Vertical Cannabis Companies Are Still Winning: A Veteran Industry Journalist on the 2026 Market

Editor's note: This article is adapted from a public interview on Cultivated Media's "This Morning in Cannabis: Live from Las Vegas" livestream with Chris Casacchia, a cannabis journalist who covered national retail for MJBizDaily for three years and has freelanced for the outlet since 2019.

The same six companies keep winning

If you look at the new licenses Texas just unveiled, you'll notice something: the same six companies you see over and over again, many of them public, many of them vertical. Casacchia's read on why is blunt: "It's not because it's a good idea. It's because it's the regulations — especially in Florida, this is what it is. In Texas, it's going to be the same."

The vertical model — one company owning cultivation, processing, and retail — is unusual outside cannabis. Casacchia says two things keep it alive: state-by-state regulations that favor it, and the lack of interstate commerce. "Once we have interstate commerce, the market will resolve itself — production will go to the lowest-cost states," he says. "Either you'll have hyper-local craft, or everything else will be where it's cheapest to produce."

That's the cut-flower model: only very high-end product stays domestic. Vertical companies are also starting to shed assets and exit states to find the "right mix" — a mixed picture, in other words, because nothing in cannabis is a straight line.

The tax-bill elephant

On the federal tax question, Casacchia points to the divide between operators: GTI is the anomaly that actually pays its taxes, while others carry enormous liabilities on their balance sheets — he cites Trulieve's roughly $600 million tax liability. "Not the way I would run a business," he says. "But it's a bet." And Texas's phase-two application process includes financial due diligence, which raises a real question: what does that look like for the list of applicants with big federal tax bills hanging over them?

New York's inversion scandal

His reporting on New York's product-inversion mess shows how a promising market stumbles. A manufacturer in upstate New York was charged with bringing untracked, untraced product into the regulatory system — even though New York technically doesn't require track-and-trace yet (the state's rollout of BioTrack has been slow). Regulators alleged the facility was effectively leased to big-name brands like Stiizy and Mfuse, who "borrowed" the license, which New York rules prohibit.

The aftermath follows a pattern he's seen in California for years: mass product recalls leave retailers holding the bag, forced to quarantine product they can't sell, then stuck in a slow fight to get money back from brands and processors. "A lot of times the retailers do get screwed in the process," he says. The deeper problem, he argues, is regulatory opacity: "They have not been transparent about what they exactly want — they're often just ghosting operators."

The hemp ban and the beverage path

On the hemp crackdown, Casacchia says the enforcement gap is the story: California's bans have no real enforcement mechanism, so they push good actors out while the people willing to break the law stay in. He's heard the Carolinas' state agencies have started raiding hemp stores even where it's technically legal.

His forecast for what survives: beverages. "If I was not making beverages, I'd be very concerned that's going to be the carve-out," he says. The big alcohol distributors — Southern Glazers, Total Wine — are already lobbying with a three-tier system in mind, and they have lawmakers' ears in a way cannabis never has. Red states unlikely to pass full legalization are a "pretty viable pathway" for low-dose (5-10 mg) hemp drinks in venues and bars. THC beverages, he notes, may have done more to normalize cannabis than anything else — they're already on menus at venues like Chicago's Salt Shed and Nashville bars, sold in non-alcoholic sections with nobody batting an eye.

What to watch

• Interstate compacts: Adam Smith, now running the Marijuana Policy Project, has pushed an interstate-compact idea — allowing commerce between two legal markets could be a "big step forward" without waiting on the feds.
• The hemp carve-out: watch which product lines get protected; beverages look favored over gummies and tinctures.
• Texas phase two: financial due diligence on applicants with massive federal tax liabilities is the test of whether "good company" actually matters.

Disclaimer: This article reports the views expressed by a journalist in a public interview. Market claims are as stated in the conversation and should be verified before acting on them.