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Peter Horvath does not particularly like the idea of a cannabis cafe. He does not like a lounge either — or a bar, or any place to buy and sit and use cannabis.

“It sounds like a repulsive experience to me,” the chief executive of Green Growth Brands, a cannabis producer with a burgeoning retail division, said over the phone from Columbus, Ohio.

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Low-margin cafes and smokey consumption lounges, Horvath said, are just impractical. “So how do you make money?” he asked. “It’s like saying, ‘I want to own bars.’ Have you ever watched a Bar Rescue episode? What a mess bars are.”

For decades, the gritty, hazy coffeeshops of Amsterdam have been an archetype of legal cannabis sales. But with restrictions on where you can consume cannabis yet to be sorted out in Canada — and indoor smoking likely a non-starter — the café’s cachet has been giving way to another paradigm: the sleek, sophisticated retail outlet.