There’s a saying in economics that sums up consolidation: big fish eat little fish. It can be bitter, but you can only shrug at the way the market moves.
In cannabis, the image carries extra weight. This is a militant industry where identity, ethics, and rebellion are still entangled with business—where the small grower is a cultural archetype, and the multistate operator often stands for everything the movement once opposed.
When a small, science-driven breeder gets absorbed by a corporate giant, it stirs old cultural reflexes: Did they sell out? Will the product still be real? Can corporate cannabis ever honor the plant? Isn’t MSO flower crap?
Those are the doubts that trailed Dark Heart Nursery when Curaleaf Holdings, the world’s largest cannabis company, quietly brought it under its wing.
The Beginning of a Long Relationship
Dark Heart was founded in the mid-2000s by Dan Grace, and it grew from the heart of California’s medical scene. In those years, growers hunted for viable clones the way miners once searched for gold. Most of what circulated was unreliable, as mislabeling and identity confusion were common.
“The mission was to grow clean flowers for patients,” said Richard Philbrook, now Senior Scientist at Curaleaf but originally part of Dark Heart’s core. “We realized you couldn’t get good genetics anywhere. So we thought, why not be the person who sells the pickaxe instead of mining for gold? For us, the pickaxe was clones.”
It was a simple but powerful shift. The nursery became a sort of public utility—a place where growers could find verified, healthy cuts of the strains they already loved.
“It’s fair to say if you were growing around that time, you probably got clones either from Dark Heart or through a middleman that originated at Dark Heart. You really wanted to bring that continuity,” Philbrook recalled. “When someone asked for a Blue Dream or a Sour Diesel, they got the actual cut.”
The lab’s philosophy mixed bioscience with community. Within a few years, lines formed outside dispensaries every time Dark Heart announced a clone drop. The team’s commitment to clean stock and accessibility made them a fixture in California’s expanding cannabis world.
“We made good material available to everyone—that was the point,” added Jeremy Warren, who led Dark Heart’s genetics and breeding program before moving to Curaleaf.
Vibe Check
We met online while the team was at Curaleaf’s genetics lab in Davis, California. Warren, Philbrook, and Jeremy Kacuba, Curaleaf’s EVP of Operations and Supply Chain, were seated around a table cluttered with notebooks and instruments, as expected in a lab facility.
A symbol of defiance and wonder from the early days sat quietly beside their laptops and microscopes:
a weathered copy of High Times from December 1976.
“We keep this one here every day,” Philbrook said, smiling. “It’s kind of our totem.”
Our talk about the evolution of breeding culture was suddenly interrupted when my British Bulldog, Ramón, decided to join the conversation. Twenty-two kilograms of pure enthusiasm, he began head-butting my chair under the table until I finally had to excuse myself. Laughter filled the room. “Let’s see the dog!” someone called. We did. Ramón wagged, everyone grinned, and the tension broke.
It was a small moment, but revealing. These weren’t the lab-coated automatons of corporate myth. They were scientists who loved cannabis, joked easily, and kept a copy of High Times next to their sequencing results.
Life After the Deal
When Dark Heart was acquired, the fear among growers was immediate: Curaleaf’s going to bury them.
Warren didn’t pretend that joining a corporation came without hesitation.
“We definitely talked about it,” he said. “Do we want to do this? Are we going to lose who we are? For a lot of companies, that answer would’ve been no. But we took the chance.”
His reasoning was pragmatic and idealistic at once.
“At Dark Heart, we had ideas we couldn’t fund,” he said. “There’s a lot we’re doing now that we probably couldn’t have done if we were still independent.”
Philbrook agreed.
“The scale, the data, the ability to test across sites… It’s night and day.”
Under Curaleaf, the Davis lab now runs sensory panels that gather feedback from dozens of tasters across multiple states, connecting those results to terpene profiles and patient outcomes from the company’s medical operations overseas.
That feedback loops back, letting them know how people feel, what they taste, what helps them sleep—and it becomes data for breeding decisions.
“We used to rely on word of mouth,” said Warren. “Now we can actually measure response.”
The corporate resources have changed the rhythm of their days. Warren spends part of his time traveling between Curaleaf facilities, aligning cultivation practices so that what’s grown in Arizona or Florida tastes and smells like what’s grown in California. Philbrook focuses on stabilizing seeds—a challenge that has haunted cannabis breeding for decades.
“The dream is for millions of people to grow or smoke something you bred,” he said. “At Curaleaf, that’s finally possible. You can open Reddit and see someone talking about your plant.”
Still, the transition wasn’t only technical.
“The question,” Warren said, “was always about the culture… could we stay true to it?”
Losing Friends, Keeping Friends
If you spend enough time around breeders, you know that gossip spreads faster than pollen. When news broke that Dark Heart had been folded into Curaleaf, many assumed the old network of independent breeders would turn their backs.
That didn’t happen.
“We didn’t lose any friends,” Philbrook said. “Some OGs won’t work with MSOs, and that’s fine. But most of the people we’ve known for years still call, still share genetics, still collaborate.”
They still talk weekly with old partners like Humboldt Seed and Compound Genetics.
“Those relationships never stopped,” Warren said. “They just got more resources behind them.”
The scientists know how unusual that is.
“We were worried,” Warren admitted. “You read the internet—it’s toxic. People think corporate equals soulless. But the truth is, most of the people in these facilities are the same kind of growers you’d meet at a local farm. They care about the plant. They just have more square footage now.”
Kacuba, the operations executive, joined in quietly.
“I wouldn’t have taken this job if we didn’t believe we could make craft quality at scale. Two years ago, I’ll be honest, our flower wasn’t good enough. Now I’m proud of it.”
It was a rare but honest confession from an MSO executive—and it went to the core of the worries the Dark Heart team had when it came to the technical matter of stability.
The Corporate Story
According to Curaleaf’s own interim financial notes, the Dark Heart deal was structured as an asset acquisition—via forgiveness of a $7.0 million promissory note and $1.7 million in cash—effective January 17, 2024. Curaleaf accounted for it not as a full business merger but as an asset purchase.
When I later spoke with Boris Jordan, Curaleaf’s executive chairman, the tone was more deliberate.
“Curaleaf and Dark Heart have worked together for years,” he said. “The acquisition simply formalized that relationship. For us, it was about bringing exceptional science and genetics expertise into the fold to deliver quality and consistency.”
He described the transaction—the forgiveness of a $7 million note and about $1.7 million in cash—as an asset acquisition, not a takeover.
“It’s amplification, not absorption,” he said. “We preserved their teams and their creative freedom. That’s how we’ll bring craft quality to a national audience.”
It’s the kind of phrasing you’d expect from a man whose words move markets. But it isn’t false. The lab still stands, the same people run it, and the collaboration lines remain open.
Culture and Capital
Every time a corporate player buys a cult brand, the same worries surface: loss of soul, homogenization, the death of risk. Cannabis culture has seen it before—in California’s green rush, in brewery takeovers, in every craft industry that’s ever grown too fast.
The anxieties are real.
When a large company absorbs a lab, it inevitably changes the meaning of independence. Decisions that once lived on instinct now pass through committees. Projects must justify themselves in spreadsheets. Freedom gets reframed as “R&D allocation.” (I even got a call with four people on it.)
Philbrook knows that.
“Sure, there’s structure now,” he said. “But structure can also be protection. It gives us room to do real science instead of just surviving.”
Warren added another layer.
“If we’d stayed independent, we might not be here at all. A lot of great nurseries from that era aren’t.”
That, too, is true. The collapse of California’s post-legalization nursery sector wiped out dozens of small breeders. Those who survived often did so by partnering with larger players.
The Stakes and a Promise of Breakthrough in Genetics
Dark Heart’s reputation came from three things: clean genetics, open collaboration, and cultural respect. Now, inside Curaleaf, those same values are being tested under different conditions.
The company’s national strategy—connecting sensory data, terpene profiles, and patient feedback—has given the lab new scientific reach. It also adds pressure to deliver consistency across vastly different environments: Florida humidity, Arizona dryness, Massachusetts cold.
To achieve that, Dark Heart’s breeders are using cutting-edge techniques to accelerate stability, creating inbred lines that behave like clones. It’s complex work—part plant science, part cultural diplomacy.
“We’ve cracked the code on making those lines fast,” Philbrook said. “Now we have to make sure they’re actually good. Science alone doesn’t guarantee flavor.”
The difference between an OK product and good weed, as anyone who’s ever smoked both knows, is often emotional.
But they are also making what could possibly be a breakthrough in cannabis:
During our conversation, the scientists mentioned what could be one of the biggest technical leaps in cannabis genetics to date.
“We figured out how to make true-breeding lines in a single generation,” said Philbrook, referring to double haploids—a plant-breeding technique that turns a genetically unstable crop into a predictable one.
In other crops like corn or canola, that method revolutionized hybrid seed production. In cannabis, it’s been almost mythical.
“I think we’re the only people who can do that in the world,” the scientist added.
(Editor’s note: High Times has not independently verified this claim but confirmed that the technique is widely regarded as one of the hardest problems in cannabis breeding.)
This is science at a level that independent breeders could never afford—and a step that could change the genetics game altogether.
It Is What It Is, But Maybe It’s Not That Bad
Even with all the good intentions, the skepticism won’t fade overnight. Many in the legacy world still believe MSOs can’t understand culture because culture isn’t scalable.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re partly right.
But not every meal ends in digestion. From afar, the Curaleaf–Dark Heart story looks like the final stage of a gold-rush cycle as the boom has cooled, business is not good, and capital is tight.
Up close, it looks more human: a group of scientists who wanted to keep doing what they love, a corporation that needed genuine genetics and to solve some major scale issues, and a fragile peace between independence and infrastructure.
If purity is your measure, no public company will pass. If your measure is the ability to bring craft quality to millions, this experiment deserves a watchful eye.
The Davis lab still hums. The December 1976 High Times still lies on the table. Ramón the bulldog sleeps through deadlines, unaware he once starred in a genetics interview.
And somewhere online, a Reddit thread is still debating whether Curaleaf’s new jars are “real Dark Heart” or a corporate remix.
The answer, like most things worth arguing about in cannabis, is probably both.
Time will tell which part matters more.
Photos by Rachel Weill Photography, courtesy of Dark Heart Nursery
The post What Happens When a Cannabis Giant Absorbs a Cult Nursery? ‘If We’d Stayed Independent, We Might Not Be Here At All’ first appeared on High Times.