The marijuana industry's first $1 billion "unicorn" startup — now the world's largest publicly traded cannabis company— is joining forces with a beer industry giant.
On Monday, Constellation Brands, the owners of Corona and Modelo, announced it acquired a 9.9% stake in cannabis holding company Canopy Growth. The beer behemoth paid $191 million for its stake in Canopy Growth, Canada's biggest producer of medical marijuana.
Founded in 2014, Canopy Growth likens itself to the Procter & Gamble of pot. Several cannabis brands fall under its umbrella and cater to different user preferences. The company supplies the drug to about a third of the roughly 200,000 medical marijuana customers in Canada.
Canopy Growth grows, trims, processes, packages, and ships marijuana products out of several properties across the Great White North. Take a look inside the company's headquarters.
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Canopy Growth has greenhouses across Canada, but its headquarters are based in a once-abandoned Hershey chocolate factory in the small town of Smiths Falls, Ontario.
The company supplies the drug to about a third of Canada's 200,000 medical marijuana patients. It is the world's largest publicly traded cannabis company.
Bruce Linton, CEO of Canopy Growth, founded the company because he thought a vertically integrated company — one that grows marijuana in addition to processing it for oils and other products and packaging it for shipment — would give him better control over quality.
Vertically integrated companies are also able to offer their products more cheaply, since they cut out the middle men in growing and distribution.
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