There’s no North Star goal for the industry. That’s why we brought in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal framework as a foundation and a North Star goal for the global industry to align their business as a blueprint for a better future and a better and more sustainable world.
As part of my series on inspiring the next generation about sustainability and the environment, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick McCartan, CGO and Co-Founder at Regennabis, the leading ESG & Sustainability advisory firm in the global cannabis industry. Patrick is also Co-Founder of Regenerative Cannabis Live, the world’s premier sustainable cannabis conference.
In addition, Patrick McCartan is Co-Founder of Regennabis Ventures, a private equity impact fund investing in cannabis startups with a commitment to sustainability and ESG and is the Co-Founder of Honeyoil, a licensed producer in Colombia. With a background in corporate sustainability working with Fortune 500 companies, Patrick operates within the global ecosystem of the public and private cannabis space and is pioneering the incorporation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into the global cannabis industry.
Thank you so much for doing this with us, Patrick! Can you share with us the story about what brought you to this specific career path?
So I worked in the corporate sustainability world for most of my career at a company called Sustainable Brands. We worked with organizations, Fortune 500 companies like Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Amazon, Nike, and many different organizations.
We worked with CMOs around their sustainability practices. As I started to understand companies like Unilever really building purpose and sustainability into the core of their business, I realized there was a major business opportunity from purpose centricity.
Number one, I am all about impact and leveraging business as a force for good. When I started to watch the first green shoots of the cannabis industry in North America, Uruguay, and in Canada, I started to really understand the potential and the power for hemp, as a resource for sustainable materials and like plastics packaging, foods, fibers, fuels, etc. I realized that there’s a huge opportunity to move the hemp industry forward so we can start to replace all of these non-sustainable materials with sustainable materials. Number two was medical cannabis, which really excited me.
From a health and wellness perspective, I had a very close family member who had pancreatic cancer and had two months to live. When he asked me to help with some CBD or some form of medical cannabis, I gave him a full spectrum of medical cannabis, but gave him an extra two years of life. The doctors could not understand as the tumor shrunk. So that was a real game changer for me to say, look, I want to have an impact. I think medical cannabis and cannabinoids within the plants are significant for driving health and wellness.
Now on the smaller part, which is the adult recreational use, I also feel that consumer behavior is shifting towards more health conscious ways to socialize rather than destructive things like alcohol and other things. I’m a big supporter of options for consumers. The cannabis industry globally is at the moment over a $100 billion industry, and it hasn’t even gotten started yet.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I think the most interesting one is getting the buy-in from the United Nations to host us in New York in October 2023, and have a conversation around medical cannabis and hemp in all of its forms. It took us two and a half years to get there. We had to work with many different agencies within the United Nations. But once they understood that in a regulated and legalized environment, cannabis in all of its forms is going to drive significant sustainable development economically, socially, and environmentally, and therefore drive every one of the 17 United Nations sustainable development goals.
Once we came to the understanding that the SDGs are the sort of the blueprint of a sustainable future as put forward by the United Nations, we came together to host this historic event last May in 2022.
Our event this year is called Regenerative to Cannabis Live on October 3rd, 2023. The lessons learned from this journey are around education — educating governments, educating the United Nations, educating corporations, educating civil society, and educating investors to the real impact of what this emerging industry is all about and how it’s actually a win-win, win across the board.
Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think the Regenerative Cannabis Live event held at the United Nations on October 3rd, 2023 will benefit people?
We’re bringing the industry, the market, the ecosystem, and governments from all around the world from Columbia, Brazil, United Kingdom, Malaysia, to Germany. Many governments who are coming, whether they’re speaking or participating, are invited to share their own experiences or share their progress.
Conversation at the highest levels will take place to say, look, we cannot leave these marginalized communities behind because they’ve been the ones who have struggled and been tormented for over a hundred years. We want to see those types of organizations, entrepreneurs, black and brown entrepreneurs, particularly in North America moving forward.
And that’s where we will see who this event will benefit. Those types of entrepreneurs, and lastly, investors. Impact investors are looking to work with and invest in those future companies in the cannabis industry that have a commitment to sustainability and ESG.
We’re moving into cannabis 3.0 once we get through this particular global challenge that we’re all under at the moment. And then we’re going to start to see the front runners emerge in probably 2024, or at least at the end of 2023.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
I would say my co-founder and now the CEO, Geoff Trotter. Geoff and I worked at Sustainable Brands. He is an Englishman, and I’m an Irishman, and we hit it off straight away. We had the same vision for business as a force for good. He spent a decade at Ernst & Young before he joined Sustainable Brands and brings in a huge amount of knowledge and expertise from one of the big four organizations.
Geoff is a very purpose driven, caring person, very committed to our vision, which is to drive regenerative growth for all. We believe that cannabis and hemp will impact 8 billion people if done correctly and in time.
Can you share your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started Leading a Cannabis and Hemp Business?”
- I didn’t realize how hard it would be.
- I didn’t realize how slow the regulations would be, particularly in North America from a federal legalization perspective. Had I got a crystal ball, I wish someone had said, It’s not going to be for another 10 years after you get into this industry.
- I wish someone had told me that there was very little focus on sustainability, very little focus on ESG in the industry at the start. So it’s taken several years to get to the point where we are the frontrunners in building and driving ESG and sustainability strategies for the cannabis industry.
- There’s no North Star goal for the industry. That’s why we brought in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal framework as a foundation and a North Star goal for the global industry to align their business as a blueprint for a better future and a better and more sustainable world.
- It is extremely difficult to get funding in the industry. It’s just very difficult.
Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest?
One is around the slow uptake on ESG. ESG is a critical strategy for every company, not just every public company, but every private company as well.
The SEC is going to come down very hard on all the publicly listed cannabis companies if they’re not reporting environmental performance and data. So that concerns me that the industry is not ready for.
The second thing that concerns me is that the industry needs to professionalize. Impact investors and investors are waiting for this industry to really collectively professionalize. One way that we are helping is to bring corporations into the Regennabis community so there can be collaboration between what these corporations are doing. We’re creating a Regennabis member network, a community for cannabis companies, ancillary companies, and corporations to really come in to collaborate together to move this all forward.
The third one is around the lack of regulation, not just in North America, but globally. It’s been very slow in many ways. Federal legalization has really hampered the potential for the U.S. to really position itself as a global leader, despite it being legal at state level. Not all states have fully legalized all cannabis. Recreational hemp is fully federal, by the way. And so what we’re doing to reform this and improve the industry is to bring those regulations to decision makers and governments at our United Nations event to really understand what this is all about. We need to remove the stigma and see the opportunity for this industry to drive for economic prosperity for their country, social impact, and health and wellness for their citizens.
If you could speak to your Senator, what would be your most persuasive argument regarding why they should or should not pursue federal legalization in all 50 states?
We’re speaking with many senators and several of the leading senators are speaking at our next Regenerative Cannabis Live event at the United Nations on October 3rd 2023. I think the most persuasive argument for federally legalizing cannabis is the economic impact that it’s going to create, not just for states, but for the country as a whole. It’s gonna drive significant tax dollars into the country. It’s going to spur even more investment into the industry here in North America. It’s going to drive significant entrepreneurship, new brands, and collaboration.
The U.S. government will see many tens of billions of dollars in tax revenues. That’s the most persuasive argument, not to mention the significant social impact that it’s going to create.
The tax dollars, the revenues, the positioning of the U.S. as a frontrunner globally is what will become a trillion dollar industry between all those three different areas — medical, adult use, and hemp. So the opportunity for the U.S. to lead the way is gigantic and we really want to push for federal legalization as soon as possible. Every senator should be at this event so they can understand the real impact that it’s going to create.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If people could understand that business can be a force for good, and really start to look at their business, not just from an economic perspective, but how they can drive social and environmental impact (we call that triple bottom line), it would be a positive.
We’ve already seen incredible companies out there doing this and leading the way. They’re some of the biggest brands in the world. It’s not just nice to have on the side, but absolutely core to the future of business.
We’ve got a lot of blue sky ahead of us for the front runner companies. Leaders really need to come together and say we’re going to build this industry in a way that no other industry has ever been built before. We’re going to build it with purpose, centricity, authenticity, leadership, collaboration, sustainability, and ESG at its foundation.
Business as a force for good is an inspirational movement that I think we could all align with. We all want a better future for our children and grandchildren. And I think that’s the way to do it.
What is the best way for our readers to follow your work online?
You can visit us at regennabis.com, and also on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @regennabis
This was very inspiring, Patrick. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.