NEW SYSTEMS: CAURD Coalition connects businesses from across cannabis supply chain
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usinesses in the cannabis industry across New York are working to move operations that would have once been illegal to the forefront of a growing enterprise.
With the first retail dispensaries to receive Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary licenses approved for operation across the state’s regions, networks are beginning to sprout between cannabis growers and retailers whose dealings are now legitimate. Businesses, including the state’s 165 total now-operation legal dispensaries, are joining together in trade unions and coalitions statewide as the industry grows.
Jayson Tantalo of Flower City Hydroponics in Fairport is the vice president of operations for the New York CAURD Coalition, a group of over 100 businesses across the entire New York cannabis supply chain, from growers to front-end retailers. The coalition includes both CAURD licensees and applicants, he said.
“It’s a collaboration over competition thing,” Tantalo told the Daily Orange in January. “The opportunity to sell legal cannabis, for us, that’d be of tremendous value, because that’s what I’ve been doing since before I can remember.”
New York state began working toward a legal, regulated market for recreational cannabis in November, with the issuance of the first Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary licenses. In the first round, 36 businesses were approved for a license, with 28 of which owned by entrepreneurs with or those with relatives who have prior marijuana-related convictions in New York. The equity-based plan is part of the state’s Seeding Based Initiative, which seeks to reverse the harmful effects of marijuana criminalization.
“We started in 2019 as a hemp farm, and really, the hemp market kind of fell out, almost as soon as we got into it,” said Lee Buttolph, chief executive officer of Tap Root Fields farm in Skaneateles. “So the cannabis has been a great opportunity for us. As of last summer, we were given a conditional cultivators license, the regulated THC cultivator license.”
Buttolph said that while he’s optimistic about the state of cannabis in New York, there are still challenges to doing business in the state’s largely uncharted cannabis industry.
“The first [challenge] is the regulatory side to it. Because it is a new market that is changing pretty regularly. We have conditional regulations. I think one of the hardest parts has been figuring out where…we spend money when we don’t know [if regulations will change]. I’m not being overly critical of the state, though, I probably could be if I wanted to- it takes time to build out a brand new regulated market.”
Jeremy Rivera, the New York CAURD Coalition’s executive director, said he’s also pleased to see the cannabis market grow into a legal, regulated industry in the state, and recalled how the ‘cannabis universe’ looked before legalization, when businesses like his were illegal.
Rivera was involved in this “legacy market,” which Tantalo defined as the pre-legalization market, and had a cannabis conviction. He was released from prison in 2018, he said.
It's kind of cool to see an emerging market open up and be a pioneer at the forefront of it, especially something that had such a bad stigma. It's (had) such a bad social effect on people from our neighborhoods.Jeremy Rivera, executive director of the New York CAURD Coalition
Now, Rivera serves on the board of a group dedicated to connecting legal cannabis professionals.
“It’s kind of cool to see an emerging market open up and be a pioneer at the forefront of it, especially something that had such a bad stigma,” Rivera said. “It’s [had] such a bad social effect on people from our neighborhoods.”
Buttolph is a member of the Cannabis Association of New York, a trade union that aims to bring New York businesses together and grow the cannabis industry community. He called CANY an “industry leader,” and said the union has seen a rapid growth in operations since the CAURD license rollout began.
“[CANY] has this really great community of farmers, processors, retailers, and, I think even more importantly, has a big following of people that want to do those things,” Buttolph said. “It brings together a lot of people who are interested in getting into this market.”
Buttolph said more people are getting interested in participating in the cannabis market now that full legalization is within sight, and also emphasized how the new market is ensuring equity.
“There’s a whole bunch of other people in this community – disabled veterans, women, minorities, that we’d like to see getting a first crack at the marketplace,” he said.
The initial rollout of the CAURD licenses has included people with minimal business experience, meaning that getting dispensaries up and running has been a slow process, Buttolph said. Still, and despite more work to be done to cultivate a thriving industry in the state, he said New York has taken the right first steps to establishing an equitable cannabis market.
“You gotta start somewhere, and the state’s starting somewhere, right?” he said. “It’s going to a deserving group – these people disproportionately affected by past cannabis laws, which threw a lot of people in jail for no reason.”