Stefan Adomeit and Francesco Baganz built Remexian into Germany’s largest medical cannabis distributor by weight in 2025, selling approximately 21 tonnes in a single year, with a team of 35 people, operating from container offices, on an initial investment of less than one million euros. He didn’t set out to build the biggest. He set out to build something that worked.
In this episode of The Cannabis Conversation, Stefan walks Nikita through the Remexian story, from its origins as a subsidiary of a Swiss pharmaceutical parallel import business to becoming the dominant importer of medical cannabis flower in Germany. The conversation covers the principles that shaped the business, the High Tide acquisition and what it actually involved, and Stefan’s unfiltered views on where the German market stands, where it’s headed, and where the industry keeps getting in its own way.
Key themes across the episode include the structural advantage of asset-light operations, the tension between pharmaceutical compliance and patient-perceived quality, the logic behind value-tier pricing in a market undergoing rapid price normalisation, and the risks that aggressive industry marketing poses to the regulatory standing of medical cannabis in Germany.
Stefan brings a grounded, often contrarian perspective to topics that others in the space tend to inflate. He is direct about valuation realities, measured about new product categories, and candid about the damage that recreational-style marketing campaigns are doing to a product that needs to be treated as a medicine first.
The episode also covers Remexian’s sourcing relationships, including their ongoing commitment to Portuguese growers despite a difficult 2024 for that market, the compliance barriers blocking new formats such as rosin and hash from reaching German pharmacies, and the structural challenges facing telemedicine and mail order delivery if proposed regulatory changes proceed.
For operators, investors, and distributors working in or towards the European medical cannabis market, this is a useful reference point on what disciplined growth actually looks like in a sector full of noise.
Key Highlights and Insights
The Lean Operation That Outgrew the Well-Funded Competition
By the end of 2025, Remexian became Germany’s largest medical cannabis distributor by weight on under €1m of initial capital, no VC, no premium office, and no bloated headcount. Stefan built it by borrowing IT, warehouse staff, and operational know-how from sister companies inside the same pharmaceutical group, by the hour rather than by the payroll. That left fixed costs low, flexibility high, and nobody upstairs demanding a hero-multiple exit. When the market turned in early 2024, they didn’t have to get ready. They already were.
The Price Tipping Point That Redefined the German Market
During the oversupply of mid-2023, Stefan spotted a structural break: below a certain price per gram, volume moves in a different direction entirely. Because a large share of German patients pay out of pocket, affordability is access. Remexian responded with a pharmaceutical-grade line at a genuinely accessible price, launched in January 2024, three months ahead of the April legalisation wave. By the time competitors reacted, the product was already moving and the margin was already structured.
The High Tide Acquisition Was Not a Distress Sale
Several voices in the industry called the valuation a distress deal. Stefan pushes back. Because shareholders had never poured meaningful capital in, nobody needed a story-driven multiple to make investors whole. The number reflected standard M&A maths: roughly one profitable year of trading, a market with real regulatory risk, and a European reality where North American cannabis multiples rarely survive the flight over. High Tide simply moved while others were still debating. In Stefan’s framing, this isn’t a ceiling for the sector. It’s the deal that reopened European cannabis to institutional capital.
Aggressive Industry Marketing Is Inviting the Regulatory Crackdown
Stefan makes a pointed argument: cannabis operators are helping build the case against themselves. Social media saturation and recreational-coded messaging hand conservative policymakers exactly the ammunition they need to restrict the telemedicine, mail-order, and reimbursement channels that genuinely ill patients depend on. His frame is strategic, not moralistic: every aggressive campaign that reaches a non-patient makes the patient pathway harder to defend. The industry, he says, needs to ask what its own part is in the problem.
New Product Formats Face a Compliance Wall Most Operators Underestimate
Rosin, hash, and concentrates are the obvious next play as flower margins compress, and Stefan is clear on why Remexian isn’t rushing in: there’s no European pharmacopoeia monograph for these products, so they can’t legally reach pharmacies as finished pharmaceutical goods under current German rules. Flower has a pathway. Concentrates don’t. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: a monograph requires a product already in market, but the product needs a monograph to get there. Until that catches up, moving early isn’t bold, it’s exposed.
Top Quotes from Nikita and Finn
"But in cannabis, the whole industry is so much faster [in terms of regulations adapting] than any other industry. I've observed we are also doing the mistakes from other industries in a tremendous speed."
"And there's a real pressure to hit that price [drop] if the Germans are going to buy your product."
"All these things [direct to consumer marketing] are not possible. We don't have a connection to our patients, that's up to the pharmacies and the doctors. That's not us."
“There's a good example in Poland where they removed telemedicine we saw a dip and now we're seeing some significant growth again in the market."
"There was no need to build a big structure. We were very flexible - asset light."
"[Medical cannabis] is a lifeline, it's literally taking them [traditional pharmacies] out of poverty."
"We haven't defined what is a patient in the sense of cannabis... if it improves the life of a patient, that is a patient, in my view."
"I'm seeing a new trend which is, especially after MedCanG, that there's more of a focus on finding hustler sales guys."
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