Commercial cannabis is an arena populated by both celebrated figures and controversial business models. The top scorer in the entire GCT100, Berner, appears in the Business category. But our Select Panel of voters also ticked “none of the above” in the Distribution, Pharma and Public Companies sub-categories at double or even triple the rate they did in any other GCT100 sub-category. What does it all mean? There’s lots of money in legal cannabis, so perhaps it means the industry has arrived.

See all of the GCT100 nominees for Business.

CPG & Brands Winners

Gilbert ‘Berner’ Milam, Jr.

Co-Founder & CEO, Cookies
San Francisco, CA, United States

Gilbert Milam, Jr., a.k.a. Berner, is a hip-hop star, cannabis icon and the co-founder and CEO of Cookies. Over the past decade, he has built Cookies into a formidable international cannabis brand. Berner’s storied music career and social media influence have helped shaped Cookies’ global expansion, which he sees as a high-profile platform advocating for the normalization of cannabis. Cookies-branded stores, now located in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Israel and Thailand, have helped introduce other cannabis brands and players, catapulting them into the global industry. As the face of perhaps the most recognizable cannabis company on the planet, Forbes magazine recently featured Berner as the first cannabis executive ever on its cover.

MORE ABOUT BERNER…
“He actually showed me, like, real plants, and showed me how to cure and things like that stuff. Stuff I’d never seen and never really even knew about. He taught me about phenos and different genetics, and all of that stuff.”
— Wiz Khalifa, in an interview with LA Weekly

Nancy Whiteman

Co-Founder & CEO, Wana Brands
Boulder, CO, United States

Nancy Whiteman has been heralded as “The Queen of Legal Weed” by Inc. Magazine. Whiteman leads her company’s strategic vision and guides its growth into new and emerging markets. She also directs the development of partnerships and licensing agreements domestically and internationally. And her company just keeps growing—Wana has been at or near the top of market share for North American edibles brands for years. Last October, Canada’s Canopy Growth agreed to acquire Wana for $350 million once the U.S. federally legalizes cannabis. Whiteman is a member of the Colorado Cannabis Manufacturers Association, National Cannabis Industry Association, Cannabis Trade Federation and Marijuana Policy Project. She has been recognized for numerous awards including Forbes’ Most Influential People in Cannabis.

Kristi & Scott Palmer

Co-Founders, Kiva Confections
Alameda, CA, United States

Kristi and Scott Palmer are the co-founders of Kiva Confections, a leader in cannabis-infused edibles. To tackle the inconsistencies associated with edibles, Kristi Palmer set up shop with the help of her husband Scott in the kitchen of her childhood home in Northern California and Kiva was born. Today, their company’s award-winning, 40-plus products are available at more than 1,000 dispensaries in the U.S. and Canada, with sales expected to top $250 million this year. Concerned with a healthy regulatory environment for the industry, Kristi Palmer is a board member of the California Cannabis Industry Association and founding board member of the California Cannabis Manufacturers Association, a trade organization that advocates on behalf of cannabis manufacturers and producers.

Sebastian Solano
& Lukasz Tracz

Co-Founders & Co-CEOs, Jeeter
Palm Springs, CA, United States

Sebastian Solano & Lukasz Tracz are co-CEOs and co-founders of Jeeter, one of the industry’s most successful brands. Jeeter, the Southern Florida slang term for a joint, focuses on marketing pre-rolls with flower sourced from licensed cultivators. Solano’s and Tracz’s simple formula became a major success. The company now sells more pre-rolls than any other brand—around 3.5 million each month—lovingly hand-rolled by Jeeter’s nearly 1,200 employees in its California factory. Through clever branding, exclusive product drops, pop-ups events and celebrity endorsements by athletes like Dwyane Wade and Ricky Williams, Jeeter expects to top $1 billion in annual sales by 2025.

Aaron Morris

Co-Founder & CEO, Wyld
Clackamas, OR, United States

Aaron Morris and his partners Chris Joseph and Rene Kaza founded Wyld in an old farmhouse kitchen in Tumalo, OR in 2015, with the goal of creating a high-quality, plant-based cannabis edible that would appeal to a wide range of consumers. They bootstrapped the company to a leading position in Oregon’s market and then Morris led a rapid-fire expansion—by 2019, Wyld had become the largest gummy supplier in cannabis and one of the top brands in the industry.

Distribution Winners

Michael Beaudry

Founder, HERBL Solutions
Santa Rosa, CA, United States

Michael Beaudry is founder and CEO of HERBL Solutions, California’s largest cannabis supply chain company. Backed by a robust infrastructure, HERBL distributes to a 1,000+ licensed cannabis retailers in California and Nevada. Beaudry has been an integral part of HERBL’s leadership since its founding in 2018. His skills in supply chain management, distribution and logistics helped establish him as a pioneer in the cannabis wholesale space. He has developed more than 30 partnerships with top brands—HERBL now carries a whopping 1,400+ SKUs. Employing cutting edge B2B and B2C technology, HERBL reports sales of over $500 million worth of cannabis products under Beaudry’s leadership.

Jun S. Lee & Vince Ning

Co-Founders & Co-CEOs, Nabis
San Francisco, CA, United States

Jun S. Lee and Vince Ning, former engineers at Facebook and Microsoft, founded Nabis in 2018 with the goal of building a cannabis wholesale platform that would help brands reach more consumers. Starting out as delivery drivers, Lee and Ning built Nabis from the ground-up. Nabis has since become one of the leading cannabis wholesale platforms in California, working with more than 300 brands and boasting a distribution network that reaches over 700 dispensaries. The Nabis co-founders were named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list in 2021 and to the Forbes “Cannabis 42.0” in 2022.

Pharma Winner

Geoffrey Guy

Founder & Chair, GW Pharmaceuticals
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom

Dr. Geoffrey Guy founded GW Pharmaceuticals and served as its chair from 1998 until the January 2021 acquisition of his company by Jazz Pharmaceuticals for $7.2 billion. Now a Jazz subsidiary, GW develops cannabidiol-derived medicines like its patented and UK MHRA-approved drug Epidyolex for the treatment of seizures associated with tuberous sclerosis complex. Guy is the creator of the GW Cannabinoid Platform which has produced the nasal spray Sativex, designed to alleviate MS symptoms, in addition to Epidiolex. Guy has led more than 300 clinical studies involving pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, dose-ranging and large scale multi-centered studies. He was awarded an Honorary DSc from the University of Reading 2016 for his contributions to science. He was the recipient of the “Deloitte Director of the Year” award in pharmaceuticals and health care in 2011.

MORE ABOUT DR. GUY…
“Fear of controversy has never held Geoffrey back. … He faced enormous prejudice …. with the cannabis work; his response was to listen to the concerns and meticulously address each one with top quality data.”
— Prof. Parveen Yaqoob, University of Reading, Reading, England, United Kingdom

Public Companies Winners

Kim Rivers

Founder, Chair & CEO, Trulieve
Tallahassee, FL, United States

Kim Rivers co-founded Trulieve in 2016, serves as CEO, and chairs the board of directors. A lawyer with extensive M&A experience and a believer in strict financial discipline, Rivers has built her company into an 11-state MSO with one of the largest retail, cultivation and production footprints in the U.S. Rivers’ early decision to focus on the profitable Florida medical market—where the company currently operates 120 dispensaries—led Trulieve to 16 consecutive quarters of profitability. Her strategy of building out regional hubs across the country continues to pay dividends, with Trulieve taking leading positions in Arizona and Pennsylvania as well as its home state of Florida.

Ben Kovler

Founder, Green Thumb Industries
Chicago, IL, United States

Ben Kovler brought his extensive experience managing complex commercial operations to cannabis—as well as a deep commitment to philanthropy—when he founded GTI in 2014. Under his leadership, the company has grown from humble beginnings into a national cannabis CPG powerhouse with a wide-ranging portfolio of branded products like RYTHM, Dogwalkers, The Feel Collection and Beboe, among others. GTI also owns and operates a rapidly growing national chain of retail cannabis stores called Rise. Kovler is frequently featured as an industry thought leader in media outlets such as Bloomberg, Barron’s, Business Insider, CNBC and Forbes.

Alexander Rabinovitch

CEO, InterCure
Tel Aviv, Israel

Alexander Rabinovich has served as CEO of Tel Aviv, Israel-based InterCure and has been a member of its board since 2018. InterCure is the fastest-growing cannabis company outside of North America, achieving success through leveraging international partnerships, a high-margin, vertically integrated “seed-to-sale” model, and a market-leading distribution network that stretches across four continents, utilizing six high-end cultivation sites across the globe. The company’s wholly owned subsidiary, Canndoc, is Israel’s largest licensed cannabis producer of GMP-certified, pharmaceutical-grade medical cannabis. Rabinovich, who also serves on the board of directors of XTL Biopharmaceuticals, holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and accounting from the University of Haifa.

Boris Jordan

Executive Chair, Curaleaf
New York, NY, United States

Billionaire Boris Jordan is the Executive Chairman of Curaleaf, the world’s largest public cannabis company by revenue, per our Global Cannabis 50 rankings released last December. Founded in 2014, Curaleaf currently operates in 19 U.S. states with 150 dispensaries and employs nearly 5,500 team members, in addition to having growing international operations in Europe and elsewhere. Jordan has been a vocal advocate for the responsible development of the cannabis industry and has been a key figure in shaping the industry’s regulatory landscape. He has taken a leading role in lobbying in Washington, D.C. for the SAFE Act and other measures that would move cannabis toward federal legalization and banking stability.

Charles Bachtell

Founder & CEO, Cresco Labs
Chicago, IL, United States

Attorney, CEO and law professor Charles Bachtell has led Cresco Labs to tremendous growth while serving as a founding member of the Illinois Cannabis Bar Association and a professor at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, teaching a course on the legal and regulatory issues in the emerging cannabis industry. He also helmed the biggest-ever deal in corporate cannabis history when Cresco agreed to acquire Columbia Care for $2 billion in 2022, giving Cresco a pathway into large new markets for medical and recreational marijuana in the U.S. Northeast.

Retail & Dispensaries Winners

Andrew DeAngelo

Co-Founder, Harborside Health
Co-Founder & Chair
Last Prisoner Project
Oakland, CA, United States

Andrew DeAngelo wears more hats in cannabis than we can count. A visionary leader with a proven track record of enacting systemic social change and developing best practices in cannabis, he is also an insightful business columnist, public speaker, actor and entertainment producer. DeAngelo lends his vast cannabis business and political expertise as a consultant to the global cannabis community. In over two decades as an activist, he worked on a variety of voter initiatives which legalized medical and adult-use cannabis in San Francisco, Washington D.C. and California. As co-founder of Harborside, he pioneered a number of legal cannabis business and health processes, including introducing CBD medicines to help heal children with epilepsy, implementing lab-testing, creating child-resistant packaging for edibles, standardizing inventory tracking and initiating senior outreach. DeAngelo is co-founder and chair of the non-profit Last Prisoner Project and a founding board member of the California Cannabis Industry Association (CCIA), where he served from 2013 to 2020.

MORE ABOUT ANDREW…
“My brother Andrew has always been a peacemaker and consensus builder. As the middle child in a very passionate family, it was an essential survival skill. Andrew’s unique ability to bring people together has also marked his career in the legal industry—as COO of Harborside, as chairman of the board of the Last Prisoner Project, and as vice president of the CCIA— it’s just what he does.”
— Steve DeAngelo, Co-Founder, Harborside Health, Co-Founder, Last Prisoner Project

Wanda James

Founder & CEO, Simply Pure
Denver, CO, United States

Wanda James is the founder and CEO of Simply Pure Dispensary. Along with her husband Scott Durrah, a professional chef and entrepreneur of over 25 years, they became the first Black Americans legally licensed in the United States to own a dispensary, a cultivation facility and an edibles company. As a leading advocate in the cannabis industry, Wanda’s political and entrepreneurial work on cannabis reform has led to her being named on numerous lists of industry influencers. She is frequently featured in print and broadcast media as an industry thought leader, appearing on the BBC, MSNBC, NBC and “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, among other guest appearances on television.

Raj Grover

CEO, High Tide
Calgary, AB, Canada

Since starting his first company at the age of 22, Raj Grover has established himself as one of Canada’s foremost business strategists and deal makers. He is the founder of High Tide and its subsidiary companies Valiant Distribution and Canna Cabana—the latter is the single largest non-franchised cannabis retailer in Canada with more than 150 locations. He is also co-founder of High Tide’s subsidiary, Famous Brandz. Through organic growth and strategic acquisitions, Grover has grown High Tide from one small shop with two employees in 2009 into one of Canada’s largest cannabis retailers with more than 1,400 employees and business interests spanning North America and Europe.

Stéphane Trudel

CEO, Fire & Flower
Edmonton, AB, Canada

Stéphane Trudel is CEO of the cannabis consumer technology and retail platform, Fire & Flower. Under his leadership, Trudel has capitalized on opportunities in technology-driven cannabis retail. Fire & Flower has grown into one of the world’s largest licensed cannabis retailers via its digital consumer platform, Hifyre. Formerly SVP of operations for multinational operator of convenience stores Alimentation Couche-Tard, Trudel has deepened Fire & Flower’s strategic partnership with the Laval, QB-based retail giant to scale Fire & Flower’s model and operations globally. The cannabis retailer also operates more than 100 of its own corporate-owned stores under four banners (Fire & Flower, Friendly Stranger, Hotbox and Happy Dayz) across Canada and the United States.

Vapes & Accessories Winners

Roger Volodarsky

Founder & CEO, Puffco
Los Angeles, CA, United States

Roger Volodarsky, founder and CEO of Puffco, is a serial entrepreneur, technophile and cannabis connoisseur. On a mission to create quality consumption devices that are accessible, practical and effective for everyone, Volodarsky created the Puffco Peak—the company’s signature THC concentrate vaporizer. With its humble beginnings in 2013 in his family home’s basement, and after eight years in development, Puffco’s sleek, high-tech dabbing device won him the nickname the “Steve Jobs of cannabis” from Inc. Magazine. Bringing together the disciplines of design, technology and engineering, the Peak and its 2020 follow-up, the Peak Pro, went on to generate more than $100 million in sales in 2021.

MORE ABOUT ROGER…
“My best friend and boss, Roger Volodarsky, is a dream-follower and thought leader. His passion for wanting a better cannabis concentrate consumption method led to him to create the most awarded hash vaporizer brand in the world. As the founder and CEO of Puffco, Roger has not only created a platform for everyone to experience the magic of hash, but he has also helped create a community that celebrates cannabis.”
— Kevin Chapman, Director of Events, Puffco

Nick Kovacevich

Co-Founder, Greenlane Holdings
Boca Raton, FL, United States

Nick Kovacevich’s Kush Bottles, in addition to bringing best-selling vaporizer products to market, pioneered SEC reporting and the public issuance of cannabis shares in 2015. Merging wtih Greenlane in 2021, the company is now a leading distributor of premium vape products and accessories in North America. Today, Greenlane’s distribution network supplies more than 11,000 retail locations with a multitude of products and a diverse portfolio of brands, including EYCE, DaVinci, Groove and Higher Standards, while also offering premium glass accessories, papers, vaporizers and patented packaging solutions.