Bogus.

He says that there are about 3,000 widely circulated strains and that CC is working to create a visualization of the nation’s flower chemistry, along with their cannabinoid and terpene profiles. There will be connections indicated between chemically similar products that are more accurate than an indica or sativa label.

Cannabis events and enterprises are cropping up faster than any one person can keep track of. It’s not slowing down and probably won’t for some time now. It’s not just the industry; we’re learning at a quicker pace just what’s in cannabis and what to expect out of it. Things could get very crowded in the cannabis space.

Social equity meetings

The Marijuana Regulatory Agency has been scheduling meetings to inform citizens about social equity opportunities in the adult-use marijuana business. The next meeting scheduled in southeast Michigan is Aug. 30 at 10 a.m. at the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum; 100 E. Cross St., Ypsilanti; 734-482-5200. The MRA meeting schedule can be found online here.

Knockout smoke

Former heavyweight champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson made marijuana news last week on his Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson podcast. Tyson, who owns a 40-acre marijuana ranch in California, said that he and his buddies might smoke some $40,000 worth of marijuana each month. However, he did not say which of the seven strains produced on his ranch is the favored line.

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Aug. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — C3 Industries, a premium cannabis producer and retailer headquartered in Ann Arbor, announced today that it has entered the Michigan cannabis market with the opening of its first “High Profile” dispensary. Located at 20327 Groesbeck Highway in Detroit, just south of Eight Mile, this is the first of 15 to 20 dispensaries the company is slated to open over the next 24 months. The next two locations are on track to open in Ann Arbor and Grant this fall, and additional locations will be announced soon.

Each High Profile store will offer a highly-curated selection of products, including flower, edibles, vaporizers, concentrates, topicals and tinctures. The company is working with many of the leading brands in the market and will also feature its own full line of products with the completion of its cultivation and manufacturing facility, scheduled to open in Webberville this fall.

C3 Industries, founded by brothers Ankur and Vishal Rungta and life-long friend Joel Ruggiero, launched in Portland, Ore. in 2018. Following a successful year in what is deemed the most “highly-competitive cannabis market,” the Rungta brothers, both University of Michigan graduates, are excited to be launching an expansive cannabis platform in their home state.

C3 Industries will invest more than $15 million in Michigan’s cannabis industry between its headquarters, a cultivation and manufacturing facility currently being built in Webberville, Mich., and the High Profile retail network. The company anticipates it will employ over 300 people once the cultivation and manufacturing center – which will supply all High Profile stores as well as third-party retailers – is at capacity and its full retail network is up and running.

“Ann Arbor has long been at the forefront of cannabis culture and advocacy,” said Ankur Rungta, C3 Industries CEO. “We’ve been waiting a long time to enter into a licensed and regulated marketplace in Michigan, and we see a great opportunity to provide the state’s patients and consumers with the highest-quality products and a premium retail experience.”

“The lack of current supply in Michigan is severely impacting medical marijuana users by driving up prices and limiting availability across the state,” said Vishal Rungta, C3 Industries president and CFO. “With our Webberville facility producing the highest quality flower and concentrates, and our retail stores carrying the most curated selection of leading brands, we are excited to enter the market and provide Michigan patients with an elevated and consistent cannabis experience.”

The High Profile dispensary on Groesbeck will be open 10 a.m. – 9 p.m., 7 days per week

DETROIT, Aug. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — STIIIZY today announced its expansion into Michigan’s budding cannabis market. On August 17and 18, the historic Russell Industrial Center in Detroit will host the state’s first High Times Cannabis Cup, where Michigan cannabis retailers and consumers will get a chance to acquaint themselves with STIIIZY, one of California’s fastest-growing and best-selling brands.

STIIIZY’s avid fan base in the Golden State has led to the brand’s quick expansion to other adult-use states like Washingtonand Nevada. Michigan became the 10th state to legalize recreational use last year. Illinois followed suit in 2019. STIIIZY’s known for its device innovations and best-in-class quality concentrates, yielding a distinctive balance of potency and purity, while the brand’s “Influence, Inspire, Innovate” message has connected with an allegiant community that is deeply embedded in cannabis culture. On August 17, STIIIZY’s popular products Original STIIIZY, LIIIL STIIIZY and BIIIG STIIIZY will be available at select retailers across Michigan. 

“I created STIIIZY, to make innovative, quality cannabis goods that are accessible and reflective of our culture. As a brand, we follow our instincts and aren’t afraid to take risks. Staying true to our authentic roots and connected to our community is what has allowed us to grow and succeed quickly. I’m proud to expand our community and be able to share STIIIZY with our fans in Michigan,” said James Kim, co-founder and a managing officer of STIIIZY’s parent company Shryne Group.

STIIIZY is Shryne Group’s marquee brand. It launched in 2017 and is currently sold in about 70 percent of all licensed cannabis retailers in California; the world’s largest, most mature legal cannabis market, and projected to grow to $5.6 billion in annual sales by 2022, according to market research firm BDS Analytics.

“The popularity of our STIIIZY brand outside of California speaks to the growing acceptance of cannabis in our broader culture and society,” said Brian Mitchell, Shryne Group’s chief executive and co-founder.  “When Michigan’s legislators voted last year to legalize adult-use, they weren’t only giving consumers access to cannabis, they were opening the door to create new jobs and economic opportunities. We’re excited to be a part of that wave.”

Marijuana users have often been plagued by the August drought: those dog days of late summer that fall between harvests in Mexico or somewhere when there was simply no weed available, when you went down your list of dealers and struck out on every one with a “call me back in a week or two” response.

The droughts have been less regular since the advent of home grows, although the vagaries of the growing cycles can sometimes still throw your timing off. That said, right now Michigan is in the midst of an August drought. A couple of weeks ago a text message came out from Corktown provisioning center BotaniQ saying that they were out of flowers. Since then the location’s co-owner Anqunette Jamison Sarfoh has been in the media saying that they have only a few selections of flowers at the location. Few others seem to be able to have adequate supplies either.

Jerry Millen, an owner of the Greenhouse in Walled Lake, reports that location has about 21 varieties, but not much of any of them. “We probably have about two weeks’ worth of flower left,” he says. “Then [we’ll] be totally out. There is no flower to be had anywhere.”

That may depend on where you are, and what and how much you’re looking for. A perusal of the Facebook Michigan Medical Marijuana Growers page shows some evidence of the search for flowers. One frustrated member posted “Straight up! Fuckin (sic) DRY SEASON. END THE DROUGHT!”

Another member responded, “I live in the Amsterdam of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and it has been super dry for at least a month now. Can’t find lbs. anywhere.”

There are several posts that belie that sentiment, but those tend to be from the southwest part of the state. There are other posts that question the quality of what is available. One narrative around the drought is that caregiver flowers of questionable quality are used to make extracts, while only best buds are sold in their natural state.

Of course, product has always been scarce in the Michigan system. For years, growing your own or using caregivers was the only way to legally access medical cannabis. When a medical system came in, some administrators were unfriendly and downright antagonistic to getting it going.

Has there ever been enough medical marijuana? A quick perusal of media this past year shows headlines pointing out a medical marijuana shortage last November, and in January, May, and June of this year. So maybe there is always a medical marijuana shortage. However, the level of complaining has intensified in recent weeks.

Maybe that intensification is due to the Marijuana Regulatory Agency tweaking how caregivers’ products enter the medical marijuana market. Previously, caregivers’ products could be sold in provisioning centers if customers signed a document acknowledging that the cannabis is untested. Now that policy has changed, resulting in less product available.

There seems to be plenty of edibles and oils on the shelves of provisioning centers. Michigan is not yet a “mature” marijuana market, and old-school flowers remain the product of choice for the majority of users. People are used to using it that way, and like it. They understand how to use it and what to expect when they use it. New ways of doing that have not yet replaced the tried and true methods.

Although most of this drought talk is anecdotal, it’s backed by information distributed by Confident Cannabis, a company with software that helps marijuana businesses to test, sell, and buy wholesale cannabis. According to press materials, 50 percent of the legal cannabis produced in the country — across 25 states — passes through the Confident Cannabis lab testing platform.

The company is moving into Michigan and has collected some interesting information about the cannabis market. The initial findings are that there’s not enough product, the caregiver and retail relationship is changing, and there is an abundance of extracts. We kind of knew that already, but it’s nice that other folks are backing up what we’re seeing.

One thing we do need in our system is more growers. Most people who want to enter the marijuana business system want to sell the product rather than grow it. That makes sense. At a basic level, growing looks more complicated than selling. Literally speaking, growers get about three harvests per year per space. You can’t make the plants grow that much faster, and if you stagger the plantings it just means less product at a time — whereas the prospect of retail sales presents a possibility for unfettered sales. But where are you going to get it?

Not from Oregon, where a reported surplus of marijuana exists, and prices are at least half of what they are here.

That all points to the fact that Michigan’s medical marijuana system still hasn’t gotten its legs under it yet. The so-called black market is still vibrant, and people seem to have more trust in the folks they’ve been buying from the past decade or more.

The medical marijuana system should be delivering for patients with an unbroken supply. They should never have to worry about where they can find what they need. The idea of a marijuana drought should be a thing of the past, but it is emphatically a thing of the present.

This August drought looks like it could well extend into September, as headlines of the past year indicate. Personally, I’m not affected by this yet because I made a bulk acquisition a couple of months back that is seeing me through all this. Not everybody can do that. From the perspective of the average patient, things don’t seem to be getting better.

DETROIT (WXYZ) — It’s been more than eight months since marijuana became legal in Michigan, and a huge marijuana-themed event is headed to Detroit this weekend.

The High Times Cannabis Cup will take place on Saturday and Sunday at the Russell Industrial Center. It’s sponsored by High Times magazine, the first month publication that advocated for marijuana legalization back in 1974.

This is the second time in three months it has come to Michigan. The two-day marijuana festival was held in June at Auto City Speedway just north of Flint in Clio.

Performers for the show include 2 Chainz, Wu-Tang-Clan, Warren G, Detroit’s own Trick Trick and more.

If you want to attend the event, you must be 18-20 years old with a valid ID and medical card, but you don’t need a medical card if you are 21 and up.

Tickets for the show start at $40 for one-day general admission and $90 for 2-day general admission.