💸 The Tape

Grown Rogue (CSE: GRIN) (OTC: GRUSF) has plants in the building. The Oregon-born craft flower operator announced this week that cultivation has begun at its affiliated facility in Fridley, Minnesota, just over a year after winning a cultivation license in the state's June 2025 lottery. The timeline was tight and the company hit it: conditional use permit in November, lease signed in December, preliminary approval in January, and the Office of Cannabis Management's green light to operate on August 25.

Phase I is 8,000 square feet of flowering canopy across five flower rooms inside a 109,000-square-foot building that can eventually support the state's 30,000-square-foot regulatory maximum. Rooms are being filled one at a time, first harvest is slated for late Q4, and product should hit shelves in Q1 2027. CEO Obie Strickler, who knows the market from Grown Rogue's earlier consulting work with Vireo, framed it as a deliberate, expandable position rather than a land grab. That's the right posture, because Minnesota right now is a market that rewards anyone who can actually produce flower.

A market that's growing fast and still starving

Minnesota's adult-use market opened on September 16, 2025, and the trajectory since has been unusual for a Midwest state. Monthly sales climbed from roughly $17 million in October to a record $25 million by April, and the retail footprint exploded from 49 non-tribal stores in January to about 150 by spring, with the state on pace to approach 200 operating dispensaries by year end. Year-to-date sales crossed $60 million by March. Annualized, the market is running somewhere in the $275–325 million range — well below MJBiz's $430 million projection, but the gap has nothing to do with demand.

The problem is supply. The state licensed retailers faster than it licensed growers, and the growers it did license are still building. Total legal canopy sat under 400,000 square feet this spring against a modeled demand of more than 2 million. Only 37 of the 50 lottery-selected cultivators were even licensed as of February. Layer on a testing crisis — only two labs at launch, one of which closed this summer, no licensed transporters for months — and you get a market where harvest-ready flower sits in cure rooms waiting on a certificate of analysis while shelves go empty. The OCM expanded lab capacity over the summer, but the structural gap between retail doors and flower to fill them hasn't closed.

The pricing picture

This is where it gets stark. Minnesota's average retail flower price is around $14.50 per gram, roughly triple mature markets like Michigan, and Hoodie Analytics found average prices up 37% year over year — in an industry where the default direction is down. The OCM's own data put the median eighth at nearly $60 after taxes this spring. Wholesale flower has been clearing above $4,000 a pound. Add a 10% state cannabis excise tax stacked on general sales tax and local surcharges, and the legal product is priced against an illicit eighth that goes for under $30 and a hemp-derived THC market that already does $180–200 million a year through more than 5,000 liquor stores, gas stations and bars.

So, is it an efficient market? Not remotely. This is a supply-constrained market with price discovery happening at the wholesale level, not the retail level. Retailers are price-takers from a handful of authorized wholesalers, tribal nations are filling gaps as distributors, and consumers are voting with their feet toward tribal stores that don't charge the state excise, toward hemp THC, and toward the guy they already knew. High prices are a temporary gift to whoever has product, not a sign of a healthy market. Every analyst and operator in the state, including Green Thumb's own CEO, expects meaningful compression starting late 2026 and accelerating through 2027.

The incumbents: GTI and Vireo's head start

For a decade, Minnesota's medical program was a legal duopoly: Green Thumb's RISE (via its 2023 LeafLine acquisition) and Vireo's Green Goods, which was founded in the state. Those two were the only operators with cultivation, manufacturing and retail already standing when adult-use opened, and the state's transition rules let them convert up to one-third of their medical inventory and plants to adult-use on day one. Small operators fumed, but it's why there was a market at all last fall.

Green Thumb runs a production facility in Cottage Grove and eight RISE stores — the maximum allowed under the state's combination license — with adult-use live across the metro and in Mankato, Willmar, St. Cloud and Baxter. Its brand share is where the real dominance shows: RYTHM is the top flower and concentrate brand in the state, Dogwalkers leads pre-rolls, and Beboe and &Shine rank in edibles and vapes. In a market with no meaningful third-party supply, GTI has effectively been the wholesale market for the microbusinesses and independents opening around it, and it's been selling into that channel at wholesale prices that would make an Illinois grower weep. Ben Kovler said on launch day that the state "is going to want more product" — a polite way of saying his Cottage Grove facility was about to have the best year of its life.

Vireo is in a similar position with eight Green Goods stores and its own cultivation, plus the strategic nuance that Minnesota is its home state and the operating base for its national roll-up. Grown Rogue's history consulting for Vireo's Minnesota grow is a footnote here, but a telling one: the craft operator knows exactly what the incumbents' flower looks like.

What's next

Three things reshape this market over the next twelve months. First, supply arrives: the lottery cultivators are coming online in waves through year end and into 2027, and the OCM's July cap review has the statutory authority to expand the 50-license cultivator cap given the demand gap. Second, the federal hemp THC ban takes effect in November, which could push a $200 million consumer base toward licensed dispensaries at exactly the moment inventory improves. Third, the omnibus cannabis bill that took effect August 1 tightens up the licensing sequence, testing, and local control issues that made the rollout so messy.

The likely result is a 2027 market of 200-plus stores, meaningfully more flower, and prices that finally start behaving like a normal state's. That's a worse world for GTI's wholesale margins and a better one for consumers. For Grown Rogue, arriving in Q1 2027 with craft flower while prices are still elevated and the hemp channel is being shut off is close to ideal timing. The company's job now is what Strickler said it is: learn the rooms, dial in the genetics, and earn the shelf before the shelf gets crowded.

📈 Dog Walkers

$CGC ( ▼ 0.02% ) Expands Down Under

Canopy Growth (TSX: WEED) (Nasdaq: CGC) is filling out its Australian medical shelf. The company announced a portfolio expansion across its Spectrum Therapeutics, Spectrum Reserve, 7ACRES, Tweed and Twd. brands, adding two formats it has never sold in the country and reworking its oil and softgel lines.

The headline additions are pastilles — four SKUs spanning Tweed's Red and Blue lines and Spectrum's balanced and CBD-forward ratios — and Canopy's first all-in-one live resin vapes in Australia, one indica under 7ACRES and one sativa under Spectrum Reserve. On the formulation side, Spectrum Flow and Sunset become the company's first Australian oils to include CBG and CBN, the softgel range moves beyond isolate-only formulas, and two new flower SKUs land in the Twd. value tier.

CEO Luc Mongeau framed it as core to the international medical strategy: expand in established markets by evolving the existing portfolio rather than building new ones. Medical president Andrew Bevan added that Australian prescribers are asking for more format choice, and that the new pastilles and oils were shaped by data from Canopy's Canadian clinic network — a reminder that the Spectrum, Abba Medix and Canada House assets are doing double duty as product R&D.

The timing follows last month's renewed EU GMP certification at Kincardine, which keeps European supply flowing. Australia is one of the few international medical markets where minor-cannabinoid oils and vapes command real prescriber demand, and Canopy is leaning into breadth while the bigger Canadian LPs fight over German flower share.

$VEXTF ( ▲ 3.94% ) Updates On Ohio

Vext Science (CSE: VEXT) (OTCQX: VEXTF) has voluntarily closed its Herbal Wellness Center dispensary in Jackson, Ohio at the request of the state's Division of Cannabis Control, which is investigating two serious adverse health events involving individuals the DCC believes may have purchased products there.

The company's disclosure is careful, and for good reason. Vext says it has not been given the individuals' identities, the products involved, purchase dates or any circumstances that would let it independently assess whether its products had anything to do with either event. It states it is aware of no substantiated evidence linking a Vext product to either case.

Cooperation is total. Vext has handed over product samples for independent testing and has quarantined certain product lines across all of its Ohio retail and manufacturing locations while results come back. Every unit in question previously cleared mandated state lab testing. CEO Eric Offenberger said the company is confident its products are safe when used as intended and wants Jackson reopened as soon as the DCC allows.

Importantly, the damage is contained to one store. Vext's five other Ohio dispensaries and its cultivation facility remain open and are not under any DCC inquiry. That matters for a company that just reported its second straight quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth, opened its sixth Ohio store, and finished winding down Arizona cultivation to lean fully into Ohio retail.

The unknowns cut both ways. Two adverse events tied to a single dispensary could be product, could be adulteration downstream, or could be coincidence — and Vext currently has no way to know which. A clean test result ends this quickly; anything else becomes a bigger story for Ohio's entire adult-use supply chain, not just one small-cap retailer. Watch for the lab results.

📺 Trade To Black

Trump Grants Clemency to Two Cannabis Offenders | TDR Cannabis in 5

• Two more commutations: Trump freed Jerry Haymon IV, serving a 10-year mandatory minimum for marijuana conspiracy, and Kevin Harden, who was serving 30 years and has had multiple open-heart surgeries.

• Bipartisan backing: Haymon's case previously drew support from 36 members of Congress who urged Biden to act, and Mike Tyson personally wrote to Trump backing both applications.

• Part of a pattern: This follows Trump's earlier pardon of a former NFL player convicted of trafficking 175 pounds of cannabis, adding up to multiple cannabis clemency actions this year.

• Timing matters: The DEA rescheduling hearing has concluded and sits with an ALJ ahead of Administrator Cole's decision, raising the question of whether a broader clemency push is coming alongside Schedule III.