“I just want to say one word to you, just one word … Plastics!” This is the phrase Mr. McGuire told a young Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film The Graduate. His sagely advice applied not only to Hoffman, but to an audience that would soon become the plastics companies’ path to billions of dollars of profits — at great expense to our planet. Hindsight is truly a great gift!

But it is not too late to realize the investment opportunity of hemp. Of the 26 disclosure topics Regennabis reviews when conducting an ESG Materiality Assessment for a cannabis company, with nine identified as being “Material” in the retail vertical, four of the nine can be directly impacted by the type of packaging used by the dispensary owner. These are:

• Product Quality & Safety

• Customer Welfare

• Selling Practices & Product Labeling

• Management of the Legal & Regulatory Environment

It is perhaps understandable then that packaging — and being able to stay on top of regulations pertaining to packaging in the cannabis industry — can present a sizable risk for dispensary-owning cannabis companies. Yet with each risk lies an opportunity.

From a corporate and product branding perspective, being an early adopter of non-petroleum-based plastics (the type now being developed, produced, and manufactured by innovators like Hippo Packaging and Dama Distributing) provides the forward-thinking dispensary owner with a significant opportunity to show their environmental smarts in a market constantly seeking such leadership.

If only hindsight were foresight. Yet, to some, it is! In the U.S., the recent passing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) opens-up a number of opportunities for hemp farmers. Producers can benefit from $370 billion available to help push the economy toward cleaner energy sources.