When Sam Sayed opened his boutique-style cannabis dispensary Flower Haze, he envisaged the small business blossoming into a bustling café, where customers could enjoy a hot cup of coffee and stay a while.
Three years later, he’s still waiting on the provincial government to allow his vision to become a reality.
Flower Haze, near the corner of Bank Street and Heron Road, was inspired by the coffee shops Sayed visited as a tourist in Holland that also sold cannabis.
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“I figured it would be cool to kind of have something like this in Ottawa,” Sayed recalls. “So I was on a mission to do something different in the height of recreational cannabis.”
What he didn’t want was to open the kind of illegal café that skirts regulations and had existed even before legalization. So, he set aside a small lounge area at the front of his 3,500 square foot dispensary with the idea that it might become a café once the province loosened restrictions on dispensaries selling anything other than cannabis or cannabis-related food and drink products.
At that time, legal consumption lounges in Ontario looked like a real possibility. The Ontario government had launched consultations on the issue in February 2020. However, nearly three years later, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General has yet to announce any decision based on those consultations.
Sayed believes he has a workaround. He says he’s confident he’ll weather the current glut of cannabis dispensaries in the market since his customer base is solid and sales remain stable, despite another dispensary opening on his doorstep. And, in the meantime, he will open an entirely separate non-cannabis café adjacent to his dispensary to benefit from some of the foot traffic Flower Haze has brought to the area.
“I’m just going to focus on premium coffee and have some health-conscious foods like vegan desserts and gluten-free desserts,” he says. “Then I’m going to operate the coffee shop right next to my dispensary. And then at some point in life, if they do allow consumption, it’s just a matter of opening them up to each other.”
Sayed says that most dispensary owners recognize that consumption locations are the next logical step. He plans to open his café by April of this year.
Susan Dupej is a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Hospitality, Food and Tourism Management at the University of Guelph and president of the newly formed Canadian Cannabis Tourism Alliance. She agrees that retailers are looking to add value in a competitive marketplace and legal consumption spaces are the next big thing.
“Look to the States,” she says. “The United States is going ahead in a number of different states on regulations surrounding spaces of cannabis consumption. And that’s where the success of this lives, in the regulations around consumption.”
Dupej says it is not enough to legalize cannabis consumption; there also needs to be social venues outside of private events.
“The limited regulations around consumption do not support commercial activity occurring in any way around cannabis consumption. And this is what is holding back the industry’s growth, both cannabis and (cannabis) tourism industries alike,” Dupej says.
The Ontario Chamber of Commerce has made recommendations around easing consumption restrictions to bolster the cannabis industry and cannabis tourism, most recently in a joint report with the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario. A report by Deloitte Canada estimated the cannabis industry contributed $43.5 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product from 2018 to 2021, with $13.3 billion going to Ontario’s GDP.
For Sayed, it’s all about the branding and design that are a big part of the boutique experience he has tried to fashion at Flower Haze.
“I’ve done this properly and we need business people like us to do this properly because it is a new, fairly new industry, and there’s a lot of stigma associated with it,” he says.
