At the very end of 2021, the Ohio Board of Pharmacy received 1,462 applications for 73 dispensary licenses. The winners will be chosen by lottery on January 27, 2022. Ohio is a limited license state and currently has 61 dispensaries around the state, so the addition of these news stores is significant and will assuredly be welcomed by the 231,165 registered patients in the state. We were able to obtain the list of applicants for our research, and though the information shared by the regulator was sparse, it gave us the chance to share the following insights.

MSOs

From among the 1,468, we could discern that a few, but not all, MSO’s entered the lottery. We found 64 applications that we could tie to an MSO:

Most of the MSOs were strategic with their site selections focusing on Cleveland, Dayton, and Springfield. Theory Wellness only applied in the Northwest 1 District while Nectar Markets papered the state, filing multiple applications in some districts. Only Curaleaf already has dispensary licenses in the state.

In the following chart, I broke out the MSO applications from the rest of the applicant pool to see the differences in where the MSOs placed their applications versus everyone else:

20% of the MSO applications were in Southwest 4, while only 12% of the non-MSO applications were for that district. This district covers Montgomery County and is slated for 3 dispensaries. With a population of 537,309, it is the fifth-most populous county in Ohio, and the county seat is Dayton.

Key Cities

The 1,462 applications were spread across approximately 142 towns and cities in the state. As with many analyses like this, the Pareto Principle holds – almost: 28 jurisdictions (20%) account for 77% of the applications, and the top five received 35%:

Key Applicants

By our count, here are the top appliers, by number of applications:

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the application fee is $5,000. They also pointed out that Citizen Real Estate, LCC does business as Klutch Cannabis. According to the Cannabiz Media License Database, Klutch currently holds a cultivation and manufacturing license in Ohio.  

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Cannacurio is a periodic column from Cannabiz Media featuring insights from the most comprehensive license data platform.