Brazil’s cannabis boom is coming. Here's your guide.

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Lars Burkholder spent years shipping craft beers across the Atlantic from Oregon before he made up his mind: Brazil wasn't just a promising market. It was a place worth planting roots. A decade-plus in the country and counting, the American entrepreneur now runs multiple cannabis ventures in Brazil — from premium seed sourcing to medical cannabis. 

And more than any other foreign operator in the field, he knows that excitement about this market can turn into a trap the moment it arrives without a serious dose of realism.

The first lesson he learned, he says, is also the most important one. Doing business in Brazil carries its own logic. 

“Don't project another market onto Brazil,” he said. “The U.S. has it. Europe has it. Brazil has its own — but it also has areas that move surprisingly fast, flex when you need them to, and run efficiently. The real issue isn't the red tape. The real issue is that Brazil runs on a different operating logic."

That different logic starts with scale. Brazil is continental. One distributor, one playbook, or a deck in English won't cut it. Regional differences matter. Climate matters. Language matters. But above all else, relationships matter. Portuguese isn't optional.

Cannabis attorney Emílio Figueiredo puts it in a way no foreign operator should ignore. He calls it "the relationship circuit." Emailing a gringo, he says, goes like this: "sounds good, best" — and that's it. 

With Brazilians, it's a whole different conversation. Longer. More personal. More relational. Miss that, and you'll struggle. Working the Brazilian market without building that layer isn't just a style error. It's a crippling condition.

Over the past few months, especially since January, the regulatory landscape for cannabis has evolved faster than at any other moment in the country’s history.

Brazil operates under five different regulatory frameworks governing the medical cannabis market. RDC 660 allows patients to import cannabis products with varying cannabinoid concentrations, including high THC formulations. RDC 1013 authorizes the cultivation of cannabis plants with up to 0.3% THC at harvest. 

There is also RDC 1014, which is aimed at patient associations, which are still awaiting further details regarding an experimental regulatory sandbox. And RDC 1015 allows the manufacturing, registration, and commercialization of pharmaceutical-grade cannabis products for direct sale in pharmacies, although all 19 products approved so far contain no more than 0.2% THC.

Advanced Nutrients, the global leader in cannabis fertilizers, figured out early that shipping finished goods into Brazil was an expensive and fragile model. The company built a local manufacturing facility and grew its registered product portfolio from 8 to 26 SKUs — with sights set on the entire South American market.

“We needed to be truly present,” Edmar Martinez, Advanced Nutrients’ country manager for Brazil said. “It made no sense to look at Brazil as just an import market.”

The large-scale commercial cultivation regulation dropped in late January opens the door wider for foreign players looking to work cannabis in Brazil. The most urgent gap is seeds. Brazilian agribusiness has no tradition with hemp, and the regulations call for certified cultivars, with THC under 0.3%, adapted to a tropical climate.

The opportunity belongs to companies with documented, tested, and registered genetics — not legacy seedbanks playing the collector card, experts say. Robson Ribeiro, CEO of LeafHub and the entrepreneur building what could be Brazil's first vertically integrated cannabis operation, points to Oregon CBD Seeds, Phylos, Segra International, and Trilogene Seeds as references. 

Attorney Figueiredo flags Malawi as a promising source of tropics-adapted cultivars, sitting at a latitude similar to Brazil's. Seeds, cultivation methodology, machinery, and traceability are, in his view, the real lanes for technology transfer.

“The biggest challenge is getting seeds to germinate in Brazil without breaking the 0.3% THC ceiling,” Ribeiro said. “Everyone's going to try, and some will get it right."

Ribeiro mapped other high-potential entry points.

Burkholder, the Oregon entrepreneur, says post-harvest businesses are one of the biggest opportunities in Brazil. 

In a hot and humid country, drying, curing, storage, and packaging can destroy quality that was built over an entire growing cycle. It's a link in the chain that most cultivators still ignore.

You don't need to be a giant to find opportunities in Brazil. 

While large companies spend years actually getting their operations off the ground, independent operators and consultants can move fast and catch the wave building across Latin America's cannabis landscape.

Building out LeafHub's extraction operation, Ribeiro went straight for international consultants with decades of hands-on experience. 

"I'm not going to spend millions on someone with two years in the game," he says. 

He brought in American and Italian specialists who've built industrial-scale operations worth tens of millions of dollars.

Burkholder frames the same gap with a different lens. Brazil doesn't just need imported products. It needs technical translation. Doctors, cultivators, patient associations, and entrepreneurs all need knowledge that makes sense in Portuguese and on the ground in Brazil. Consulting, in this market, is education. And education here is a business opportunity.

Carolina Sellani, director of Abiquifi, Brazil's pharmaceutical inputs industry association, sees the country as a strategic global export platform for pharma-grade cannabis products.

“Every company should have exports in their business plan, with Brazil as their global launch platform,” she said.

Products registered as medicines with Anvisa, Brazil's FDA equivalent, can be exported to any market. The agency is now operating at the level of the world's most respected regulators.

The Brazilian supply chain is segmented by law. 

Cultivators produce raw plant material. A pharmo-chemical company processes it into an API. A distributor bridges the gap. A pharmaceutical manufacturer produces the finished product. Each link is a different opportunity.

Figueiredo, the cannabis attorney, says that unlike the U.S., no Brazilian company can go from “seed to shelf.” 

Figueiredo has watched the same script play out dozens of times since 2020. 

The foreign operator shows up fired up. The Brazilian partner gets excited. They schedule the legal and technical meetings. Then the overseas company announces they already have ‘the right people for all the regulatory and strategic guidance’ and then the local partner gets shown the door. 

"It happens all the time. I've seen it dozens of times," he says. 

“A foreign company can have capital, a great product, and a global brand,” Advanced Nutrients’ Martinez said. “But without someone local, reliable, in the field, and with the operational capacity to execute — the risk of blowing it is very real."

To Figueiredo, Brazil’s institutions are more like Russia’s than the U.S. or Canada, where most of the cannabis industry operates. 

“Bureaucracy, hustle culture, corruption — you name it. You need someone on the ground here with serious ethics, moral clarity, and the operational horsepower to actually get things done,” he said.

Ribeiro, the LeafHub CEO, says Brazil is going to become one of the biggest cannabis markets in the world as regulations ease. “That’s a fact,” he said. 

To Burkholder, the biggest opportunity is collaboration — between international companies with technical expertise, and local operators who know how to do business in Brazil.

So, what comes from outside can add real value. But only if it learns to run as part of this machine.

Story edited by Jeremy Berke.