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TORONTO – The latest sprint at the launch this week of legal marijuana sales for recreational purposes in Canada can be summed up by a small stamp.
To sell any marijuana product in Canada, the government requires a tax stamp on the package, but these are only available from one authorized vendor, the Canadian Bank Note Company or the CBNC . Once the pot producers dealt with the CBNC to receive their stamps, they were probably dismayed to find that the stamps had no glue – and that there was only one of them. only one company in Canada that could stick glue on stamps.
"If you did not book your time six months ago with the only company in Canada that stuck it, then you're in trouble," Tilray Inc.
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General Manager, Brendan Kennedy, told MarketWatch. "I do not even know what you're doing."
MarketWatch has not been able to determine how this potential bottleneck has impacted on the widely reported retail shortages in the country, but is emblematic of the challenge of turning a black market into a national industry. which raises capital via initial public offerings. Although there does not appear to be any massive and unexpected problems at the beginning of the legal marijuana sale in the first G-7 country to legalize the drug, it was difficult to determine whether the distribution network, still fragile, had been able to keep up. request.
For the largest companies in the pot sector, the first week of legal sales did not involve frenetic activity by the managers in charge of inventory management, the decision to allocate resources or the attempt to sales optimization. Because of the regulatory structure, the directors of Tilray and Cronos Group Inc.
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told MarketWatch that things were happening more or less as before – too early, even for comments on products sold online or in retail outlets.
To see all the coverage of Canadian legalization by MarketWatch, click here.
"It's six months (from) when you plant a seed when it's shipped to [Ontario Cannabis Store] if everything is perfect, if everything is on the spot, "said Tilray's Kennedy. "So, I can not do much today, it just would not make a big difference. Were we scared six months ago? Yes. And there were certainly places along the way where we had to do things to be ready. "
In Ontario, Canada's most populous province, three sources familiar with sales told MarketWatch that the province's online store – the only way to legally buy grass there, since 39; it will not allow retail sales until next year – was short of product Wednesday, the first day of sales. But Ontario spokesman, Cannabis Store, Daffyd Roderick, said Thursday morning on the phone that there was still a lot of work to be done. Roderick declined to allow MarketWatch to interview SCO executives, nor to provide sales figures for the first few days of sales.
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"The OCS will not publish statistics at the moment," he wrote in a statement. "We will say that the reaction to the legalization of cannabis has resulted in a high volume of orders."
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The threat of a Canada Post workers' strike, the country's post office, complicates the work of Ontario and other provinces that operate online retail stores and currently dispatches the vast majority of legal weeds . And brick-and-mortar stores will not open until April at the earliest, according to earlier statements by the Ontario government.
"Ontario should have allowed the retail trade to be open the same day," said Corey Herscu, RNMKR PR's chief executive, specializing in cannabis communications. "They lost a very good chance of doing things right, establishing a benchmark. I think there could have been a lot of good ways to show other countries how Canada can lead. "
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Some provinces, such as Nova Scotia, released sales figures for October 17, before the usual quarterly publication of provincially administered liquor stores, which also sell cannabis. Nova Scotia, the telephone spokesperson, said on the phone that Nova Scotia had sold more than $ 600,000 ($ 778,000) on the first day, and stores in major metropolitan areas continued to sell queue until the third day of legal sales.
"The first online customers have received their orders," she said Friday, adding that many customers had done so the next day.
But Nova Scotia was struggling to get a pot. Of the 3.75 million grams ordered by provincial buyers, Nova Scotia received less than 40% of licensed producers. The stores are completely immune to capsules and oils – because they first had small quantities, says Ware – and saw shortages of small packages of pre-rolled pots and joints.
Retail stores in Alberta, operated by private entities, also suffered from supply shortages. Reached by phone late Friday, Alcanna Inc.
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CEO James Burns said that for the company's first orders at the five retail stores in Alberta today, it also received about 40% of the desired quantity of product. The first order was 10 days before October 17 and the company placed its second order on Wednesday, which should arrive soon or early next week.
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Demand has exceeded expectations and the company plans to open many more retail outlets, Burns said.
"I was surprised," he said. "We knew it would be a big rush on Wednesday but we did not expect it to continue on Thursday and Friday.Our stores go from 10 to 22 hours, Saturday will be exactly the same and we did not think it would would last as long. "
Burns added that after Wednesday, there were more women and older people doing their shopping. Although the demand was larger than expected, the operations went smoothly, he said.
"We had 230 stores on Tuesday," said Burns, referring to the liquor stores he operates. "We had 235 on Wednesday. [Legalization] is a big problem, but it's not a big problem either. "
Although it is difficult to determine the initial sales, Shopify Inc., a company based in Canada,
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– Helps manage provincial online sites in Ontario, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, as well as outlets managed by Canopy Growth Corp.
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among other things, was able to quantify the huge demand for the recently available legal drug. A spokeswoman said the company was processing "more than 100 transactions per minute" across the country and was planning millions of orders during the first week of legalization.
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Despite the difficulties faced by some to obtain cannabis on October 17, the celebrations were not lacking. There have been industry events in Toronto including many of the big pot companies. At an evening sponsored by Leafly, pot lovers, industry leaders and others came together to watch a large artificial marijuana flower fall from the ceiling at midnight. Security was tight at the event and, as with other celebrations, cannabis use was not present, at least officially.
Enthusiasts gathered for a "cigarette" in a large park called Trinity-Bellwoods near downtown. Around 4:20 pm On Wednesday, Eastern Time, at least a hundred people gathered under a pouring rain to commemorate the day, including a person dressed in a kangaroo suit sporting an oversized oversized seal.
Party-goers smoked joints, used vapes and bangs without the visible presence of the police. While it was a celebration of the first day of legal marijuana sales in Canada, few people commented that the pot they smoked must have been bought illegally because the Ontario online store did not have still started to be delivered.
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