From the blog

Two Dispensary Brands You've Never Heard of Are Entering Florida's Weekly Numbers. Who's Next? [2026]

August 31, 2026

Scan the MMTC table in Florida's August 28 OMMU weekly update and two brands stand out that had no approved Florida retail locations a year ago. Fino Cannabis logged another week of dispensing volume from its first store in Clermont — it has been reporting smokable-flower sales in the state's weekly tables since late June. And Wildflower Cannabis, which has sat in those tables at zero locations all summer, just moved from zero to one: its first dispensing location — 240 3rd Street South in Jacksonville Beach — was approved by the state during the week of August 21–27. (Approved isn't open: the August 28 report shows no dispensations yet, and Wildflower's site still says "coming soon.")

Neither of these brands came through the licensing story everyone has been watching. The 22 pending MMTC applications from the April 2023 batching cycle are still waiting on final agency action — the ALJ's recommended order issued May 11, sixteen weeks ago as this publishes, and the state still lists the 22 as applicants holding preliminary letters of intent, not licensees. So none of them can open a door yet. The new names reaching Florida's tables right now came through two different doors entirely: one brand is dispensing on an acquired legacy license, and one has just secured its first storefront approval through the license Florida promised Black farmers in 2017. That's the story — while the big license class idles in administrative law, the next wave of Florida dispensary brands has already started, one store at a time.

Door number one: buy your way in

Fino Cannabis is what a deliberate, well-capitalized single-license entry looks like. The company, led by CEO Joe Puglise — formerly chief operating officer of Colorado's Medicine Man Technologies — acquired Planet 13's original Florida license in May 2024, a 2016-vintage vertical license (MMTC-2016-0006 on the state's registry). Two years of build-out later, its first store opened in Clermont in June 2026, with a second planned for Winter Park.

What makes Fino worth watching isn't the acquisition — licenses change hands in Florida all the time. It's the retail thesis. Puglise's argument, laid out in a July MJBizDaily interview, is that Florida's medical market has drifted into competing on one number — THC percentage — and that a meaningful share of potential patients don't shop that way. They want to sleep better or take the edge off, and they'd rather be asked how they want to feel than what potency they're after. Fino's stores are built around that conversation: effect-based guidance, terpene-forward products, staff trained to consult rather than close. The expansion plan is deliberately unhurried, too — Puglise told MJBizDaily he'd rather open fifteen profitable, well-located stores than fifty or a hundred, and separately credits the company's clean, family-office-funded balance sheet for letting it wait for the right locations. Competition, in his framing, happens store by store: he's "doing guerrilla warfare in a 5- to 15-mile radius."

In a market where the top five operators run 441 of the state's 778 dispensing locations, that's a genuinely different playbook — and it's been on the public record all summer, one weekly OMMU volume line at a time.

Door number two: the license Florida promised

Wildflower Cannabis took a route that has been in the making for nearly a decade. Its license — MMTC-2023-0024 — is one of the Pigford/Black farmer licenses Florida awarded on July 11, 2023 to class members of the Pigford v. Glickman USDA discrimination settlement, under a statute that had promised such a license since 2017. Shedrick McGriff, a farmer from Bascom in Florida's Panhandle, received the award alongside Suwannee County's Terry Donnell Gwinn — six years after the law passed, and after years of litigation over how the state would fulfill it.

Three more years of climbing the MMTC ladder — bond posted, cultivation authorized, processing and dispensing authorizations earned stage by stage — brought Wildflower to last week's milestone: its first retail location approved, in Jacksonville Beach. From the 2017 law to a first approved storefront, the road ran more than nine years, and it isn't quite finished — the store still has to open its doors. When it does, it enters one of the denser retail strips in the state: Sunburn operates essentially next door at 308 3rd Street South, and Trulieve, MÜV, Ayr, and Sunnyside all have Jacksonville Beach locations within a short drive, per the state registry's location list.

And Wildflower isn't the last new name in the pipeline. Read the same OMMU table closely: Bloom Dispensary — the retail brand of Gwinn's Pigford-licensed operation — holds dispensing authorization with zero open locations, and Eden Florida, licensed through the same Pigford/BFL process in December 2023, is already dispensing from four. Moton Hopkins Jr. received initial licensure in 2025 and is earlier in the same climb. A caution against reading the table as a schedule, though: dispensing authorization means an MMTC may open stores, not that one is imminent — each location still needs individual approval, and Revolution Florida, a 2019-vintage licensee, has held dispensing authorization with zero locations for years. The table shows you the pipeline. It doesn't show you the dates.

What this means if you already operate in Florida

The obvious reading — new competitors — is the less interesting one. One store in Clermont and an approved location in Jacksonville Beach don't move the needle for an MSO. But the pattern matters, for two reasons.

First, new-brand retail entry has restarted without the 22 licenses. For most of this year, the story of Florida dispensary growth has been consolidation: SNDL completed its Parallel asset acquisition, giving it majority economic exposure to Surterra's Florida operation through Sunstream — 43 stores at closing, 44 in the August 28 OMMU table — with direct consolidated control expected later, and Vireo announced an acquisition of Planet 13 that would put it near 106 Florida stores pro forma — if the announced transactions close. All of that reshuffles existing stores among fewer owners. Fino and Wildflower are the other channel — genuinely new brands from acquired legacy licenses and the Pigford cohort — and it's producing storefronts now. Meanwhile, whenever final agency action lands on the 22 applications, Florida's rules start a clock: a newly licensed MMTC must request cultivation authorization within 180 days of licensure, and retail approvals follow location by location from there. Today's trickle of new names is the leading edge of that much larger wave. The competitive map you're planning Q4 against is likely the least crowded it will be for some time.

Second, at least one new entrant is competing on experience, not scale. Fino's effect-first retail thesis is aimed directly at the gap between what a medical patient walks in wanting and what a potency-ranked menu shows them. (Wildflower hasn't published a comparable retail strategy yet — its differentiator so far is the story and the license itself.) Every incumbent within fifteen miles of a Fino now gets to find out whether their own in-store experience answers that thesis. If a first-store operator with no brand recognition can win the consultation, the education moment, and the repeat visit — the parts of retail that don't require 170 locations — then those are the parts incumbents can't leave on autopilot.

What this means if you're one of the new entrants (or about to be)

This part is for the Finos and Wildflowers — the teams opening store one, and the 22 applicants whose day one is coming. We wrote a full grand-opening playbook for dispensary screens and a tech checklist for new Florida MMTCs; here's the short version through the lens of what the new class is already doing right.

Your menu is your thesis, rendered. Fino's whole strategy lives or dies on whether the menu a patient sees leads with effects and terpenes instead of a THC% leaderboard. That isn't a training question, it's a display question — the menu board decides what the first conversation is about before an associate says a word. A digital menu that syncs from your POS can be configured to sort and badge by effect profile, feature full-spectrum lines, and still show potency for the shopper who wants it. A printed menu, or a generic top-sellers layout, quietly re-argues the potency thesis you built your brand to escape.

Store one has no slack for menu drift. A 170-store chain can absorb a stale menu for an afternoon. A one-store brand whose whole reputation is the next patient's first visit cannot — an out-of-stock item on the board at 4 p.m. is the brand, as far as that patient knows. Real-time POS sync (we integrate with Dutchie, Flowhub, Alleaves, Jane, Treez, Cova, BioTrack and 15+ more) is the difference between the menu being a live surface and being yesterday's inventory.

Day one is an education day. Every store in this wave opens into a market whose rules are moving: card renewal requirements changed in July, and federal hemp deadlines remain unsettled. The screens that aren't showing menu should be doing the explaining — how your store works, what's changing this fall, how cert renewals work — the consultation Fino trains its associates to have, running on a loop for everyone the associate hasn't reached yet.

And it scales with the plan, not ahead of it. The discipline Puglise describes — store two only when the location is right — is exactly the case for retail infrastructure that's cloud-managed from the start: when Winter Park (or your store two) opens, the menu system, the compliance loop, and the brand screens are a config push, not a second build-out.

The takeaway

Florida's next dispensary era didn't wait for the 22-license order. It started quietly this summer — one brand dispensing from a Clermont strip mall on a 2016 license it bought to bet on effect-first retail, and one brand with its first location approved but not yet open on a Jacksonville Beach corner, more than nine years after the state first promised the license it holds. The Pigford cohort is spread across the same ladder — Eden already operating four stores, Bloom still at zero — and the 22 applicants are behind them all. Whether you're an incumbent about to get a new neighbor or an applicant counting down to your own day one, the operating lesson from the new class is the same: in a 778-store market, the store-level experience is the whole game — and the screens are where it starts.

If you're building a store one — or defending against somebody else's — that's the part we do. See how GreenScreens works, check your POS integration, or get a demo and we'll show you a live store.

Figures are from the OMMU weekly updates linked above (through the August 28, 2026 report, covering August 21–27) and the state MMTC registry as of publication; company details are from the public reporting and official documents linked inline. Wildflower's Jacksonville Beach location was approved but had not reported dispensations as of August 28. This is general information for retail operators, not legal or business advice.