Before You Build: The Do's & Don'ts of Starting a Cannabis Business in Minnesota

Minnesota's cannabis industry has no shortage of people who want to be part of it.

The harder question is what happens once you actually have to operate.

How do you choose the right vendors? How much should you spend building a dispensary? How do you train employees? What happens when cultivation moves from growing plants to tracking every gram through a regulated system? How do you protect customer information? And what happens when today's high prices eventually come down?

Those questions were at the center of a conversation recorded live at CannaCon Midwest 2026 in Saint Paul featuring Jonathan Hunt of Leech Lake Cannabis, Jacob Affeldt of Frostbite Dispensary, Brytany Melville of Forte Ops, and Munir Haque of Cure8.

Start by vetting the people around you

The first piece of advice comes almost immediately: vet who you're dealing with.

Cannabis attracts consultants, vendors and service providers from every direction. Experience matters, but so does being able to prove that experience.

The panel encourages Minnesota entrepreneurs to ask for references and learn from operators in established markets rather than assuming everything needs to be invented from scratch here.

That idea becomes the foundation for much of the conversation.

Jonathan Hunt brings the cultivation perspective

Jonathan Hunt's voice is particularly important because cultivation exposes just how different a regulated cannabis business can be from what outsiders imagine.

Growing a good plant is only part of commercial cultivation.

Operators also have to create repeatable systems, maintain compliance, track product through seed-to-sale requirements, make decisions about genetics, manage quality at scale and respond to a regulatory environment that continues to evolve.

Jonathan's perspective from Leech Lake Cannabis grounds the cultivation portion of the panel in what happens after cannabis moves beyond a hobby or small grow and becomes a regulated commercial operation.

The conversation also touches on Minnesota's developing product supply and what consumers actually want from genetics and flower.

And when the discussion turns toward the next five years, Jonathan's outlook is worth hearing.

Minnesota's market will mature.

That means more competition, changing rules and businesses learning that simply being early does not guarantee long-term success.

What it actually took to open Frostbite

Jacob Affeldt brings another side of the story.

He and his wife spent years planning what eventually became Frostbite Dispensary.

Instead of assuming a cannabis store needed an enormous buildout, they worked to control costs and understand what their customers actually needed.

That includes knowing local demographics, thinking carefully about product selection, navigating payment processing and banking, and developing a working relationship with Minnesota regulators.

It's an important counterpoint to the hype that can surround a new industry.

Opening the doors is an accomplishment.

Keeping them open is the business.

SOPs aren't the same as training

Brytany Melville of Forte Ops takes the conversation deeper into day-to-day operations.

A dispensary can have hundreds of pages of compliance documentation and still fail to teach an employee how to do their job well.

There is a difference between an SOP written to demonstrate regulatory compliance and a process that a budtender or manager can actually follow during a busy shift.

Brytany also discusses marketing calendars, employee turnover, technology decisions and retention.

Her advice becomes especially important near the end of the episode.

Don't expand simply because you can.

A successful first location does not automatically mean a second, third or fourth location will make the company stronger. Growth introduces new expenses, management challenges and operational complexity.

Build something that works first.

Then decide whether it should become bigger.

Cannabis businesses are technology businesses too

Munir Haque of Cure8 brings up something operators can easily underestimate during a buildout: technology.

Security cameras, access control, networks, POS systems, customer information, seed-to-sale systems and cybersecurity aren't separate from facility planning.

They're part of it.

Waiting until construction is nearly complete to think about IT and security can mean reopening walls, rerouting electrical infrastructure or paying to redo work that could have been coordinated from the beginning.

Cybersecurity matters for another reason.

Cannabis businesses can hold sensitive customer and operational information. A compromised network isn't simply an IT inconvenience. It can become a compliance and business problem.

Planning early is cheaper than fixing it later.

Minnesota won't stay a new market forever

The final portion of the panel may be the most important.

Minnesota cannabis businesses are currently operating in a market that is still taking shape.

That won't last.

Prices will change. Competition will increase. Regulations will evolve. Businesses will consolidate. Consumers will become more sophisticated.

Jacob's advice is to protect margin rather than racing competitors to the bottom on price.

Brytany emphasizes retaining good employees because experienced staff understand both the business and its customers.

Jonathan reminds the audience that not every business entering today's market will make it through the next stage.

Together, those points create a much more useful definition of success.

It isn't getting a license.

It isn't opening the biggest facility.

It isn't having the most locations.

It's building a business capable of adapting.

Learn from the people doing it

Minnesota doesn't need to make every mistake itself.

Other cannabis markets have already experienced rapid expansion, price compression, consolidation and business failures. Minnesota operators have an opportunity to study those lessons while listening to the entrepreneurs and professionals already navigating this market locally.

That's what makes this panel worth watching.

It's not a blueprint promising success.

It's 48 minutes of people doing the work explaining where they'd tell the next operator to pay attention.

Watch The Do's & Don'ts of Starting a Cannabis Business in Minnesota on The Canna Connect Show.