California Cafe Hybrid Lets You Order A Coffee And A Joint From Your Car – CoffeeTalk

Gold Rush Coffee and Green Rush Cannabis is a unique hybrid business in Eureka, California, that combines the coffee and cannabis industries. The couple, Tashina and Mike Benson, own a legal pot farm in Humboldt County and have been exploring the idea of combining their coffee business with their cannabis background to create something new. They bought the coffee business in 2022, but they were not just banking on winning customers with their coffee alone.

During the pandemic, they found that in the legal market, bulk cannabis buyers were offering “a good ticket” for their Salmon Creek farm’s product. However, they never developed a brand or packaged their product for retail, and as small farmers, they felt they didn’t have the team to do it. They decided that running a cannabis farm wasn’t worth the time if they didn’t also have a store. That realization led them to explore whether the cafe’s lobby could double as a dispensary.

Tashina and her husband started digging into regulations, meeting with city officials and checking with the state. At the time, the rules didn’t allow made-to-order food in dispensaries, so they began building a wall between the coffee shop and the dispensary. Local officials tipped them off that Gov. Gavin Newsom might soon legalize food sales at dispensaries.

On September 30, 2024, Newsom made their dream possible by signing Assembly Bill 1775, allowing dispensaries to serve non-cannabis food and drinks. It took six more months of work, but they finally opened their hybrid cafe and dispensary on April 3.

Three years after buying the coffee shop, the couple opened their cannabis cafe, made possible by state laws that gave small operators like them a way to stay economically afloat in the cannabis game. A little over two weeks into their grand opening, the numbers are promising. Customers aren’t allowed to actually smoke their joints inside the coffee shop, as the Bensons do not have a consumption lounge license. But customers can buy coffee and joints at the drive-thru without leaving their car with the help of a QR code ordering system.

The dispensary’s cannabis menu consists almost exclusively of marijuana grown in the sun and soil of the Emerald Triangle, a rarity in the commercial cannabis business that prioritizes indoor cannabis. As the larger industry around them continues to shrink, many farmers have hung up their straw hats for lack of a better word because they just don’t know what to do or where to go.

For the Bensons, Gold Rush Coffee and Green Rush Cannabis is a bright spot in a difficult time, a creative gamble in a place known for reinvention. They hope to make this work and at the very least, be sufficient enough to keep business operable.

Read More @ SFGATE