*By Alisha Haridasani*
Recent mergers in the rapidly growing legal weed industry are making it possible for fledgling cannabis companies to consolidate market share as new jurisdictions adopt legal pot.
“We see a great deal of urgency to move very, very quickly,” said Cam Battley, the chief operating officer of the Canadian medical marijuana company Aurora. “This is a brand new industry on a world scale and it’s important to gain that leadership position as quickly as possible.”
Aurora announced Tuesday it had acquired the hemp-based foods company Hempco a day after its $2.3 billion merger with another medical marijuana company, MedReleaf. The combined company has 11 production facilities churning out 570,000 kilograms, or 1.25 million pounds, of marijuana per year in Canada, Germany, Denmark, and Australia.
The Aurora-MedReleaf merger comes as Canada is expected to legalize recreational marijuana later this year, almost two decades after the country made the drug legal for medicinal purposes.
In the United States, four cannabis companies announced on Tuesday that they were combining to form a new company, TILT, which will produce and deliver marijuana products.
The company is betting on more states allowing the recreational use of marijuana soon, said Alexander Coleman, the CEO of TILT.
Coleman said there are 50 unique markets in the United States, and as more states allow recreational marijuana, TILT can go in and build infrastructure for production and distribution based on that individual market's demand and regulations.
For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/marijuana-mega-merger).
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
Japanese automakers Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi are dropping their talks on business integration.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
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