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“We are extremely excited about opening our flagship store in New Jersey,” “Berner,” the co-founder and CEO of Cookies, said. “Our team has taken their time with attention to detail — not only with the build-out of the store, but also with the product, which has gotten more and more dialed-in from our work with our cultivation partners in Jersey. I’m blessed to be touring on the East Coast and have the chance to visit the store prior to opening. I can’t wait for our New Jersey community to experience our first Cookies store in New Jersey.”
One of the most globally respected cannabis companies on the market, Cookies recently announced new licensing agreements with operator TerrAscend to bring its products to New Jersey. Established by rapper Berner and his cultivation partner Jai in 2008, Cookies offers a collection of over 150 proprietary cannabis varieties and product lines, everything from flower and vapes to CBD and medicinal mushrooms. The brand’s success in its native California has been explosive and revolutionary for the cannabis industry; now it’s time to take the East Coast by storm.
Legal cannabis dispensary operators and industry members said they fear more targeted looting as well as attacks by professional criminals this week amid national civil unrest over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Several dozen dispensaries in California and two in Oregon were subject to a wide range of criminal acts over the weekend, including vandalism, ransacking, and targeted professional robberies. At least one cannabis producer and a licensed distributor in California also reported being robbed.
The rapper doesn’t condemn the people who broke into the store. Instead, he argues that human life is more valuable than any building.
“It’s extremely unfortunate what happened to our store tonight on Melrose. But as a human living in the world we’re living in today, I cannot expect anything less until justice is served,” Berner said in the video posted to his 1.3 million Instagram followers. “We can rebuild our store, but you cannot bring someone back to life.”
The problem, many critics say, is that equity programs suffer from the exact same failings as every other business effort in cannabis. In order to stand a chance of winning a permit—let alone founding a viable business—Black and brown businesspeople must still find well-capitalized partners. Almost always, this means finding white partners—rendering equity programs little more than a cynical example of tokenism at best.
