Valentia Valentine isn’t your normal pot shop owner. The 70-year-old is quick to tell you that she sent three of the seven children she raised to drug treatment when she caught them with marijuana, and she’s proudly never smoked a joint in her life. Yet she’s still a fierce advocate for cannabis, especially if it comes in a drink.
“I have never smoked a joint and nor do I have a desire to ever smoke a joint because the delivery is so much better with a beverage,” Valentine recently told SFGATE by phone.
She’s the owner of Synchronicity Holistic, a bougie cannabis store in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and an investor in Cann, the celebrity-backed pot beverage brand. She first used cannabis in 2010, after her Stanford doctors told her the drug could help treat her multiple sclerosis. She started with edibles. But with modern advancements in beverages she’s become a devout user of pot drinks, and she’s not alone.
Cannabis drinks have become an unlikely winner in California’s otherwise troubled pot market. While legal pot sales have taken a nosedive in California in the last few years, with fourth quarter sales falling by over 28% from 2021 to 2024, cannabis beverage sales have been steadily increasing.
These beverages are still a tiny slice of the overall market, but they have become a rare bright spot in legal weed sales. Between January 2024 and January 2025, overall pot sales fell 10% in California, with a 15% drop in sales of cured cannabis flower, the most popular product category, according to data shared with SFGATE by industry data firm Headset. But sales of cannabis drinks grew 6% in the same frame, the only product category to see an increase, per Headset’s analysis.
Valentine attributed this growth to new customers who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in marijuana, like active parents and retirees who will drink weed sodas before a game of pickleball. “We love it, it’s subtle and gentle,” Valentine said, referring to the lighter effects of weed drinks that have lower doses of THC, the most common intoxicant in cannabis.
Brett Yader, the owner of cannabis store Surf City Original by Flower Supply in Santa Cruz, said weed drink sales have steadily increased at his store this year without him doing any promotions or marketing for them. He said he was initially skeptical that cannabis users would buy weed drinks when they were first launched — “We laughed at weed drinks all day,” he said — but now he sees that the products draw an entirely different consumer than his typical weed smoker.
“We didn’t think beverages work, because we didn’t think stoners wanted to drink weed,” Yader said. “We didn’t realize that so many people across the country were looking for an alcohol replacement, and now we have all of these people drinking low-dose drinks all day.”
Cannabis drinks have been particularly popular in America’s largely unregulated hemp market, which is a federal category of cannabis that is legal to ship across state lines and is sold in liquor stores, grocery stores and even some bars. Hemp drinks were growing increasingly popular in California in particular, until Gov. Gavin Newsom banned the products last year.
Benjamin Warner, a cannabis regulatory affairs consultant based in the Bay Area, said the hemp market remains a more attractive place for companies to sell cannabis drinks because hemp drinks are cheaper to make, with far lower regulatory and tax costs, and they have a much larger interstate market. Warner said that reality has kept beverage options at legal dispensaries limited as brands flee California’s marijuana market for the hemp industry.
“If I’m a beverage manufacturer, I’m just going to pivot to a market where you can sell it anywhere, including on the internet and at bars and Total Wine,” Warner said, referring to the hemp market. “I’m not going to pay the cost of selling to a consumer in California. It’s an unwinnable battle in California that you don’t need to fight right now.”
Flower Supply owner Yader backed up Warner’s theory. He said that while the last two months have brought the best sales ever for weed drinks at his store, he doesn’t want to invest in more refrigerator space or marketing for weed drinks because Newsom’s hemp ban will expire soon. That would theoretically enable hemp drinks to be sold at grocery stores again, undercutting his sales.
“I would love to continue to invest in this obviously emerging market, but everything I’ve seen is that the hemp ban is coming in six-month intervals,” Yader said. “Unless it’s permanent, at this point I don’t want to invest more in weed drinks.”
Valentine has no plans to stop pushing her favorite way to consume cannabis. She said she’s seen plenty of younger parents who are looking to reduce their alcohol consumption come into her store for THC drinks, too.
“Now the soccer moms are coming in and buying drinks because they don’t want to have wine,” Valentine said.
