23rd State and The Minneapolis Cannabis Week

23rd State at the Flourish Investment Forum and NECANN Minnesota

For four days in mid-May 2026, downtown Minneapolis became the most consequential zip code in the cannabis industry. From May 12 through May 15, two of the year's most strategically important events unfolded back to back, just blocks apart, drawing founders, investors, regulators, retailers, and operators from across Minnesota and well beyond it.

Tuesday and Wednesday: the Flourish Investment Forum at the Minneapolis Event Centers, a two-day gathering created specifically to close the cannabis funding gap for Midwest founders. Thursday and Friday: the inaugural NECANN Minnesota at the Minneapolis Convention Center — the first time the country's second-largest cannabis convention organizer has ever brought its B2B juggernaut to the Midwest after twelve years of East Coast events.

For 23rd State — a Minnesota-born cannabis beverage brand with a hometown founder named to the Flourish speaker roster and a panel seat at NECANN Minnesota — this stretch was as close to a "home opener" as our industry gets. We had been preparing for it publicly for weeks. (You can read the full setup in our pre-event posts on Leah's Flourish speaking slot and her NECANN Minnesota panel preview.) This is what actually happened.

Days One and Two: The Flourish Investment Forum

The Flourish Investment Forum is one of the most strategically important events on the Midwest cannabis calendar — and frankly, in cannabis writ large — because it is one of very few rooms in the country built explicitly to fix the capital problem.

Hosted by CUJI (Communities Unifying Thru Justice and Inclusion) and founded by attorney Calandra Revering alongside North Bloom magazine editor-in-chief Angelique Zerillo and event planner Vivian J., Flourish was designed around an uncomfortable truth: the conventional capital stack is essentially closed to most cannabis founders. The institutions that do lend tend to charge interest rates and demand collateral that small operators cannot meet. Private and family-office capital has cooled. And without the kind of intentional infrastructure Flourish exists to build, Minnesota's adult-use market risks consolidating around the founders who already had access to capital before they ever got a license.

The 2026 edition of Flourish expanded to fill the Minneapolis Event Centers at 212 2nd St. SE, a venue upgrade that signals the kind of growth the Forum has earned in just one year. Day One programming carried the theme "Build the Foundation"; Day Two, "Make the Moves." The networking dinner closed things out Wednesday evening at The Glasshouse on Holden Street North, a venue that has become a recurring stage for serious Minneapolis cannabis hospitality.

What Leah Brought to the Panel

23rd State founder Leah Kollross was confirmed in the Flourish 2026 speaker lineup well in advance of the Forum, alongside a deep bench of Minnesota and national cannabis voices: Office of Cannabis Management director Eric Taubel, OCM Director of Social Equity Jessica Jackson, Vicente LLP partner Jason Tarasek, Honest Cannabis founders John Barthel and Benjamin Haley, Hellmuth & Johnson Cannabis Industry Practice Group leader Carol Moss, Indigenous Cannabis Industry Association founder Rob Pero, Merida Capital senior operating partner Colin Kelley, GreenState editor Rachelle Gordon, Brink's Vice President of Product Niki Mohrlant, and many more.

Leah's seat at the table reflected exactly the kind of operator Flourish is built around. Sixteen-plus years of operational experience across payroll, tax, benefits, and people operations, followed by entrepreneurship across regulated industries from beauty to real estate to cannabis and hemp — the throughline of her work, and of her panel contribution at Flourish, is that scaling a regulated brand is not primarily a marketing problem. It is an infrastructure problem. Licensing, product development, manufacturing, and go-to-market strategy live or die on the systems underneath them, and the brands that do this well treat compliance as a strategic asset rather than a tax.

For more on the panel framing and the specific topics Leah came prepared to address, our pre-event Flourish post lays out the full thesis.

The Conversations Flourish Surfaces

A few themes emerged across the Forum's two days that are worth naming for anyone who couldn't be in the room.

Capital structure beats capital amount. The most useful Day One conversations weren't about how to raise more — they were about how to raise smarter. How to structure a credit facility against real estate. How to build a deck that survives diligence. How to speak fluently across a capital stack that includes equity, convertible notes, revenue-based financing, and patient family-office capital. The brands that left Flourish with deals in motion were the ones that had already done the operational work to be funded, not just the storytelling work to look fundable.

Equity is not a footnote. Minnesota's adult-use program has one of the most robust social-equity frameworks in the country, with 50 percent of capped licenses reserved for qualifying applicants. Flourish leaned hard into this — Jessica Jackson's role at OCM, Calandra Revering's foundational work through CUJI and the Minnesota Association for Black Cannabis Professionals, and the Indigenous-led conversations anchored by Rob Pero and Mitchel Chargo all pushed against the industry's habit of treating equity as a compliance line item rather than the core architecture it actually is.

Beverage is becoming a category investors recognize. Conversations on the floor consistently came back to infused beverages — what's working, what's not, and how the data on dose accuracy and consumer substitution is reshaping investor diligence. That conversation runs directly through 23rd State's involvement in the MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study, which has now produced two cohorts of consumer-reported data on dose consistency, sleep impact, wind-down occasions, and the alcohol-substitution effect. Last week, Leah expanded on exactly why this kind of independent scrutiny matters for the category in an op-ed published by Marijuana Moment.

Minnesota investors want Minnesota stories. This was the dynamic that mattered most for us. The Flourish room was concentrated with Minnesota lenders, Minnesota attorneys, Minnesota compliance partners, and Minnesota-affiliated capital. Telling the 23rd State story — founded the year Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize, woman-founded, anchored in the Twin Cities, built on real-world data — landed differently in that room than it lands anywhere else.

The 23rd State Throughline

Before we move to NECANN, it's worth pausing on the through-line that connected our presence at Flourish to our presence at the Minneapolis Convention Center forty-eight hours later.

23rd State was founded in 2023, the year Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize adult-use cannabis. Leah Kollross built the brand around a deliberate thesis: the cannabis beverage category should be a designed alcohol alternative — not a wellness product by accident or an alcohol substitute by default. That thesis lives across our portfolio:

SHAKE — THC + CBG edible glitter drops in Emerald, Cosmo, and 24k Gold, designed for precise dosing and customization across any base beverage.
FRESH PRESS — a THC + CBG pear cider/perry that delivers the ritual of a craft cider without the ABV.
Blush Crush Infused Bubbly — a sparkling-wine-format beverage available in cans and elegant 750mL bottles, built for the toasts, dinners, and celebrations alcohol used to own.
CITRA STASH — rounding out a portfolio that now spans formats, occasions, and dose profiles.

What ties those products together is the body of independently validated, real-world consumer data we have actively contributed to and made public. The MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study has produced cohort-level data showing measurable, repeatable performance on dose accuracy, sleep impact, and the substitution effect when adult consumers swap alcohol for low-dose THC beverages. Cohort 2 results, released earlier this year, established what Leah has called a true performance standard for the infused beverage category — and that standard was the credibility currency we walked into both rooms with.

Days Three and Four: NECANN Minnesota

If Flourish was about capital meeting cannabis on home turf, NECANN Minnesota was about the rest of the country deciding that Minnesota is officially worth the trip.

NECANN — the New England Cannabis Convention organization — has been running its East Coast flagship in Boston since 2014, and over the past decade it has become the second-largest cannabis convention organizer in the United States. Until this May, NECANN had never produced an event west of Pennsylvania. The May 14–15, 2026 Minneapolis Convention Center event was the company's first-ever Midwest expansion, drawing 5,000+ professionals, 120+ exhibiting companies, and 60+ expert speakers across two full days.

That timing is not accidental. Minnesota's adult-use retail sales launched September 16–17, 2025, after Governor Walz signed legalization into law in May 2023. By the time NECANN Minnesota opened its doors, the state's market was eight months into commercial operation, with 37 retail licenses operational and a mandated July 2026 reassessment of license caps approaching. The state's 2026 cannabis sales projection is $430 million, with $1.5 billion in potential by 2029. NECANN read that runway and showed up.

23rd State on the NECANN Floor

For us, NECANN Minnesota was the first major B2B convention where the wholesale buyers, distributors, and brokers shaping Midwest cannabis distribution were all assembled in one place — on our home calendar, in our home venue, with travel barriers stripped away.

Our pre-event post outlined Leah's NECANN Minnesota panel involvement and the framing we brought into the convention floor: that Minnesota's hemp-derived THC beverage framework, layered into the state's adult-use program, has produced one of the most closely watched regulatory case studies in the country, and that brands built inside that framework start every conversation with a credibility advantage other markets are still chasing.

A few things stood out from the floor.

The expo hall pulled national attention to a Minnesota-anchored category. Out-of-state brands, multi-state operators, and ancillary service providers were on the floor specifically to evaluate the Minnesota market — and inside that evaluation, infused beverages were the single most asked-about category. The Minnesota beverage framework, the state's hemp-derived THC rules, and the rapid maturation of the adult-use program made the beverage tables among the busiest in the room.

Education programming leaned operational. Sessions were led by people running real businesses inside Minnesota's regulatory environment — operators, attorneys, accountants, compliance consultants, and OCM-adjacent voices. Citrin Cooperman partner Mitzi Keating, for instance, led a deeply attended session on cannabis cash flow, taxation, and the structural pitfalls that catch new operators off guard. The educational track was less theoretical than national conventions tend to skew, and significantly more applicable to operators making decisions in real time.

Distribution conversations moved fast. Because NECANN Minnesota is a true B2B environment with no on-site product sales or sampling permitted at the Convention Center, the floor leaned heavily into wholesale and distribution conversations — which is exactly the kind of activity the trade circuit is designed for. Several conversations 23rd State opened on Thursday morning were back in the inbox by Friday afternoon. As anyone who has worked B2B in this category knows, that's where the real work begins.

What Four Days in Minneapolis Told Us About 2026 Cannabis

Sitting in Flourish on Tuesday morning and on the NECANN Minnesota expo floor on Friday afternoon, with less than seventy-two hours separating the two events, it was hard to miss how much these rooms were saying the same thing in different registers.

Minnesota is being treated as a serious market. The fact that NECANN chose Minnesota as its first-ever Midwest expansion, in the same week that Flourish scaled into a larger venue to accommodate growth, is not a coincidence. National operators, capital allocators, and trade organizations are now treating Minnesota's adult-use program as a destination market, not a curiosity.

Evidence is becoming the price of admission. At Flourish, investors wanted to see independently validated performance data before they would seriously evaluate beverage brands. At NECANN, wholesale buyers wanted to see exactly the same thing before serious distribution conversations could move forward. The brands that came prepared with cohort-level consumer data, third-party lab testing, and a credible alcohol-alternative use case are the brands that left both events with conversations in motion.

Hemp and adult-use are converging — and the operators are tired of waiting for the policy to catch up. This is a long-running thread that 23rd State Senior Advisor Kasey Kollross has been working on through the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) Board of Directors for the 2026–2028 term, alongside engagement with HBA, USRT, HIFA, and CABA. Both the Flourish room and the NECANN room reinforced what those policy conversations already know: operators on both sides of that line are increasingly serving the same consumer with the same compliance burden, and the federal reclassification timeline is tightening.

The Minneapolis cannabis ecosystem can host this scale. Four days of programming, hundreds of exhibitors, thousands of attendees, two distinct event organizations, and a city infrastructure that absorbed all of it without strain. Minneapolis has been positioning itself as a serious cannabis convention destination, and this week made the case definitively.

What's Next for 23rd State

The follow-up phase begins now. Wholesale conversations, distribution explorations, capital introductions, content collaborations, and policy partnerships all started inside one or both of these rooms, and most of them are still warm. We'll be working through that pipeline through the rest of Q2 and into the summer.

In the meantime, the portfolio keeps doing what it was built to do. SHAKE keeps customizing the cannabis beverage experience one glitter drop at a time. FRESH PRESS keeps finding consumers who love the ritual of a craft cider but not the ABV that comes with it. Blush Crush keeps showing up at the dinners, the toasts, and the celebrations alcohol used to own. CITRA STASH continues to broaden the format conversation. And the MoreBetter study keeps doing what we hoped it would when we enrolled — letting the data tell the story instead of the marketing copy.

If you'd like the pre-event background on Leah's appearances at both events, see her Flourish speaking slot here and her NECANN Minnesota panel preview here. For more on the products, the MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study, and the broader policy work the brand contributes to, visit 23state.com.

Two events. Four days. One zip code. Minneapolis owned the cannabis calendar this week — and we're proud to have shown up at full strength.

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