A Thunder Bay business is one step closer to becoming a cannabis retail store. Kia Ora Kannabis received the news Monday that they were successful in getting a retail operator licence.
General Manager Matthew Harrison says it was well worth the wait to receive it.
“It has been a long time, we’ve been at this for almost a year now. It’s nice to see that it’s coming to the end of the build process and move on to the selling cannabis portion to Thunder Bay,” Harrison says.
The business can apply for their store licence on March 2nd and following a two-week comment period, they can book a site inspection.
Harrison doesn’t expect any issues to arise from the public comment portion of the approval process.
“We’ve been in contact with a drug enforcement team as soon as we opened, we wanted to be open and transparent with the whole city, the police, the health department, kind of everybody. Nobody we’ve spoken to has had any kind of issues with where the store is or that the store is going to exist at all but time will tell,” Harrison notes.
Kia Ora is hoping to have the cannabis portion of its Victoria Avenue store open by the beginning to the middle of April. The store is already open and sells cannabis accessories.
The store has held several job fairs to look for around 25 to 30 employees and will be hosting another one on Wednesday.
Last week, Tokyo Smoke received word from the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario that they would be able to open following a successful store inspection that’s set for this Friday.
Harrison feels that Thunder Bay has the capacity for more than one cannabis store.
“The AGCO had said a while ago that a city could hold probably one store for every 10,000 to 15,000 people, with that being said Thunder Bay could probably house a half a dozen, so two probably won’t be enough,” Harrison adds.
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