Aleafia Health’s (ALEF.C) subsidiary, Emblem Cannabis, has signed a licensing agreement with Kinstate Inc, to bring Kin’s sublingual cannabis strips brand and tech to the Canadian medical and adult-use market.
The agreement gives the company the exclusive Canadian rights to manufacture, market and sell certain Kin Slips products, along with rights to use the proprietary formations, manufacturing methodology and intellectual property to offer the format to other international markets.
“The innovative excellence of Kinstate’s Kin Slips product line has been tested in the world’s largest cannabis market. Our approach of leveraging the formulas, branding, equipment, packaging and production know-how of tried and tested partners significantly accelerates our objective of bringing to market a portfolio of unique, premium cannabis health and wellness brands,” said Geoffrey Benic, chief executive officer.
The benefit of sublingual strips as a delivery device for cannabis is that they’re essentially smokeless. That means no burnt lung feeling, no post-drag hacking, and nothing leftover in your lungs to give you cancer later on in life. Given the bad press that vapes have been getting this year, what with all the lipoid pneumonia leftovers from illegal black-market cartridges using vitamin E acetate as a cutting agent, this could be a good alternative for us non-smokers looking to have a good time without risk of dying. Granted, legal and quality cannabis companies that sell vapes and cartridges don’t cut corners with additives in their products, but for the time being, most folks aren’t going to know that. This can be marketed as a safe and legal alternative to vaping.
“Aleafia Health’s commitment to cannabis health and wellness aligns perfectly with our long-stated objective of providing consumers with a discreet and all natural cannabis experience,” said Josh Kirby, CEO of Kinstate.
The portfolio of sublingual strips is currently available in over 100 retail outlets in California, with multiple formulations. The company expects to provide the new format to consumers in Canada during Q2 2020.
The Kin Slips brand has been widely recognized for leadership in product innovation, including:
- The National Cannabis Industry Association’s excellence in technology award for infused products and extractions;
Dope Industry Awards best company branding/marketing along with best topical/sublingual company features in major national publications including Rolling Stone, Bon Appetit and Forbes.
The problem that both Aleafia and Kinstate are going to run headlong into is that this product is neither new nor novel. Rapid Dose Therapeutics (DOSE.C) has their QuickStrip formulation, and has been selling it in various spots courtesy of a former client of ours, Chemesis International (CSI.C). Core One Labs (COOL.C), formerly Lifestyle Delivery Systems and another former client, has their CannaStrips. COOL’s CannaStrips are in California only for right now, but Rapid Dose is selling QuickStrip in the Ottawa area. There’s no head start for Aleafia unless they try to take over the west coast, but it’s early yet with cannabis 2.0 not even two months old, and there’s still time to get in before all the air is sucked out of the market.
Still, there’s no moat here, and if all the company is planning on doing is using it as a cannabis delivery system, then they’re not only going to find themselves on the losing end of a competitive drive, but missing out because of the lack of diversity.
The Quickstrip formulation, for example, can theoretically act as a delivery system for more chemicals than just THC, giving them access to the nutraceuticals market, which is anticipated to be worth over $578.23 billion by 2025 according to Grandview Research.
Kin Slips, along with many new cannabis formats, will be produced in house at the company’s processing facility in Paris, Ontario.
—Joseph Morton
The examples used for pre-existing oral strips are complete unknowns.
Core One Labs’ (ne Lifestyle Delivery Systems) is on it’s deathbed. As of Set/30/2019 they had $119,524 in cash, and $605,427 revenue, with losses of $5,786,993. Despite small injections from Canopy Growth ($1.5M), they toast son.
Rapid Dose Therapeutics is worse. As of Nov/30/2019 they had $22,641 in cash with a revenue of $3,479 (dollars – not thousands), with losses of $2,815,381. They received $400,000 in the form of a grant from the National Research Council of Canada – but it ain’t gonna cut it.
You can basically scratch these off the list of competitors (with the possibility of course of them being bought out for pennies by competitors).
If you wanted to slam on Aleafia’s strips you could have mentioned Aurora which announced oral strips Oct/8.2019. There is a chance Aurora ends up going under as well with their ridiculous spending, but it’s much more likely they’ll get access to capital.
Anyways, the market is still wide open as you pointed out.
Update.
Both DOSE and COOL are halted and are about to go full bankruptcy any minute.
DOSE is halted due to stalling, then simply not filing financials. COOL for not filing financials, getting a CTO,, then filing financials, then despite their CTO being revoked remaining halted…not even sure what that kind of F’d up they are.
Aurora’s oral dissolving strips (that I mentioned previously) have been MIA since early 2020 at least and won’t be showing back up any time soon due to a lawsuit filed by their licenser CTT Pharma.
The moat to having this product on the shelves seems to be actually running a business. I’d say you were right. The market is wide open.
Meanwhile Aleafia’s Kin Slips are produced and are awaiting HC approval.