Welcome to “A Market You Should Know,” MMLG’s ongoing series all about emerging cannabis markets that licensed operators and would-be licensees may want know more about. This week? We’re looking at Concord, California.
Concord Cannabis Licensing Application Snapshot
- The least you should know:
- Located about 5 miles east of the Bay Area, Concord is a suburb of nearly 130,000.
- With a BART stop and ready access to Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco, the town has become a hot spot for employees of the tech sector to reside in.
- The median household income in Concord is a hair below $82,000/year.
- Is cannabis legalized? It sure is. Concord recently passed an ordinance calling for several adult-use cannabis license categories.
- Manufacturing (up to 5 licenses, 2 of which have been issued to date)
- Distribution Type 11 (up to 2 licenses)
- Testing laboratories (no license limit)
- Microbusinesses without storefront retail (up to 4 licenses [including those with storefront retail–maximum of 2, and non-storefront retail–maximum of 2])
- Storefront retail (up to 3 businesses)
- Non-storefront retail (up to 3 businesses)
- Microbusinesses with storefront retail (up to 2 businesses)
- Crucially for the categories, Concord is doing two different things. For manufacturing, distribution, testing, and microbusinesses without storefront retail categories these will all be on a first-come first-serve basis. Storefront retail, non-storefront retail and microbusinesses with storefront retail, will have a competitive application.
- The city’s RFP and merit-based competitive application criteria are on hold until this fall due to the pandemic. Concord has tentatively set an RFP release date for 10/5/2020, but this is subject to change with the pandemic.
While we anticipate more cities and towns in California opening due to revenue shortfalls due to Covid; Concord, in the MMLG blogger’s estimation, represents a nice opportunity and (slightly) lower cost to entry for an operator looking to enter into the greater Bay Area. Curious about applying? Reach out to MMLG today.