When I spoke with Cheech & Chong’s team in 2025, the tone leaned more toward business planning than cultural throwback, which makes sense at this stage of the industry.
But there’s still room for a cultural fight. On one side: a retail landscape dominated by multistate operators (MSOs) that carve out protected territories and lean on regulatory power instead of brand building. On the other side: a legacy cannabis brand trying to stitch together a national network of independent dispensaries without becoming the thing they’re critiquing.
The weapon, they insist, is IP licensing, not empire-building.
“We’ve got a handful of MSOs that raised a huge amount of money and they’ve kind of been able to wall off the states they operate in. It’s pretty protectionist,” says president Brandon Harshbarger. “The model we’re giving to smaller independent operators is a way to take an iconic brand and lay it across their store… and compete on something other than just license power.”
Instead of buying stores, Cheech & Chong’s Cannabis Company is selling an overlay:
branding, design, data, marketing, and a bit of cultural gravity.
Retailers keep ownership. C&C takes a 6% royalty and tries to drive a 20–30% lift at the register.
“We don’t need to become an MSO,” says co-founder and CEO Jonathan Black. “The OPEX to become an MSO and the state lines doesn’t fit the goals of this company. When we started, the goal was to get products with consumer confidence into every consumer’s hands, no matter where they are. Hemp gave us the bridge; retail completes it.”
They tested the concept quietly in Massachusetts a year and a half ago, with three locations in non-glamorous markets and a parallel launch of their hemp drinks. The numbers were good enough to scale. Today the company counts 8 stores in Montana, 1 in Oklahoma, 3 in Massachusetts, 3 in Maine and 1 in Guam.
collector’s poster nods to Cheech & Chong’s 50+ years with the plant
In total, they now have fifteen stores operating or in build-out, with a target of 100 agreements in 12–18 months.
Black claims early partners are 20–30% up versus pre-branding, even after the royalty. The promise: a recognizable storefront, national marketing, data tools via Headset, and something that most mom-and-pop shops never get—a defined exit strategy.
“We’re not buying a chain of dispensaries and throwing it under our umbrella,” he says. “We’re partnering with them, building with them, and giving them a path to a liquidity event. For a lot of these operators, their only hope was maybe getting big enough to be bought by an MSO. We’re trying to build a different outcome.”
Brands vs. Muscle
I asked Harshbarger what’s actually working in cannabis right now:
“Brands are working,” he says. “There are only a handful of real brands you see operating coast to coast. I think we’re one of them. Cookies, Stiiizy—brands that are in merch, in hemp-derived products, in beverages, in retail, and in the traditional dispensary market.”
What’s not working, in his view, are the companies that bet everything on regulatory leverage and local political influence.
“Some of the more traditional MSOs focused more on the regulatory localized power they have and not necessarily on building a brand. Over time, that’s going to defeat them. Schedule III will occur, limitations will fall away, and this becomes a coast-to-coast business. If you don’t have a recognizable brand, you’re going to have a difficult time evolving in cannabis.”
C&C is betting that when the walls come down, brands plus community-rooted independents will be more adaptable than giant, rigid structures.
The Hemp Ban and the Illicit Market
Black and Harshbarger have recently been in D.C. They met with Senator Rand Paul in Kentucky. They’ve talked to House members. They think the Hemp Ban idea is a policy mistake with classic prohibitionist fingerprints.
“I do think it is absolutely a mistake,” Black says. “You’re talking about, depending on the source, a $70–90 billion impact for hemp. Hemp has been a way to meet traditional consumers where they are—at mass retailers like Total Wine, ABC, Circle K, Target.”
Someone who will never set foot in a dispensary might try a 5–10 mg hemp beverage in a familiar grocery or bottle-shop setting. That becomes either an alternative to alcohol or a first step into the broader cannabis ecosystem.
They argue that killing the path won’t make people safer. You just lose visibility and ID checks.
“A ban works like this,” Black says. “When you ban something, what you’re doing is shoving it over to the illicit market. And I’ll tell you what drug dealers don’t do.”
Although he is as concerned as his partner, Harshbarger is also optimistic about the future regulation of hemp, perhaps as a result of those meetings.
“Prohibition never works. We got a long way down the field before a handful of select opposition managed this last-minute challenge. It’ll still impact the hemp category, but in the end, I think we’ll get to a federal bill that lets hemp operate at scale without this constant ‘what if they close the loophole next year’ anxiety.”
For C&C, hemp is a core part of a three-legged flywheel: Hemp beverages and edibles in mainstream retail, direct-to-consumer channels, and dispensary partners on the cannabis side.
Designing Against Sterility
Creative director Jasmine Marin is the one charged with making the adaptation, which is customized for every partner store. And she does the job on site, meaning that she will be visiting dozens of stores in a very short time.
display fully outfitted ‘dollhouse’ Dispensoria mock-ups
Fortunately, she’s young enough for the travel load.
At 33, she’s younger than a lot of Cheech & Chong’s original fanbase, but she’s grown up inside the universe. Cheech is her dad.
“We’re drawing on the rich visual history of Cheech & Chong and the time they came up—mostly the ’70s, creeping into the ’80s,” she says. “We’re taking from that period a lot of fun, eclectic styles and textures. The spaces are light-hearted and humorous, and they look like they came together accidentally, but there’s a lot of thought behind it.”
For C&C fans, she prepares “moments of surprise and delight”.
“We do play on nostalgia,” she admits. “There are references to the movies, but if you don’t know them, it doesn’t hurt the design. It still looks cool. Fans get the Easter eggs; everyone else just feels comfortable.”
The company has 7.6 million TikTok followers, most of whom are obviously not 1970s stoners.
“The creative we deploy on TikTok dovetails with what that younger demographic is watching and enjoying,” Harshbarger says. “At the same time, the brand works in a Total Wine in Texas or a vape shop in Florida. The goal is that, wherever you encounter it, you feel safe and comfortable buying it.”
If their reverse licensing strategy works, Marin is about to spend a lot more time in airports. “My goal is to at least get status on an airline by the end of the year,” she laughs.
A Network Instead of an Empire
Under all the branding language, C&C offers:
- A 6% royalty based on sales
- A store redesign and brand guide tailored to each space
- Access to Headset data, live menus and performance analytics
- National marketing that funnels hemp and DTC customers into partner dispensaries
- A long-term exit strategy tied to revenue performance
The company offers two paths for retailers: Cheech & Chong’s Dispensoria, which is a full-store rebrand; and Flowered by Cheech & Chong, which works as a co-branded shop-in-shop for operators who want to keep their existing identity.
Dispensoria in Massachusetts
In return, they get coast-to-coast presence without owning licenses or going vertical.
“MSOs might say they’re ‘just cannabis,’” Black adds, “but they sell hemp products like we do. They sell drinks like we do. We just built around brand power and smart partners instead of building infrastructure and then trying to buy culture later.”
For now, Cheech & Chong’s team is betting that in a market squeezed by policy, capital and consolidation, there’s still room for a network based on good popular brand work.
Photos courtesy Cheech & Chong Cannabis Company
