Delta Dispatch

Jon Halper of Top Ten Liquors says three in four shoppers in his stores don't buy THC products. Melissa Vonder Haar (CSP C-Store Cannabis Board) moderates Jake Bullock (co-founder and CEO, Cann), Lonnie McQuirter (36 Lyn Refuel Station, NACS legislative chair), Thomas Winstanley (Edibles.com, part of Edible Brands), and Grant Bleecher (TruAge) at CannaBev Summit 2026. The panel makes the case that convenience stores, bars and restaurants, and direct-to-consumer are where those shoppers will try their first THC drink, and that these are the channels state laws most often lock out.

Jake explains why Cann launched at 2mg seven years ago and why Live Nation drew the line at 3mg. Melissa and Lonnie make the case for convenience as an impulse, singles-driven channel, and Grant explains why NACS built TruAge for an industry that handles 54 million age-restricted transactions a day. Thomas describes an Edibles.com customer base that skews 55 and older. The panel also covers what the flavored-vape ban taught convenience retail about prohibition without enforcement, and closes with audience questions on drug interactions, ingredient sourcing, and how to define a bad actor.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at https://deltaemerald.substack.com/.

Three investors across the capital stack sit down with moderator AnnaRae Grabstein (Wolf Meyer) at CannaBev Summit 2026 to answer a foundational question: is this category investable right now? Ryan Lake from JP Morgan's beverage investment banking group, Ian Dominguez from Delta Emerald Ventures, and Brian Rosen from InvestBev ($700mm under management, beverages only) bring three different vantage points to the same conclusion: capital is available for founders who build track record.

The panel covers why beer distributors hold the keys to scale (and why betting against them is a losing proposition), how COD economics and distributor lobbying power make the three-tier path the most pragmatic route to market, what velocity metrics actually unlock investment capital, and how the post-November/December regulatory landscape could trigger a wave of M&A. We also get into margin profiles at distribution scale, the Jim Koch / Boston Beer playbook for building pull, and why an extension without restrictions is dead in the water.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at https://deltaemerald.substack.com/.

Former Constellation Brands CFO David Klein sits down at CannaBev Summit 2026 with two decades of beverage industry lessons for the THC drinks category. Klein was CFO during Constellation's $4bn investment in Canopy Growth in 2017 and its exit in 2024 — his read is that the thesis was right and 10 to 15 years early.

We get into what he'd tell the category now: think like a challenger brand instead of copying alcohol's instincts, stop fighting over shelf space before the category exists, and obsess over distribution the way Constellation did in taking Modelo from the import aisle to the largest beer brand in the US by value. We also cover category captainship, the three-tier system, what makes a brand attractive to a Big Alcohol acquirer, and why he thinks THC drinks need distance from flower to reach mainstream retail.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at https://deltaemerald.substack.com/.

Jason Dayton and David O'Neill built Trail Magic out of a college senior project. Their hard cider company became one of the first THC beverage brands in Minnesota, launched in nineteen days flat when the law changed in 2022. They survived COVID, added pickleball courts, expanded to sixty-plus wholesalers, and are now preparing for the possibility that their core product category gets banned on November 12.

In this conversation, we talk about what adaptability actually looks like when you have loans, investors, and thirty employees depending on you. We get into the game theory of the hemp ban, including how distributors and retailers are planning for inventory wind-down. And we go deep on how Trail Magic uses AI tools (including Claude) to run sales operations and financial management that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars a month in specialized software.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at https://deltaemerald.substack.com/.

Dave Infante and Kate Bernot are two of the sharpest reporters on the adult beverage beat. Between them, they've done more to dismantle the "sober Gen Z" narrative than anyone in trade media. In this episode, we sit down together to talk about what's actually happening to alcohol demand, and what it means for THC beverages.

The mainstream media has spent five years repeating a simple story: Gen Z doesn't drink. Dave and Kate walk through why that narrative is lazy, who benefits from it, and what the data actually shows. Gen Z isn't pathologically averse to alcohol. They're a smaller generation earning less money, and they haven't been acculturated into drinking the way boomers were through workplace rituals and stable careers.

Meanwhile, boomers, the biggest, wealthiest, most alcohol-loyal generation, are hitting retirement and pulling back spending. The combination of a shrinking new cohort and an aging-out legacy cohort is the real structural threat to beverage alcohol.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at deltaemerald.substack.com.

Bart Watson, President and CEO of the Brewers Association, joins Ian Dominguez to translate thirty-plus years of craft beer's regulatory experience into a working playbook for the cannabinoid beverage category. The conversation moves from the coalition mechanics that made the Craft Beverage Modernization Act permanent, to the franchise-law carve-outs that let small brewers leave a distributor, to the demand-erosion story that oversupply headlines miss.

Watson implores the THC beverage industry to lead with tax dollars, treat distributors as customers, speak with one voice across competitors, and design a regulatory framework for the market you will have in ten years rather than the one you have today.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at deltaemerald.substack.com.

What happens after legalization? In our prior episode, UC Santa Barbara historian Lisa Jacobson walked through alcohol prohibition's failure and how post-repeal enforcement proved more restrictive than prohibition itself. This follow-up brings Jacobson back alongside Paul Weaver, who leads cannabis strategy at Boston Beer Company from a Toronto R&D hub they built years before hemp-derived THC beverages proliferated in the US.

Legal status has never guaranteed mainstream acceptance. Post-repeal brewers were told they were "on probation." Jacobson and Weaver trace the origins: the three-tier system emerged as behavioral control, a direct response to tied-house corruption that fueled saloons and gave prohibitionists their strongest argument.

For operators navigating today's regulatory patchwork, understanding why these structures exist changes how you engage with them. The THC beverage industry's taxation narrative, its language discipline, and its trade association strategy are all underperforming relative to what alcohol's history says is possible.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at deltaemerald.substack.com.

What does alcohol's 200-year regulatory rollercoaster tell us about cannabis beverages today? UC Santa Barbara historian Lisa Jacobson, author of Intoxicating Pleasures, walks through prohibition's failure, the unintended consequences of legal loopholes, and a counterintuitive fact: post-repeal enforcement was more restrictive than prohibition itself. The parallels to cannabis regulation today are uncomfortable and instructive.

Moderated by Ian Dominguez of Delta Emerald Ventures, this conversation reveals how women architects of Prohibition became key to alcohol's post-repeal redemption, why fermented fruit juice and 3.2% beer were deliberate legal fictions that shaped the entire beverage landscape, and how the three-tier system emerged not as free-market efficiency but as behavioral control, replacing open saloons with state-managed retail to prevent the "saloon problem" of old.

Regulatory acceptance isn't automatic after legalization. It requires narrative capture, intentional brand positioning, and understanding that the most insidious restrictions often come not from criminal bans but from compliance infrastructure designed to discourage consumption.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at deltaemerald.substack.com.

Our retailer insights panel unpacked how institutional retailers have adapted their business models and org structures for THC beverages. These operators understand that THC operates on fundamentally different velocity, compliance, and ordering mechanics than alcohol, even if it oftentimes travels on "alcohol rails."

THC beverage brands have a lot of room for improvement, which can be summarized as having more empathy for their retail partners. Circle K's "non-negotiables" include a ban on any marijuana-forward imagery as well as a 10mg per container cap.

NielsenIQ's data shows THC beverages capturing approximately 20% of beer's volume decline, representing meaningful substitution, but not cannibalization. Circle K's 6,000+ company-owned locations are building three-tier-adjacent supply chains that mirror packaged beverage logistics; independent operators like Top Ten have built sustainable regional velocity through trial-and-repeat rather than promotional spend.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at deltaemerald.substack.com.

In the first Delta Dispatch Salon, we brought a brand CEO, an independent retailer, and a category-native distributor to debate a question sparked by a listener: does mandatory wholesaler intermediation actually make THC drinks safer, or is the industry conflating the "safety stack" with a "distribution mandate"? What followed was an hour of unscripted, occasionally heated debate about franchise laws, federal tax proposals that could add $24 per case, craft operator protections, and whether the category's best move might be to walk away from a bad deal entirely.

All three panelists agree on the safety stack: testing, labeling, age verification, dosage standards. Where they diverge is on whether mandatory wholesaler control, franchise laws, and cross-tier ownership restrictions are necessary to deliver that safety or merely politically convenient. With a federal deadline looming on November 12th and proposed tax rates that would cost more than the product itself, the panel stress-tests the assumptions underpinning the industry's most consequential negotiation.

The full Delta Dispatch is invite-only. Request access at deltaemerald.substack.com.