It’s not hard to find an online cannabis delivery service in the more populated regions of California. Soon after recreational weed became available in the Golden State after voters passed the Adult Use of Marijuana Act in 2016, it was easy to get products delivered to your doorstep via website or cannabis delivery app. LA and San Francisco became epicenters of weed distribution in the largest cannabis marketplace in the United States.
What’s hard is finding a good delivery service. Right now it can seem like a bit of a crap shoot – while decriminalization in California was immediate, the regulatory infrastructure needed to certify dispensaries has been slow to implement. Which means you’ll not only have trouble finding a decent service that won’t drop your order, get it wrong, or take all day to deliver, but you’ll also need to worry about whether you’re buying from a place that has safe products.
Fortunately, part of your research process should be pretty simple – just look to see if your cannabis provider is licensed by the state of California. If they are, they’ll advertise it pretty prominently, if only to set themselves apart from their competitors. But even once you’ve narrowed down the field, it’s hard to find a reliable service.
One LA-area service is hoping to change all that – in part by boosting its own reaction time.
When cannabis delivery services falter, they tend to falter on a number of basic skills, says GrassDoor CEO Zack Ein. “Things like getting orders right, not dropping orders and having an inventory that matches what’s available on your website aren’t terribly hard,” he said. “As licensing increases and the marketplace weeds out the bad actors – no pun intended – you’re going to be left with a leaner set of sellers that’s able to rival each other in those basic standards.”
But the most challenging skill for dispensaries to master will be speed, especially in a market as big as Los Angeles, a city that covers over 500 square miles. And that’s not counting the suburbs, which increase that area nearly tenfold. That much potential sales area could mean trouble for cannabis providers who want to make their mark in quick delivery, even if you didn’t take into account LA’s notorious and omnipresent traffic.
Anyone who’s ever used a cannabis delivery service in LA knows that speed can be a factor; while all services offer same-day delivery, a lot of dispensaries don’t quite specify when it will arrive on the day you order it. It’s like waiting for the plumber to arrive. It’s the bugaboo of an industry already plagued with cultural images of laziness and carelessness.
GrassDoor guarantees it can deliver cannabis to your door in under an hour, and Ein claims its coverage area (now limited to certain ZIP codes in LA and Orange County) will expand in the future. In fact, he claims, by November 2019, they’d gotten delivery time down to about 32 minutes. (The hour guarantee still stands.) (Oh, and if Grassdoor misses the hour guarantee, Ein says, customers won’t get free weed but will get credits toward future purchases.)
GrassDoor won’t reveal its secrets other than to say their delivery model is powered by proprietary AI technology, but if they persist in their capacity to reduce the amount of time between purchase and delivery, look for other dispensaries to try to steal their crown. That means more speedy weed purveyors to choose from.
The cannabis industry in California is in such a state of flux that it’s hard to make predictions. With regulations growing and the number of unlicensed vendors shrinking, weed fanciers should always be on the lookout for better delivery services. But if GrassDoor’s movement forward is any indication, those same weed fanciers have a bright future to look forward to.
