The cannabis industry has taken the business sector by storm and is projected to grow to $23 billion by 2022. Despite it being illegal under federal law, this business has been legalized by more than 30 states in the United States. Its legalization has been met with emerging opportunities that extend far beyond cultivating and dispensaries. However, you need significant capital to get the success that you desire. According to Drew Breuninger, “There’s no reason not to expect huge inflows into the cannabis industry from institutional capital providers and more traditional financing institutions with the trending regulatory environment.” Thus, you need to find alternative funding sources, for instance from close friends or family. There are so many opportunities that you can put your money into. Here is a list of potential emerging opportunities:
- Extraction business
This opportunity involves the extraction of concentrates such as oil from raw plant material. The extract that you get can be used to make compounds such as cannabinoids (CBD) and Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). After you get these products, you can sell them to consumers who can use them either for cooking to make cannabis-infused meals or as a vaporizer. Cannabinoids have various benefits and can be used to relieve pain, reduce depressive symptoms, alleviate acne, and manage cancer symptoms. Tetrahydrocannabinol on the other hand is used to enhance appetite, manage insomnia, nausea, and muscle spasticity. It, however, causes a high sensation compared to cannabinoids. With all these benefits, you will have a market for these two products once you extract them. Additionally, you can also sell your products to manufacturers who pioneer in value addition to make edibles. However, for you to go into the extraction business, you require to purchase the right machinery and get the appropriate expertise so that you end up with a high-quality product.
- Value addition
Another interesting business venture is value addition. Through this process, you can make a broad range of edible recreational products such as cookies, brownies, and gummy bears or medical products like oil capsules. You could also make beverages infused with cannabis, vape pens, and topicals. Additionally, you could develop cannabis flowers. However, before you settle on the product that you want to develop, you may want to first understand what your target market needs. You may start making cannabis flowers and yet the demand is for edibles for recreational purposes or medicinal products. Therefore, you need to liaise with a cannabis consulting firm to help you understand the bigger opportunities that are there. A consulting firm will offer advice and solutions to cannabis financing because value addition is a costly affair. This is because you require an operational facility and machinery to create the products that you want.
- Research-Breeding
As a breeder, you will be committed to developing cannabis strains through various experimental procedures such as hybridization. Note that for you to become a successful breeder, you need to have expertise in fields like biotechnology and molecular biology to create high-quality strains. In case you didn’t know, dispensaries, and cultivators are going to be reliant on you to make them the right strain. The beauty about breeding is that you get to experiment with various plant traits and contribute to creating resistant and high yielding plants. Also, your innovation will contribute to producing generalizable knowledge for the vast global population.
- Ancillary provider
You can also start providing business to business (B2B) services to other sectors in the cannabis industry. Establishing an ancillary business allows you to explore your full potential and skills in an exponentially growing industry. But what is an ancillary business? This is any business venture affiliated with the cannabis sector where you do not directly touch the plant. Ancillary businesses include providing legal services, consultancy, cannabis security, cannabis contractor, marketing, insurance, and public relations. This opportunity requires you to have sufficient funds of approximately more than $100,000 for you to pull it off. Fortunately, given how popular the cannabis business is becoming, the increased profit margins, and growing legalization, you are bound to make a fortune from providing these services.
Conclusion
The opportunities in the cannabis sector are endless! Depending on what you wish to do, you could go into extraction, value addition, breeding, or ancillary services. When well-executed, all these ventures have the potential to make you wealthy. So, pick a business and get into it today!
