TORONTO—Fire & Flower Holdings Corp., a cannabis consumer retail and technology platform, announced an agreement with Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc.
Fire & Flower will have the exclusive right of first opportunity to negotiate with Couche-Tard with respect to entering new retail cannabis businesses and franchise arrangements in Canada, as well a potential retail expansion to additional legal cannabis markets outside of Canada.
Couche-Tard has exclusively committed to developing Fire & Flower-branded retail cannabis stores in Ontario under the Master Licensing Agreement.
The first five Fire & Flower-branded retail cannabis stores will be recently opened co-located stores, adjacent to Circle K convenience stores, in the Greater Toronto Area that are currently operating as MC Cannabis Inc. and will be rebranded to Fire & Flower.
"With the signing of this agreement, we have achieved another important step forward with our strategic partner, Couche-Tard. We continue to work closely together to build a sustainable growth engine, leveraging Couche-Tard's high-quality real estate assets, retail operations expertise and capital, accelerating our path to profitability and goal of free cash flow," shared Stéphane Trudel, chief executive officer of Fire & Flower.
"Successful retail is built on delighting our customers with great locations, people and products. Today, we have expanded our ability to grow the Fire & Flower network, in Canada and other international legal cannabis markets, by adding this scalable building block that we can further refine together in the first federally legal cannabis market in the world."
"Couche-Tard is pleased to have entered into a Master License Agreement with Fire & Flower. The Hifyre digital retail platform, including the Spark Perks membership program and the Spark Marketplace app, will bring a distinct competitive advantage to our cannabis stores. The current co-located cannabis stores adjacent to Circle K locations and anchored by convenience stores, fuel and car wash offerings are showing growth, and we look forward to combining this with the recognized Fire & Flower brand and technology-enabled shopping experience to make it easy for customers," shared Steve Pitts, vice president of operations, Central Canada, of Couche-Tard.
"As we look to markets opening in the United States and Europe, we will work alongside our strategic partner to expand Fire & Flower to international markets," said Trudel.