Forty-five million people in the U.S. speak Spanish as their dominant language. The cannabis industry has existed legally for over a decade. And it took until 2026 for one of the country’s largest dispensary chains to build a full Spanish-language experience for them. Curaleaf finally did it. Took a minute.
The program rolled out this month across Curaleaf’s 73 medical cannabis dispensaries in Florida. It covers in-store kiosks in Spanish, a fully translated curaleaf.com, a Spanish SWEED e-commerce storefront, printed bilingual education materials, and paid media built for Spanish-speaking audiences. Curaleaf says it plans to scale the model to other states and other languages.
If you are wondering why this took so long, you are not the only one.
The math the industry kept ignoring
The U.S. Census Bureau pegs the country’s Hispanic population at 68 million as of 2024, one in five Americans. Data compiled by the Cervantes Institute and reported by Euronews earlier this year put the number of dominant Spanish speakers (monolingual and bilingual) at at least 45 million, with another 15 million at varying levels of fluency. That makes the United States the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. Only Mexico has more.
Florida is one of the densest pockets of that map. 6.7 million Hispanics, 28.7% of the state’s population. It is also one of the largest medical cannabis markets in the country, with close to a million registered patients.
The arithmetic was never the hard part. The hard part was getting a major operator to actually move on it.
The budtenders called it
The initiative did not come out of a strategy deck. It came out of the retail floor.
Justin Miller, Senior Vice President of Brand Marketing at Curaleaf, told High Times the program was triggered by feedback from the staff who actually deal …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
