High From California: Cannabis at the State Fair Breaks New Ground for Weed Industry

More than 100,000 people visited a first-of-its-kind pop-up shopping area and on-site consumption lounge at the recent California State Fair, breaking new mainstream ground for the cannabis industry and setting a trend that could spread across the country.

The family-friendly festival, in its 170th year—featuring carnival rides, rock concerts, fried snacks and sweltering weather—was the first in America to allow cannafans to buy and consume weed on the premises. 

The tightly regulated program drew scouting missions from Nevada and several other states, with government officials taking note of the layout, guidelines and partnerships that gelled to create the 21-and-older “California Cannabis Experience.”

Founders at Embarc, a 15-store dispensary chain, spearheaded the effort with Fair Play Ventures that spanned 30,000 square feet at the Cal Expo complex in Sacramento. The project included more than 80 cannabis brands, a large-scale educational exhibit, live entertainment and panel discussions and a competition judged by experts at Budist that put cannabis on par with California’s fine wines, cheeses and olive oils. 

Attendees could buy flower, prerolls, edibles, sodas and other THC-laced products from the on-site vendors and dispensary, while the consumption lounge was located a few football fields away, all in designated security-heavy zones.

“This is California taking a historic leadership position—it’s bigger than sales, it’s bigger than consumption and it’s bigger than any one of us,” Lauren Carpenter, co-founder and CEO of Embarc, told ADWEEK a few days into the event. “Failure is not an option when you’re on a world stage like this—we have to pull this off in a way that creates a gold standard.”

Embarc and its collaborators did just that, according to fair organizers who have already committed to a redo of the program for 2025.

Tom Martinez, CEO of the California State Fair and Cal Expo, said there were “a mix of opinions” from the general public on adding cannabis sales and consumption to the event before it happened.

But after the strong response and foot traffic, which often had dozens of people waiting in lines to buy cannabis products, organizers “look forward to continuing to innovate the California Cannabis Experience next year and beyond,” Martinez told ADWEEK.

The project hit on the “educate, celebrate and experience” goals, Martinez said, noting that it checked the “immersive” box and recognized “the role of cannabis as agriculture, since it is not only the fastest-growing agricultural commodity, but also the state’s leading cash crop.”

Cannabis and capybaras

And as it turns out, the cannabis area was among the fair’s most popular attractions, alongside the new Wild Things Adventure—with its capybaras, reindeer, kangaroos and sea otters—that also brought in about 100,000 visitors, per fair data.

Final tallies are still to come, but the overall attendance at the 17-day California State Fair was up 10% this year over 2023, per organizers, with an estimated 650,000 visitors. The event, which suffered through 11 days of triple-digit temperatures, ended Sunday.

Cannabis has been embedded in the fair since 2022, with the introduction of the brand competition and the museum-quality exhibit that highlights milestones in weed history, cultivation and advocacy. Those features alone have set a precedent for how cannabis can be integrated into a marquee all-family festival. 

But the addition in 2024 of on-site sales and consumption welcomes cannabis more fully to Main Street USA, a boon to California brands and the broader industry, which is expected to total $46 billion in sales in the U.S. by 2028, per BDSA.

“We think this will go a long way to destigmatizing cannabis and normalizing it in culture,” Carpenter said, “especially when everyone realizes their friends and neighbors are buying at the fair.”

California—which has struggled with price compression, illicit competition, pesticide scandals and stratospheric taxes, among other woes—leads the American cannabis market. The legacy state racked up $2 billion in legal sales in the first half of 2024, for an average of $270 million per month, according to the Green Market Report. (Michigan, with $1.6 billion, and Illinois, with $851 million, are the closest competitors.)

Not just lookie-loos

For the brands involved, the California State Fair provided an unmatched marketing platform. Embarc worked with Equity Trade Network to include social equity brands and legacy cultivators—small startup companies looking for a business boost. 

The founder of Queen Mary, a Black female-owned brand based in Los Angeles, was bowled over by the reactions of the attendees, which she said represented a wide range of demographics, including many baby boomers and senior citizens.

“We could’ve had a bunch of lookie-loos, but we had real customers, and tons of people said it was the only reason they came to the fair,” said Tiana Woodruff, founder and CEO of Queen Mary. “I couldn’t keep product in stock—I had to go to L.A. twice and clear out all my inventory.”

Buyers were snapping up Queen Mary’s fast-acting gummies and subsequently “flooding my DMs,” Woodruff said, potentially leading to expanded distribution for the three-year-old brand into Northern California.

“I thought I’d sell maybe 300 units, but I ended up selling 800 to 1,000 units—more than I could’ve fathomed,” Woodruff added. “And most of the customers had never walked into a dispensary.”

Electric energy

Lizzie Spier, chief marketing officer of craft vape maker Halara, reported a similar reception from fairgoers. Her emerging brand—based in Santa Rosa and a gold award winner in the fair’s competition—sells in about 200 dispensaries around the state but has a limited marketing budget.

“The opportunity to interact with thousands of people—that’s such a challenging lift for a company of our size,” Spier said. “It’s exposure we never would’ve gotten on our own, talking to people we’d never cross paths with ordinarily.”

The crowd included military veterans, former police officers, lapsed users and canna-curious folks, she said, which could bring a new wave of consumers into the legal market. It also gave the on-site brand sponsors the chance to dispel myths and misconceptions about cannabis and, in Halara’s case, focus on its twin passions of education and sustainability.

While the full return on investment of the fair is tough to quantify, “There’s no better form of marketing than word of mouth,” Spier said. “It just underscores the value in being integrated into the community and getting out and meeting people at crossover events. Because this went so well, it will open more doors for all of us—the energy was electric.”