By the end of the month, cannabis users in Kitchener will finally be able to shop local.
Meta Cannabis Co. announced on Thursday that it will open a cannabis store on Fairview Road on Feb. 28.
The store will open its doors at noon with an official grand opening getting underway at 4 p.m.
The announcement comes just a day after Waterloo region’s first pot shop was opened in Cambridge as a franchise under Canopy Growth’s Tokyo Smoke label.
The new store will be the second one for Meta Cannabis Co. in Ontario, which has already has 35 stores open across the country under various banners.
“Kitchener is a big win because we get to be the first store there which I’m sure is going to make a lot of cannabis customers happy very soon,” Meta Cannabis Co. vice president of marketing Matt Ryan.
In addition to the aforementioned stores, a third store is also on its way on King Street in Waterloo although it has not announced when.
The Ontario Cannabis Store also announced that it will offer same-day delivery service to some addresses in Waterloo region.
Ryan sees the quickly-growing market as healthy, at least for consumers who have been underserviced in the past.
“We’re probably a far ways away from market saturation,” he said.
Meta Cannabis Co. is looking to open up as many as 30 new stores across the province before year’s end in cities such as Guelph, Toronto and Ottawa.
“Our strategy is to have as many stores open as quick as possible,” Ryan said while noting that the province has placed a limit of 30.
He said it is unclear how quickly the government’s new process will allow a company to open the store.
“The government will need to hopefully move things through an expedited grade to get more stores open soon because this province is so under services,” Ryan explained. “There’s a lot of kind of unknown for us as a retailer on how quickly that will come to be.”
He says they are already looking for real estate in other major markets to grow the brand as quickly as possible.
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