Research /Research
Florida Just Issued 22 Cannabis Licences Worth a Fraction of What They Used to Be
It took 1,232 days. Fourteen of the winners can’t be tied to any known cannabis operator. And the last bare licence to trade in Florida went for $9 million — down from $55 million three years earlier.
On 11 September 2026, the Florida Department of Health signed final orders granting 22 medical-marijuana treatment centre licences. They are numbered MMTC-2026-0029 through MMTC-2026-0050. In one afternoon the state went from 27 licensed operators to 49 — the largest single expansion in the programme’s history.
The application window had closed on 28 April 2023. That is 1,232 days from application to licence.
Nobody has opened a store.
How a five-day window took three and a half years
Seventy-four applicants competed for 22 licences in a five-day window in April 2023, sized to Florida’s then-800,000 patient population. Letters of intent went out on 26 November 2024. Thirteen rejected applicants challenged the scoring at the Division of Administrative Hearings. In May 2026 the administrative law judge recommended that the Department rescore the applications. The Department rejected that recommendation and issued all 22 licences anyway.
Appeals were expected within thirty days.
Who actually won
Eight of the 22 can be tied to a recognisable cannabis operator from public reporting:
| Entity | Brand | Home state |
|---|---|---|
| STIIIZY Florida, LLC | STIIIZY | California |
| Theory Wellness of Florida LLC | Theory Wellness | Massachusetts |
| Star Buds Florida LLC | Star Buds | Colorado |
| KCOF, LLC | Klutch Cannabis | Ohio |
| Wachovia Holdings LLC | Greenlight | Missouri |
| Florida Sports Consultants, Inc. | Belushi’s Farm | Oregon |
| King Palms, Inc. | King Palms | reported California |
| The Flower Shop FL, LLC | The Flower Shop | reported Arizona |
Not one of them is a Florida company.
The fourteen nobody has identified
The other fourteen winners are: A Good Decision LLC. Alamanda Farms LLC. East Coast Packers LLC. FG Operating Florida LLC. Gates Housing Group LLC. Global Investment Group Inc. Green Point Research LLC. Healing Greene FL LLC. O’Donnell Landscapes Inc. Pioneer Growers of Florida Inc. Pure Beauty Farms Inc. RAAB LLC. Statewide Property Holdings FL LLC. Sunfest Herbs LLC.
We could not tie any of them to a named cannabis operator from a credible public source. Several read like established Florida agricultural businesses — Pure Beauty Farms is the name of a long-running Miami-Dade ornamental nursery, Pioneer Growers evokes the Belle Glade farm belt, East Coast Packers a produce operation. That would be consistent with a statute that originally favoured licensed Florida nurserymen. But we could not confirm those links, and we are not going to assert them. Florida corporate filings would resolve most of these names, and that is the obvious next piece of reporting.
For now: more than half the largest licence expansion in Florida history went to entities whose backers are not public.
What a Florida licence used to be worth
Florida has never had a liquid market in licences — roughly twenty transactions in a decade — but the disclosed prices track the sector’s capital cycle almost perfectly.
2017–2019, the nursery era. Aphria seeded Liberty Health Sciences with $25 million in 2017. iAnthus paid $48 million for GrowHealthy in 2018. Green Thumb paid $98.2 million for KSGNF later that year — a licence, a Homestead grow and six stores.
2021, the peak. Ayr paid roughly $290 million for Liberty Health Sciences and its 387-acre Gainesville campus. Eight weeks earlier, Cresco had paid $213 million for Bluma Wellness at a 29% premium. In September of the same year, Planet 13 paid $55 million for a bare licence — no stores, no revenue, divested by Harvest as a condition of the Trulieve merger. That is the purest measure of scarcity value Florida has ever produced.
2022–2026, the collapse. MedMen exited at $63 million, $16 million below its announced price. Planet 13 resold that same bare licence for $9 million. Columbia Care’s Cannabist sold fourteen stores and two production facilities to an Arizona-led joint venture for $5 million — $3 million cash and a $2 million note.
By 2026 the transactions had stopped being purchases at all. SNDL took Surterra through strict foreclosure, wiping roughly $842 million of Parallel debt. Vireo is acquiring FLUENT partly by converting about $30 million of debt into equity.
One licence, two prices, three years
Licence MMTC-2016-0006 sold for $55 million in September 2021 and $9 million in January 2024. Same licence. Same state. Eighty-four percent markdown.
Four things happened in between. Scarcity ended — once the April 2023 cycle made 22 more licences inevitable, the option value of incumbency evaporated years before the licences actually issued. The economics stopped supporting the price: patients plateaued near 941,000 while the store count kept climbing, and an eighth now averages about $20, among the cheapest in America. Capital markets closed, so the distressed sellers of 2024 met creditors instead of strategics. And adult-use failed twice — Amendment 3 took 55.9% against a 60% threshold in 2024, and the 2026 initiative died on signature validation in March.
Every Florida licence was priced partly on an adult-use conversion that has not come and cannot before 2028.
So what is a 2026 licence worth?
None has traded, so there is no market price. But the comparables bracket it.
The cleanest recent mark for bare paper is the $9 million Fino deal — and twenty-two arrived at once rather than one. Cannabist’s fourteen operating stores plus two factories went for $5 million, which caps what a licence alone can be worth. The application fee under the new permanent rule is $146,000, and the bond is $5 million, due within ten business days of the award.
Then the build. Green Thumb spent roughly $20 million renovating a single Ocala facility. The operators who supply 100-plus stores run 350,000 to 750,000 sq ft of cultivation. A new licensee opening in 2027 faces all of that against a patient base growing under 2% a year.
The working conclusion: single-digit millions as bare paper. What the holder is really buying is a 2028 adult-use call option with a multi-million-dollar annual carry. That is a very different asset from the one Ayr bought in 2021.
The clock the 22 are now on
Five million dollars in bond or letter of credit within ten business days. Cultivation authorisation requested within 180 days. Processing within 270. Dispensing within 365.
The first stores are realistically a 2027 event, opening into the flattest patient market Florida has had since the programme began. The March 2027 cultivation deadline will be the first honest test of which of these twenty-two are actually funded.
Methodology: licence numbers and entity names from the OMMU MMTC registry, which shows the 22 licences with "Initial Licensure" status but does not publish an issuance date; the 11 September date and licensing conditions come from trade-press reporting of the final orders. Deal values are as disclosed by the parties; where a Florida-attributable figure was never broken out of a larger multi-state transaction, it is marked undisclosed rather than estimated. Fourteen licensees could not be attributed to a named operator and are reported as unidentified. By Greg Silverstein · @sourcatjack · @newyork420week.
