On 9 September 2026, Lumino marked eight years as Europe’s leading cannabis recruitment agency. The team, spread across the UK and mainland Europe, came together in Lisbon, Portugal, to celebrate, a day ahead of this year’s edition of PTMC (Portugal Medizinisches Cannabis).
Eight years… that’s long enough in the European cannabis industry to have watched most of it get built.
Lumino started with a simple premise: that a regulated medical cannabis sector would only move as fast as the people hired to run it, and that recruitment for this industry deserved specialists rather than generalist agencies treating it as another vertical.
Eight years on, that premise is still the business.
Lumino’s team is distributed across the UK and mainland Europe, which makes any excuse to be in the same room worth taking.
This year’s excuse was a good one. Landing the birthday gathering in Lisbon, a day before PTMC, meant the team could celebrate together and then walk straight into a room full of clients, candidates and partners the next morning.
Plenty to do this month
Our birthday is only the first highlight of the busy month.
This September also carries PTMC (Portugal Medical Cannabis) 2026, a well-renowned conference that hosts the European medical cannabis industry in Lisbon for a round of insightful panels and networking opportunities.
The week after PTMC sits Expopharm and a casual cannabis industry golf event Lumino organised with our good friends over at Kündig Pharmaceutical Solutions.
Two more recruiters, before the month is out
The other piece of September news is less ceremonial and more structural. By the end of the month, two new recruiters join Lumino.
The point of adding headcount isn’t headcount for its own sake, it’s capacity: more roles taken on, and a better chance of bringing in the operators, quality leads, regulatory specialists and commercial hires that a maturing medical cannabis industry actually needs.
The slogan hasn't moved
Lumino opened eight years ago with a line that has stayed on every piece of company material since:
"An industry is only as good as the people working in it."
It reads plainly enough that it would be easy to treat as a tagline and move on. It hasn’t worked that way in practice. It’s the test behind who gets hired, both inside Lumino and by the clients Lumino places into.
An industry built on genuinely good regulation and genuinely good science can still stall if the people running it aren’t up to the job, and that has been true in every market Lumino has worked in over eight years, not just the ones with policy problems.
Eight years and a Lisbon gathering doesn’t change that ethos, it just gives us a reason to say so out loud this year.
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