In Switzerland, legal weed is heading in an entirely new direction. A supermarket chain selling CBD flowers as an alternative to tobacco will be taking the lead on this new approach to cannabis retail. At this point, only CBD flower will be sold in the stores, so don’t expect to get high from this supermarket bud.
Buying Weed at Supermarkets
Swiss supermarket chain Lidl recently announced plans to sell a new line of cannabis products. The stores will soon sell 1.5-gram boxes of CBD flower.
The bud will be grown by a company called The Botanicals. The cannabis producer is based in northeast Switzerland and will grow the CBD-rich weed in greenhouses.
The CBD flowers will be packaged and marketed in the supermarket chain as an alternative to tobacco. To that end, Lidl said it will sell the boxes of weed alongside regular rolling tobacco at the cash register.
Although the weed will be marketed as an alternative to tobacco, it will be priced much higher. At this point, the supermarket chain said it plans to sell a 1.5-gram box of CBD bud for 18 Swiss Francs, which is roughly $18 USD.
At this point, the new cannabis product line is limited to only CBD flowers. In order to stay within Switzerland’s laws, only cannabis with less than 1 percent THC can be produced and sold.
That restriction is part of a sweeping medical marijuana law introduced in Switzerland in 2011. That year, the country passed a new set of laws and regulations that made it legal for people 18 and over to purchase weed with less than 1 percent THC. The idea was to make high-CBD medical marijuana accessible and easy for adults to buy.
“The legally cultivable varieties contain only very small amounts of THC and a high proportion of CBD oil,” Lidl said in a statement to news source The Sun.
The chain added: “The manufacturer relies on sustainable agriculture and refrains entirely from adding chemical, synthetic, or genetically modified substances.”
Will This Be The Next Big Thing?
Over the past year or so, companies in Switzerland have experimented with different ways to market legal weed. For example, in 2017 a company called Koch & Gsell announced a new line of pre-rolled spliffs the company called Heimat.
The product was a pre-rolled combination of tobacco and cannabis. And just like the weed that Lidl plans to sell, the weed used in the Heimat product line was a low THC variant. In fact, the spliff products were designed to fall below the country’s 1 percent THC limits.
Here’s how Koch & Gsell described their product: “The natural tobacco-and-hemp blend develops a bouquet of mild, sweet and spicy aromas when smoked, exuding the unmistakable scent of cannabis. And yes, of course, it’s legal.”
For many weed smokers, developments like those being made by Koch & Gsell and Lidl supermarkets are a mixed bag. On the one hand, it may be promising to see cannabis become more widely accessible. But on the other hand, weed with negligible amounts of THC might not represent a very big step forward.