The Cookies cannabis brand is one of the most influential operations the industry has produced, and it started with a single strain that rewired what premium flower could be. Berner didn't just build a dispensary chain. He built a cultural institution that runs from Bay Area grow rooms to retail floors on multiple continents. Here's the full story, from underground genetics to global empire.
How Girl Scout Cookies became the strain that changed everything
Before Cookies was a brand, it was a plant. Girl Scout Cookies, now almost universally shortened to GSC, came out of California's underground breeding scene. The breeder behind it was Jai Chang, known as Jigga, who crossed a sub-type of OG Kush with an intermediate strain called F1 Durban.
What made it different wasn't raw THC. It was the whole package: dense, frosty, purple-flecked buds and a sweet, dessert-leaning flavor that stood out from the fuel-heavy OGs of the day.
The strain went on to win a string of awards, including Cannabis Cups, and the name eventually ran into trouble of its own. After the Girl Scouts of the USA sent a cease-and-desist letter, the strain and the brand leaned into the shorter names that stuck: GSC and Cookies.
GSC's bigger legacy is genetic. Its bloodline runs through some of the most important cultivars of the last decade. Sunset Sherbet is a Girl Scout Cookies × Pink Panties cross. Sunset Sherbet crossed with Thin Mint GSC produced Gelato #33, and the same cross gave us Gelato #41. That's what it means to be downstream of GSC.
The lineage breakdown
- OG Kush (a sub-type): the structural backbone of the cross
- F1 Durban: the intermediate strain that completed the cross
- Jigga's selection work: the pheno hunting that made it GSC and not just another hybrid
Where GSC shows up in modern genetics
- Sunset Sherbet (Girl Scout Cookies × Pink Panties)
- Gelato #33 (Sunset Sherbet × Thin Mint GSC)
- Gelato #41 (Sunset Sherbet × Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies)
- London Pound Cake (Sunset Sherbet × Nip OG), a Cookies release
Who built the Cookies cannabis brand: Berner's origin story
Gilbert "Berner" Milam Jr. was born in San Francisco in 1983 and grew up in the city's cannabis culture while building a rap career. He started working at a dispensary at 18. That combination of street-level product knowledge and a public-facing music career wasn't incidental. It's the foundation of everything Cookies became. He saw what most cultivators missed: when cannabis went mainstream, brand identity would matter as much as cultivation.
Where Jai Chang brought the genetics, Berner brought the vision. He treated cannabis the way streetwear treated sneakers and hoodies: as a brand people could identify with, not a commodity in a jar. Cannabis had the culture. It just needed the packaging to match.
The blue Cookies packaging became one of the most recognizable looks in the category. Limited drops created anticipation and merch became collectible. This was one of the first real examples of hype-culture mechanics entering legal cannabis, years before it became a playbook everyone copies.
That cultural instinct is what separates Cookies from other cannabis brands that grew up in the same era. Operations like Wonderbrett, Glasshouse and STIIIZY all built serious businesses, but none of them built a lifestyle movement the way Berner did.
How music and streetwear fueled the Cookies cannabis brand's rise
Berner's recording career gave Cookies something money can't buy: organic cultural reach. Cannabis advertising is still heavily restricted across most markets. Music isn't. His collaborations with artists, athletes and cultural figures embedded Cookies in spaces where traditional cannabis marketing couldn't go.
Apparel came early. The first Cookies clothing store opened in San Francisco in 2015, three years before the brand's first dispensary. Plenty of consumers encountered Cookies apparel before they ever saw Cookies flower, and that sequencing was the point. You build the flag before you plant it.
Today the streetwear and accessories side runs four standalone stores of its own, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City and Vienna, Austria. Berner has also put the playbook on paper in his book Becoming Legend.
The Cookies lifestyle lineup
- Clothing and apparel (one of the brand's biggest differentiators)
- Accessories and lifestyle goods
- Limited-edition merchandise drops
- Brand collaborations and events
The genetics pipeline: why the Cookies cannabis brand keeps winning on product
Most cannabis brands launch with strong genetics and coast. Cookies built a continuous pipeline of new cultivars and limited releases, creating a release cadence that functions more like a sneaker brand than a traditional cannabis company.
That pipeline is one of Cookies' clearest competitive advantages. It keeps the core consumer engaged and gives retailers a reason to keep the brand prominent on shelves, because there's always something new to talk about.
The continuous release model also protects the brand from the commoditization trap that hits so many cannabis companies. When any single strain gets widely cloned or loses its novelty, Cookies already has the next one in rotation. That's not luck. That's operational discipline built into the genetics program.
Notable Cookies genetics
- Gary Payton (Y Life × Snowman)
- London Pound Cake (Sunset Sherbet × Nip OG)
- Georgia Pie (Gelatti × Kush Mints #11)
The full Cookies product portfolio
Cookies runs a multi-category operation. Flower remains the flagship, but the brand covers most consumption formats, which matters for retail velocity and for reaching consumers across different occasions. Retail analytics firm Headset tracks Cookies products in 26 states and breaks down where the sales come from.
Premium flower
Flower is the core of the brand and the product that built the reputation. In Headset's data it accounts for just over half of Cookies' tracked sales, at 54.1%. Quality control here is where the licensing model either earns its keep or doesn't.
Vapes
Vapor pens are the second-largest category in Headset's breakdown, at 30.9% of tracked sales. The format is a strong brand extension when the product lands. When it doesn't, it erodes trust faster than almost any other format.
Pre-rolls
Pre-rolls make up 10.6% of tracked sales, and they are where the momentum is. In Headset's August 2026 snapshot, six of the brand's top ten products were pre-rolls, led by a 1g Blue Suede pre-roll.
Concentrates, edibles and beverages
These are smaller slices of the business: concentrates at 3.6% of tracked sales, edibles at 0.5% and beverages at 0.4%. They fill out the retail footprint without being the star of the show.
Apparel
Genuinely one of the most important product categories in the Cookies ecosystem. The apparel functions as walking advertising, cultural signaling and a revenue stream that isn't subject to cannabis regulations. In a category where paid media is still largely off-limits, a logo on a hoodie is one of the most efficient marketing tools in the business.
How Cookies scaled globally through licensing
Cookies built much of its national and international footprint through licensing and partnerships rather than owning every operation outright. Local licensed operators handle the regulated work of cultivating, manufacturing and running stores, while the brand sets the identity. That kept capital requirements manageable while enabling speed, a smart structural call in an industry where overcapitalization has sunk plenty of companies.
The retail timeline shows how fast it moved. The first Cookies dispensary opened in Los Angeles in 2018. The brand reached the East Coast with a Massachusetts location in 2021, counted 49 dispensaries by June 2022 and hit 70 by January 2024, across the U.S., Canada, Israel and Thailand. By 2026, Cookies counted roughly 70 retail locations across six countries.
The scaling model explained
- Genetics: the Cookies cultivar library is the product foundation that partners grow and sell under the brand.
- Retail: Cookies-branded storefronts operate with local partners who hold the licenses in each state or country.
- Brand and apparel: clothing and lifestyle goods extend the brand into unregulated commerce, which matters where cannabis advertising is restricted.
- Manufacturing: regulated products are produced by licensed operators in each market.
The model has real risks. Quality variance is the main one. A licensed partner cutting corners in a market three time zones away can generate headlines that stick to the parent brand. Any operator running the same playbook should go in clear-eyed about that tradeoff.
Cookies dispensaries: the retail experience as brand statement
Walk into a Cookies dispensary and you understand why retail is part of the strategy, not just an extension of it. The stores lean on streetwear codes, with branded merchandise alongside flower. It doesn't feel like a pharmacy. It doesn't feel like a head shop. It feels closer to a boutique that happens to sell cannabis.
That's deliberate. Berner understood early that the point-of-sale environment shapes consumer perception more than any ad placement. When a customer walks into a well-designed Cookies location, they're not just buying product. They're buying into an aesthetic identity, and that experience supports premium pricing and repeat visits.
Stores also double as event spaces. Product launches, artist appearances, strain drops and pop-ups keep the physical retail experience from going stale. That's a difficult discipline to maintain at scale, and it's core to why the brand hasn't softened as it's grown.
Cookies versus the competition: where the brand actually stands
California has produced serious cannabis brands. STIIIZY built one of the biggest vape operations in the country; read how STIIIZY built its business for that side of the story. Wonderbrett has a real claim on ultra-premium indoor. Glasshouse built one of the state's best-known greenhouse operations. Connected Cannabis Co. has genetics that compete at the highest level. These are real competitors with real products.
Cookies wins on brand equity and cultural footprint, not necessarily on cultivation specs or price efficiency. In head-to-head flower comparisons, Connected or Wonderbrett will hold their own and sometimes outperform. In terms of which cannabis brand a casual consumer can name on sight, few come close to Cookies.
That's the moat. Brand recognition built through music, culture and more than a decade of product drops is extraordinarily hard to replicate. You can't backfill cultural credibility. Newer operators can grow better flower, run tighter margins and build cleaner retail, but they can't manufacture the history. Cookies has the history.
The brand also benefits from being early to international expansion. Most California-origin cannabis brands are still domestic-only operations. Cookies had retail in Israel and Thailand and an apparel store in Vienna while many competitors were still figuring out multi-state expansion. First-mover positioning in international markets is real, even if the regulatory environment makes those markets complex.
What the Cookies cannabis brand gets right that most operators miss
High Rise has been watching cannabis brands launch, stall and occasionally collapse since 2012. Certain patterns become obvious, and Cookies gets several things right that most operators still fumble.
The brand came first. Most cultivators build product and then try to bolt a brand onto it. Berner built the cultural identity in parallel with the product, opening a clothing store before the first dispensary. By the time Cookies was widely available at retail, it already had a following.
The genetics program never stopped. Cookies didn't launch GSC and call it done. Strain fatigue is real. Consumers move on. The answer isn't better marketing; it's new product. Cookies understood that early.
The apparel is actually good. Plenty of cannabis brands sell merch. Most of it ends up in a drawer. Cookies built apparel people want to wear, which means the brand travels into spaces where the product can't legally advertise. That's distribution and marketing in one move.
The licensing model scaled the brand fast. This is the hardest one to execute. Licensed brands risk getting soft as they grow: partners cut corners, quality slips and the flagship identity blurs. Keeping the Cookies identity recognizable across dozens of stores and six countries is an operational achievement worth acknowledging.
Berner never stopped being Berner. The artist, the operator, the San Francisco native who came up in the culture: that identity has stayed consistent as the business scaled. In 2022 he became the first cannabis executive on the cover of Forbes, which conservatively valued Cookies at $150 million. Authenticity in cannabis isn't a marketing angle. It's the product.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Cookies cannabis brand and who founded it?
Cookies was co-founded by rapper and entrepreneur Gilbert "Berner" Milam Jr. and breeder Jai Chang (Jigga), who created the Girl Scout Cookies strain. The brand grew out of that strain's success and has since expanded into a cannabis and lifestyle company covering flower, vapes, pre-rolls, concentrates, edibles, beverages and apparel.
What strains does the Cookies cannabis brand produce?
Beyond the original Girl Scout Cookies (GSC), Cookies releases include Gary Payton, London Pound Cake and Georgia Pie, alongside a steady stream of newer cultivars. The continuous strain pipeline is one of the brand's core competitive advantages.
How does the Cookies cannabis brand licensing model work?
Cookies scales largely through licensing and partnerships rather than owning every operation. Licensed local operators handle regulated work such as cultivation, manufacturing and retail, while Cookies supplies the genetics, brand and retail identity. That approach let the brand expand nationally and internationally quickly, though it introduces quality-control variables that require active management.
Where can I buy Cookies cannabis brand products?
Cookies has roughly 70 retail locations across six countries, and Headset tracks Cookies products in 26 U.S. states, where licensed third-party retailers also carry the brand. Check the official Cookies website for a current store locator, since availability and formats vary by market.