April 20, 2022. The On The Revel crew is loaded into a Sprinter van, headed to a Styles P show, when Matt Kachmar walks up with his pitch already built. They invite him aboard.
Peter Mercado-Reyes already knew who he was. The Kolektor x Sensei had been moving around on Instagram for a while by then — Matt is the Sensei, Albert is the Kolektor — so this wasn’t a stranger climbing into a van. What landed that night was the hustle.
Then came four years of watching them build. Growers Cups. Jiu-jitsu events. Showing up for their community and finding their own way to make noise in New York’s cannabis scene, while being husbands, fathers, and veterans at the same time.
And now, Mercado-Reyes buys their flower for the shelves at CONBUD, where it gets sold to New Yorkers and to tourists from everywhere else.
Two stories that got tangled up in each other. Both parties persisting through the same strange New York experiment, and now doing business together.
That’s the part worth holding onto, because it’s the whole microbusiness story in miniature.
Mercado-Reyes is Chief Insights Officer at On The Revel, the company Jacobi Holland and Lulu Tsui grew into Revelry, and he met Holland at a Cannaware Society event back in 2016. He’s also Director of Procurement and Brand Partnerships at CONBUD. Both jobs, at once. That combination is why I wanted an hour with him — he builds the room, and he’s the person standing on the other side of the pitch inside it. Revelry Buyers’ Club Fall hits Pier 36 on September 18.
Two and a Half Years From Promise to Paperwork
MRTA created the microbusiness license in March 2021. Nobody could apply until October 2023. More than 200 applications came in during that first window, and plenty of those operators are only now turning their lights on.
Mercado-Reyes doesn’t read that gap as incompetence. He reads it as a pipeline.
The micro license was supposed to be the answer for craft — small operators controlling their own means of production, their own quality. Legislators knew indoor cultivation and vertical integration would be the most contested thing on the board. They also knew that if the window opened before legacy growers were ready to file, the people the license was written for would lose it to whoever had a lawyer on retainer.
The bridge was CCTM, the Cannabis Compliance Training and Mentorship Program, which he credits to Damian Fagon, the state’s first Chief Equity Officer, and the OCM staff around him. No job promised. No license promised. Just licensing structures, compliance, seed-to-sale tracking, and a look at how cannabis economies work in other states. OCM built it. Then the office leaned on grassroots organizations across the state — On The Revel among them — to source applicants and sit with people as they filled out the paperwork.
Mercado-Reyes didn’t go through the program himself. Matt and Albert did. Not every awarded micro came out of CCTM, he says, but CCTM applicants got priority, and that was the point of building it.
Worth saying that not everyone who sat in those classrooms would describe the outcome the same way. Spectrum News reported in April on a North Country participant still waiting on an application three years later, paying rent on a storefront the application required, who says the expedited review CCTM members were promised never came. Fagon himself left OCM in November 2024. This January he published an op-ed in Marijuana Moment arguing that the promise of craft cannabis has gone unrealized across adult-use states — not because markets are ruthless, but because of how the policy was designed. He now runs policy at the Parabola Center for Law and Policy and directs the Bronx Cannabis Hub at The Bronx Defenders.
So the man who built the on-ramp has spent the past year writing about where it lets out.
What the Micro License Actually Buys You
Here’s where I got corrected. I’d read the line that New York was the first in the country to issue a license allowing small operators to work the full supply chain, and I put the California and Michigan comparison to him — Type 12 has existed since 2018.
He wouldn’t take it. Said he isn’t familiar enough with those programs to make that claim.
What he’ll argue instead is narrower and more useful. Three thousand five hundred square feet of indoor canopy, stackable, with control from seed to sale. For the first three years of this market, indoor growing was dominated by the Registered Organizations. Everybody else got outdoor.
Advocates had already won a piece of that fight, holding ROs to twelve or thirteen licenses, and not all of those are even switched on. But indoor commands the premium, and there still aren’t many sources of premium indoor flower in this state. So it’s ROs and micros in the same lane, at very different weights.
“It really is a David and Goliath story,” he said. Which is why the Micro Business Showcase exists.
The Quality Claim, Pressure-Tested
Micros are outperforming the ROs on quality. He’s said it, other people have repeated it, and he spent six years running gut-brain circuit research at Kallyope — so I asked what the claim actually rests on.
He gave me a straight answer. On sales, the ROs are beating the micros, no argument. On COAs, he’ll take the micros on terpene percentages: smaller batches, better cures.
But when I pushed genetics as the explanation, he narrowed it down. The real differentiator is care for the craft. Small scale lets an operator put attention into the cultivation, the cure, the plant itself, in a way that volume production doesn’t. That’s the argument.
Genetics is a secondary advantage, and it benefits some operators rather than most. A grower who has spent years working cuts already acclimated to New York conditions, and who knows how those cuts behave, walks in with something an RO can’t buy. Major NY is the example he reaches for — the Queens collective whose founders ran a hydroponics shop back when everyone buying lights off them was buying them for a reason nobody wrote down.
An RO orders a haze from a seed bank. It’s good. It’s just not the same thing.
And because CAURD put the first retail licenses in the hands of people with cannabis convictions, a lot of New York retail is legacy talking to legacy. Nothing better than a warm face, he told me. An old friend knocking on the door.
Why the Showcase Took Until Now
Six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a facility. Then OCM inspects. Then you get the green light to grow. Then another three to six months before you have flower anyone can buy.
That is why a dedicated Micro Business Showcase didn’t exist until this past spring in Hudson. It’s also why a micro can’t work New York City the way a funded brand does. A funded brand pays a rep to hit every store every other day. A micro is four guys who grow, pack, drive, and collect. “If a micro comes to the city, the hotel room, gas, tolls, fines, all the bullshit, equals $500 or more,” he said. “They have to be able to make $500 a day, and that’s closing at least one store.”
Revelry doesn’t ask exhibitors what they made afterward, so he won’t hand me post-show revenue and won’t pretend anyone’s return is guaranteed. What he’ll do is the math out loud. A Micro Business Showcase booth runs about $1,500. Another $1,000 or so to make the space look like something and cover logistics. Maybe $2,000 in product set aside for compliant sampling. Call it $4,500 to show up properly.
So the question isn’t how many accounts you leave with. It’s how many you need. If a retailer relationship turns into an order somewhere around $3,500, three of them is roughly $10,500 in initial wholesale against that $4,500. Nobody needs thirty new accounts for the economics to start working.
And the reason to spend the $4,500 in the first place is that you aren’t meeting three buyers at Pier 36. You’re meeting dozens of them, in one room, on one day.
Cash on Delivery Is the Whole Ballgame
Most wholesale in this industry runs net 30. Mercado-Reyes wants retailers doing cash on delivery with micros, and the argument comes in two parts.
First, COD deletes collections. Cannabis operators live with banks freezing accounts and processors dropping them, because the plant is still federally illegal. Terms get pushed. Games get played. COD ends that game before it starts.
The second part is the one retailers need to hear. That cash goes straight back into the operation — and then back into your store. You want the founder coming in to train your budtenders, sample your staff, run a pop-up on a Saturday? COD is what makes that realistic for a four-person company.
At CONBUD, the terms depend on the micro: margin, brand, story. He was upfront that the store is unusual — mission-driven, relationship-dependent, and still refusing to buy from the ROs that were party to the original injunction. Coss Marte’s shop, Coss Marte’s rules.
Is it replicable? That’s the piece I want answered in print, and I’d like to hear from other retailers already doing it.
The First Product Isn’t Always the Final Product
I’d framed the retailer relationship as pass-or-fail — the product moves, or it goes. He pushed back on that and gave me Dreaming Tree Farms as the reason.
When CONBUD started working with her, one of her products was a live rosin-infused brownie. The OG ones. With the packaging she had at the time, they had a roughly 30-day shelf life.
They spent three or four months trying to make it work. Coordinating delivery timing. Sampling and training the staff. Running pop-ups, hanging banners, pushing sell-through hard enough to move the brownies before they expired. It worked a few times. It wasn’t sustainable.
So instead of ending the relationship, they asked a different question: what else are you really good at?
They already knew the rosin was special. So they asked whether she’d just sell them the rosin. She went back into the lab and taught herself — through YouTube videos and working the process over and over — until she was producing Tier 1 quality. The team went crazy for the first batch she brought in.
Dreaming Tree’s rosin drops are now among the fastest-selling concentrates at CONBUD, priced reasonably, and she’s still experimenting with other products.
His point is that each side is holding something the other one needs. The retailer knows what customers are responding to, what the staff is excited about, what price works, what’s sitting on the shelf too long. The micro can go back into the lab, change the product, and turn it around fast. Neither of those is worth much alone.
What Gets You on the Shelf
His ranking is short.
Product quality first, because indoor and small-batch give micros a structural edge. Though he’ll also tell you that a micro label isn’t a blanket purchase order. Just because it’s a micro doesn’t mean he wants all of it.
Brand and founder story second, and packaging is part of that. You can’t drop it in a mylar, put your name on it, and call that a brand.
Sell-through data comes last, and not because it doesn’t matter. Look up Ayrloom — New York’s best-selling adult-use brand, carried in more than 600 dispensaries — and he can pull rates store by store, neighborhood by neighborhood. For a micro, he’d have to work backward off individual store menus and hope he found them all. The data just isn’t built for small.
The Cooperative License That Never Came
OCM still hasn’t issued guidance on cooperative licenses — same holding pattern as delivery and on-site consumption. Mercado-Reyes sees the model as an opportunity for small operators to pool resources: equipment, infrastructure, capital.
His example is a pre-roll machine. A hundred grand for a unit that cranks 10,000 units. No single micro can justify that spend. But five micros harvesting on staggered cycles, moving biomass freely between facilities, sharing one machine at one site — that changes the arithmetic completely. Same logic for extraction equipment.
Matt and his partners already built the New York Craft Association and co-created the New York Growers Cup, which is the membership half of the idea. The infrastructure half is still waiting on Albany.
There’s also a second route to market that’s now open, which wasn’t open in the spring. Chapter 207, signed August 6, lets a microbusiness fill the cultivator, processor, and retailer roles on a Cannabis Showcase Event permit by itself — direct-to-consumer at farmers markets and street festivals, no three-licensee partnership required.
Half Price at Pier 36
The micro area at Revelry is priced at 50% of the standard rate. Twelve applied, eight got in, and the block sits next to the title sponsor space on the exhibitor floor — not the second indoor room, which is where they landed in Hudson and which he’ll admit didn’t play the way they intended.
Applications have closed. On The Revel absorbs the difference. There’s no sponsor underwriting it.
He isn’t sure they even cover costs on it. They run it anyway, the same way they ran licensing boot camps at a loss before legalization, and the same way he’s now paying a videographer out of pocket for Operator Intelligence, a new buyer interview series with no ROI attached. Buyers don’t get trained in this industry. Sales reps don’t get trained. He decided to do something about the gap.
The Neuroscientist in the Room
Purdue biochemistry. Eric Kandel’s lab at Columbia. Six years at Kallyope on the gut-brain axis. Then weed.
He explains it through his family. A grandfather who was a pastor, a mother who’s a social worker. One helped people through a higher power and a sense of belonging; the other through food pantries, bus fare, and knowing where to send someone. He wanted the same kind of impact, but he pictured getting there through science — research, molecules, something tangible you could hand a person that would make their life better.
Kandel was the high school hero. He’d read the books, he was obsessed with memory. Then he got into the lab. They always say never meet your heroes, he told me, and left it there.
He gave On The Revel eight years before it paid him a dollar. Four hours a night and weekends, on top of a bench job — and he’s still there, still a partner. Then he got passed over for a promotion at his biotech company for the third time, called his friend Coss Marte, and asked how he could be useful. That’s how he got into cannabis full time.
What’s In His Rotation
Söze: the live resin-infused pre-roll with a ceramic tip — small, Black-owned, bootstrapped in New York. Then 1 Slice, a micro he says is the only brand whose entire flower lineup is terpy, doing its own crosses, with strains testing as high as 2.8%. Their site will tell you where to find them. And High 5’s, the infused-and-coated pre-roll out of Vinay Mehta’s Gotham Manufacturing — ultra-potent, and not built for everybody.
He also wanted to name the retailers who made room early. “I appreciate retailers like Cannabis Realm who were ahead of the game and deserve a lot of credit for providing space on their shelves for micros,” he said. Jesus and his team in White Plains bet on micros before it was obvious, and Mercado-Reyes credits them every time the subject comes up.
Revelry Buyers’ Club Fall is Friday, September 18 at Pier 36, 299 South Street. Registration at revelryny.com.
