The deal would result in a significant increase in the amount of cannabis being shipped from Canada to Israel in the coming years, pending receipt of regulatory approvals from Health Canada and the Israeli Ministry of Health.
Last year, only 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of dried cannabis was sent from Canada to Israel for medical or scientific purposes, while another 1 kilogram was approved but not shipped that year.
According to the terms of the deal, the Canadian company will supply Canndoc with “a guaranteed 3,000 kg of high-quality, indoor-grown dried flower product” by Dec. 31, 2021, the companies said in a news release.
The cannabis will be processed and distributed in the Israeli medical market.
Canndoc has an option to receive another 3,000 kilograms over the same period.
“The Agreement also contemplates, among other things, an opportunity for Organigram to launch branded medical products with Canndoc in the Israeli and EU markets, and grants exclusivity and related rights to Canndoc within the Israel market for a period of approximately 7.5 years,” the release notes.
Jefferies analyst Owen Bennett wrote in a note to investors that the deal is consistent with Organigram’s prudent approach to costs and capital allocation.
“(The deal) gives Organigram international exposure without significant spending needed in terms of acquisitions, capex or other investments,” he said.
Though the release cites “a vast export market,” the actual global export market for dried medical cannabis last year was small but growing fast.
The Netherlands and Canada, the top two cannabis exporters in 2019, shipped 4,370 kilograms and 3,740 kilograms of dried medical cannabis, respectively.
]]>Executives told Marijuana Business Daily there is no threat to supply chains at this time, and safety measures have been put into place for employees and consumers.
Spiritleaf CEO Darren Bondar said his 46 stores “experienced an unprecedented demand for cannabis over the weekend with sales up 20% over the previous one and a record number of customers served.
“The supply chain remains in place, stores are stocked and we have seen an uptick in edible purchases.” Spiritleaf is encouraging online ordering via click-and-collect programs in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.
In most of Canada, provinces retain monopolies over cannabis e-commerce with delivery. The click-and-collect program allows privately owned stores to take payment online so customers can pick up their orders in stores.
Ontario Up 80%
Sales surged week-over-week at Ontario’s monopoly online cannabis store, but some of that increased demand is attributable to lower prices.
The government-owned store aggressively dropped prices on some products as part of an ongoing drive to improve competitiveness.
Mike Ravkine, who operates the popular price-tracking and inventory tool WhatsMyPot, recorded significant price drops at the Ontario Cannabis Store.
“The last three days have seen a marked increase in volume in sales on OCS.ca and a high demand for our same day/next day delivery option where it is available,” Daffyd Roderick, OCS communications director, wrote in an email to Marijuana Business Daily.
“Some authorized retail stores are also reporting an increase in customer volume. Saturday saw almost 3,000 orders, an 80% increase over an average Saturday.”
The OCS’ 4,000 orders Sunday represent a 100% increase from the previous week, officials told MJBizDaily.
Roderick said the OCS has sufficient inventory to meet demand.
“We are working closely with our partners and currently delivering and receiving as per our normal schedule,” he said.
Physical stores in Ontario are also seeing an increase in orders, noted Sessions Cannabis CEO Steven Fry.
“Not unlike major grocery retailers, Sessions Cannabis has seen a significant increase in sales this week due to growing concerns regarding COVID-19 social distancing protocols,” he wrote in an email.
Compared to the previous week, Fry said the Sessions on the Beach location in Toronto saw approximately:
B.C. ‘Steady’
British Columbia’s online monopoly BC Cannabis Stores has not seen any new sales trends.
A spokesperson for the BC Liquor Distribution Branch (BCLDB), which operates the store as well as the province’s cannabis wholesale system, said there has been no change in sales online.
The BCLDB spokesperson also said sales on the wholesale side remain “very flat, steady.”
Alberta Cannabis, the only legal online store in the province, said it is not sharing any information.
Quebec Bump
Quebec’s monopoly online store also saw increased sales.
Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC), which is also the wholesaler for the province, said its website remains “fully functional and parcels are still being delivered.”
“Indeed, we have seen an increase in sales over the last days,” spokesman Fabrice Giguere wrote in an email to MJBizDaily.
Giguere said inventory levels, both online and in stores, are stable.
“We invite all customers returning from a trip abroad or who experience flu-like symptoms to do their shopping directly online,” he noted.
Safety first
Physical cannabis stores are taking measures to increase the health and safety of customers and employees to support social distancing.
“Sessions Cannabis is taking extra measures to ensure the safety of our customers and staff through increased cleaning and sanitation measures and we will continue to monitor the situation to ensure a safe shopping experience,” Fry said.
Bondar said Spiritleaf continues to follow all advice and government guidelines.
“All surfaces, door handles and employee stations are being sanitized throughout the workday to maintain a clean, safe environment for all of us,” he said.
“We encourage customers to check on store hours in the event that they may change to accommodate various staff members’ needs to take care of family members or who are returning from vacation and in self-isolation, which has been happening at a few locations across the country.
]]>In an interview on BNN Bloomberg Thursday, Ford said that pot producers didn’t have enough supply for Canadian retailers when recreational cannabis was legalized in Oct. 2018, which resulted in the province taking a more cautious approach to licensing marijuana stores.
“Maybe I’ll shoot back a little bit. They didn’t have the supply ready,” Ford said. “We’re doing it responsibly. We’re going to roll out the market and keep in mind it’s only been a little over a year and a bit and we’re opening up to the market.”
Ford said Ontario will soon have more cannabis stores open than the entire country combined, although he didn’t provide specifics on when that would take place. Ontario currently has 28 legal pot stores open, compared with 402 in Alberta.
The province recently ended an often-criticized lottery system in exchange for an open allocation of cannabis retail licences that should see at least 20 stores open per month as early as April. The province recently ended an often-criticized lottery system in exchange for an open allocation of cannabis retail licences that should see at least 20 stores open per month as early as April.
A spokesperson from the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, which regulates the licensing of cannabis stores, told BNN Bloomberg in an email it has received 600 applications for new pot shops licences, but said “many” of them had missing information, which would lead to processing delays.
“We’re going to open up stores,” Ford said. “We’re going to have more stores than all the provinces combined, so we’re going to make everything we can to help the cannabis industry.”
Several cannabis producer executives recently blamed Ontario for not having enough retail locations available for consumers to buy their products and resulted in those companies widely missing revenue expectations.
“We harp on Ontario simply because it is the biggest province and they are so far behind the leaders like Alberta,” said Glen Ibbott, chief financial officer at Aurora Cannabis Inc., during a conference call with analysts in November. Similar comments were made by Aphria Inc. and Canopy Growth Corp. executives.
Ford said he watches the evolution of the legal cannabis industry “on a daily basis” and is a strong believer in allowing the market to dictate how the industry evolves. He also said he wants to get rid of the illegal market and ensure that the industry can “prosper.”
“I know a lot of cannabis companies jumped into this with blindfolds on as far as I’m concerned and now they’re coming to reality,” Ford said. “By no means can you point a finger at one province. We encourage them and hopefully they’ll be able to fulfil their requirements.”
]]>It seems simple enough, but there’s a strange twist: producers will be legally required to first sell their cannabis to the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS), the province’s government-owned monopoly wholesaler, then buy it back from them before it can be sold on to the consumer.
The OCS could not say what the resulting markup would be or how much it would raise the price for consumers, though an email response states they are “… working to finalize details on how onsite retail stores (even despite covid 19 concerns) will operate and will share these with federally licensed producers in coming weeks.”
Under provincial law, producers can only sell cannabis intended for sale in Ontario to the OCS, and retailers can only buy cannabis from the OCS. There is no exception in the law if the producer and retailer are operated by the same company at the same location.
“If you have a farm-gate store and there’s no minimum price, what do you need the wholesaler for?” asks cannabis lawyer Matt Maurer.
“I can’t think, sitting here, off the top of my head, in a sort of fictional transaction, not a physical transaction, what is the point of a markup? If that is what is going to happen solely to get around the existing legislation, which requires it to be purchased from the OCS, then what is the markup for? What is the rationale behind it?”
Cannabis lawyer Trina Fraser points out that legal cannabis is still having problems competing with lower prices in the illegal market.
“If they are saying they intend to mark it up the same as if we’d taken physical possession, that I have an issue with,” Fraser says.
“It starts to get difficult to understand what the policy justifications for that are when we’re obviously struggling to displace the illicit market and match pricing, among other things, and you’re now charging for a service you’re not even providing, which is physical distribution.”
Finance ministry spokespeople did not respond to questions about what purpose the rule seemed to serve, or why the system is different from the one used for alcohol.
“The Cannabis Licence Act, 2018 states that retailers can only sell cannabis purchased from the Ontario Cannabis Store,” spokesperson Emily Hogeveen wrote. “The government will provide licensed producers with details in the future.”
Sales of wine or beer from production sites don’t work this way in Ontario — sales, though taxed and regulated, happen without a middleman.
Wineries, for example, sell directly to the consumer, though sales have to be reported to the LCBO, and prices can’t be lower than the LCBO’s for any given item, the Winery and Grower Alliance of Ontario’s Aaron Dobbin wrote in an e-mail.
Jordan Sinclair, vice-president of Canopy Growth, defended some level of markup.
“They still have to maintain the infrastructure of the OCS, and the farm gate is a part of that,” he says.
“They’re administering the entire market. They’re administering the inventory, they’re managing data, they’re managing the flow of cannabis back and forth. Obviously, there’s a logistical difference when the cannabis stays on-site, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s cannabis being sold in the province of Ontario.”
What are your thoughts on this news? Let us know in the comments below! Don’t forget to check out our collection of Cannabis vaporizers and accessories at https://vapemeet.ca/collections/vaporizers
]]>The online retailer experienced 2,000 transactions on Thursday in the hour after 70 products -- cannabis-infused chocolates, cookies, soft chews, mints, tea and vapes -- were made available at 9 a.m. local time.
Some products sold out within a half-hour, said the cannabis distributor's spokesperson Daffyd Roderick.
"At 8:59 a.m., we had 3,000 people in the lobby hitting refresh, waiting to get online, so there was obviously some excitement in the marketplace," he said.
"We were sold out of soft chew products within 25 minutes."
The rollout is part of Cannabis 2.0, where the country is allowing a second wave of products like edibles, extracts and topicals to hit the market following the October 2018 legalization of cannabis in Canada. The frenzied pace of sales online Thursday comes after the products first appeared on store shelves last week. Such items were approved for sale in Canada in mid-December, but several provinces, including Ontario, delayed their rollout.
When the OCS website was first launched and the first round of cannabis products went on sale in 2018, Roderick said the site experienced "high demand," causing online deliveries to take as long as five days to arrive. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in the first 24 hours the OCS processed 38,000 orders.
Roderick said the online debut of the edible and vape products went well, but acknowledged that there were "a few bumps."
"Because there were so many people simultaneously refreshing, their page would drop and then they would hit refresh a couple times and they would get back," he said.
"It's similar when you're buying concert tickets or anything else where everyone is online trying to do the same thing at the exact same moment, so we did face some challenges but that's completely sorted itself out now."
When shoppers Thursday did make it through to the site, which was down between 12:01 a.m. and 9 a.m. to prepare for the launch, Roderick said they were most interested in soft chews.
Several packs were priced for between $6.65 and $12.35 and came in flavours like raspberry vanilla, peach mango, pineapple orange, apple green tea and grapefruit hibiscus.
Roderick figured there popularity stemmed from soft chews having a "convenience factor" and because "not everybody loves chocolate."
There were only three kinds of chocolate left for shoppers by noon, when The Canadian Press reviewed the website.
Roderick would not share when more stock will arrive or how much of each product was available for sale, but said its allotment is equal to physical stores and the distributor has a limited supply it has been provided with by licensed producers.
"We know that they're doing their best to ramp up their production capacity and like everyone else, we're waiting and watching for when those products are going to come," he said. "The producers are very interested in getting these products to market, so they're working as quickly as they can."
The OCS expects cannabis topicals, concentrates and beverages to be sold in the coming months.
]]>October 17th 2019 will mark the first-year anniversary of Cannabis legalization here in Canada, but it also marks the beginning of something much bigger that will affect vapers everywhere. The Federal government has announced that it intends to legalize and regulate edible cannabis products, beverages, as well as cannabis extracts intended for ingestion and inhalation by no later than October 17th of this year.
They have outlined their proposed regulations and pending a 60-day review period that ends on February 20th, the public has a chance to voice their opinion. Here is what is currently on the table:
It’s no secret that the public has been vocal about their disappointment with the proposed regulations in the edible categories, but nobody is really talking about the extracts for inhalation – this is where vaping comes in. Unsurprisingly, vapable THC e-liquids, oils and extracts have been the stars of the cannabis black market for years now, but now that they will become legal, the market is predicted to explode.
What does this mean for vapers? The good news is that the majority of us vape for the harm reduction aspect, and this is a huge opportunity for cannabis users to do the same, and legally! Combustible cannabis may not contain the chemical additives found in cigarettes, but it is still full of tar and burning it is not the ideal method of consumption from a health perspective.
Also of note is the staggering amount of THC allowance proposed for these products. According to the chart above containers may contain up to 1000mg of THC at a maximum container size of 90ml. These numbers are much more “generous” than the proposed regulations for edibles or beverages which may explain why there hasn’t been nearly as much media attention.
Used in the proper devices these liquid extracts have the potential to be quite potent, to the benefit of more experienced users, but can easily be scaled down for those less experienced. Perhaps the best part about this product category is that the liquids (if regulated and tested correctly) will be much more consistent in their potency than dried flower. In fact, every bottle should be exactly the same. The importance of consistency for a new product in a new market is paramount, and coupled with detailed packaging and labeling will mean less harmful and more precise products for the cannabis market.
It remains to be seen how the launch of these new products will be received in the public, but once things are smoothed out we can expect them to change the way Cannabis is consumed along with an increase in demand for specialized vaping hardware across the country.
]]>