Entrepreneurs excited about potential for cannabis café concept

Starting not only a new business, but also a new niche, has taught some bold Southwest Florida entrepreneurs an important lesson: from cops to clients, customer education is an ongoing task.

By Beth Luberecki
| 3:00 a.m. September 23, 2021
| 0 Free Articles Remaining!

Stefania Pifferi. Cole Peacock is one of four business partners who launched Â Seed & Bean, a Â cannabis cafÃ©, in Fort Myers.

Strategies

The road to open the first cannabis café Florida wasn’t always smooth. The founders of Seed & Bean Market in Fort Myers — Cole Peacock, Bruce Wendorf, Kyle Scheid and Ron Greenstein — began working toward that goal in 2018.

The founders had previous experience in the cannabis industry. That includes involvement in efforts like the 2016 amendment to legalize medical marijuana in Florida and the state-level legislation establishing a hemp program in Florida in 2019. That was made possible by the passage of the federal Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (known as the Farm Bill), which removed hemp from the definition of marijuana in the Controlled Substances Act and made it legal to grow cannabis and derivatives of cannabis containing no more than 0.3% THC (the compound that produces a high).