Shortages are short-term, insists Canopy Growth
Supply and demand market equilibrium coming
At least two Tweed stores in St. John’s were almost entirely sold out of products on Friday morning.
The Telegram contacted locations on Kenmount Road in the capital city and Commonwealth Avenue in Mount Pearl and learned that neither had any of the flowered bud or pre-rolled joints available. Both stores, however, were expecting a shipment in the morning and expected to be fully stocked again by the early afternoon.
The Tweed store in downtown St. John’s could not be reached.
The Telegram also contacted a couple of the independently owned cannabis dispensaries — namely the Wild Newfoundland Blueberry Cannabis Co in Portugal Cove-st. Philips and the Paradise Green Stop. Both say they were well-stocked with a variety of strain and sizes, with the latter suggesting another big order had just arrived in the morning and would be on the shelves later that day.
As for when customers can expect the Tweed supply to normalize, Jordan Sinclair, vice president in charge of communications for the parent company Canopy Growth, says the end is in sight.
“There’s enough capacity with plants in the ground and with the licenses we’ve just recently received to be able to confidently see an end to this period where there are shortages,” he says.
“Really, we’re looking at a system that’s just been stood up, it’s just getting going and the way that the license has been issued and the nature of the agricultural product is going to have a little bit of a lag before the market reaches that equilibrium of supply and demand.”
While there’s been a lot of discussion and media coverage of shortages across Canada, Sinclair says an angle that hasn’t been explored is what could have occurred if there had been too much supply when legalization came into effect on Oct. 17.
“If you think about Canopy, for example, we’ve invested close to a billion dollars across the country in all of our growing facilities. If we came out of the gate and there was too much cannabis — so there wasn’t enough demand in the market or people just preferred the black market — that would have been devastating for us as a business.”