Reword and rewrite the following article in HTML, use a hip journalistic writing style and make the heading statements in H3 or bold font where necessary: 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.
True Heads: Designed to promote the three new Dispensoria outlets in Massachusetts, thiscollector’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 b
