The cannabis industry has a habit of making things more complicated than they need to be. But sometimes the most important shifts are also the most straightforward — if you know where to look.
Here's one worth paying attention to: the way cannabis gets grown is changing. Significantly. And for brands trying to build retail presence, that shift has real implications for what you can sell, what you can promise, and how you differentiate in a crowded market.
We sat down with Jesse Redmond — Chief Strategy and Investor Relations Officer at Leef Brands and co-host of the Higher Exchanges podcast — to get a ground-level view of where cultivation is headed and what it means for the brands navigating it.
Most of the large multi-state operators built their cultivation strategy around a simple premise: if you can't ship across state lines, you grow where you sell. The result was millions of square feet of indoor canopy spread across a dozen states, each facility a silo, each market its own operation.
It made regulatory sense. It rarely made economic sense.
Indoor cultivation runs somewhere between $300 and $500 per pound to produce, depending on the market. That math works when prices are high and competition is limited. It stops working — fast — when markets mature and prices compress. Which is exactly what's happened in most adult-use states over the past several years.
The cost problem is real. But there's a quality problem layered on top of it that doesn't get talked about enough, especially for brands in the concentrate space.
When you extract cannabis, you amplify everything in the starting material. THC goes up — but so does everything else. Pesticides. Contaminants. Whatever the plant picked up from its environment. Jesse has spent years sourcing biomass for concentrate production, and his observation is blunt: "In California, about half of the material we test that passes as flower fails when you concentrate it."
Half. Of material that already cleared testing.
For brands building extract lines, that's not a sourcing inconvenience. That's a structural supply chain problem.
Jesse's view on the future is direct: "I think the future looks like the bulk of cultivation coming from the West Coast, specifically California, also Washington and Oregon, especially on the biomass side, especially on the concentrate side, the greenhouse, the outdoor side. And then I think that gets filled in patchwork across the rest of the country."
That's a significant shift from the siloed multi-state model. And it has real consequences for operators who've built their cost structure around indoor grows in markets that may not be able to compete with low-cost West Coast biomass once interstate commerce opens up — whenever that happens.
Jesse's take on those indoor cultivation facilities: "If you're a big MSO and you have 10 cultivation facilities in 10 states, I honestly think more than half of those become bowling alleys or pickleball courts. I just don't think they're gonna make sense."
The brands who are thinking clearly about this right now aren't waiting for interstate commerce to become official. They're asking: what does our supply chain look like in a world where California outdoor is a competitive alternative to what I'm growing in New Jersey?
Here's where it gets relevant for you.
As cultivation economics shift, the brands that win at retail won't just be the ones with the best grow. They'll be the ones whose retail teams actually understand and can communicate what makes their product different — and why it matters.
Clean inputs. Low-cost production. Consistent quality. These aren't just talking points for investor decks. They're the story your budtenders need to be able to tell at the point of sale.
The problem is that most retail employees don't have that story. Not because they don't care — they do — but because no one gave it to them in a way that stuck.
That's exactly the gap SparkPlug is built to close. Courses let brands deliver product education directly to retail teams, so the people selling your products understand what's in them, where they come from, and why that matters to the customer standing in front of them. Sparks give those same employees a reason to lead with your brand when they're recommending products on the floor.
The cultivation reckoning Jesse describes is going to create real differentiation between brands that can stand behind their supply chain and brands that can't. The ones who win won't just have a better story — they'll have retail teams who know how to tell it.
Cannabis cultivation is shifting toward lower-cost, cleaner, large-scale outdoor and greenhouse production — primarily on the West Coast. The indoor multi-state model that defined the last decade is under serious economic pressure, and the brands and operators who see it coming are positioning accordingly.
For brands, the opportunity is straightforward: build the retail relationships and team education now, so that when your supply chain story becomes a genuine competitive advantage, your retail partners already know it.
Insights in this post are drawn from Jesse Redmond's conversation on the High Touch podcast. Jesse is Chief Strategy and Investor Relations Officer at Leef Brands and co-host of the Higher Exchanges podcast.