TerrAscend Cash Flow Continues While Hemp Ban Debate Escalates
In the latest Trade To Black podcast presented by Flowhub, hosts Shadd Dales and Anthony Varrell are back together for a rare second show of the day, highlighting breaking news as earnings season continues. TerrAscend Executive Chairman Jason Wild and CEO Ziad Ghanem open the show, and Edibles.com President Thomas Winstanley returns to tackle the hemp fight. We cover margins, consolidation, credit cards, and where hemp policy heads before December.
In segment one, Wild and Ghanem walk us through TerrAscend’s (TSX: TSND) second quarter: net revenue of $67.1 million with modest sequential growth, and gross margin expanding to 54% — among the strongest in the sector — on product-mix improvements and operational efficiencies. Adjusted EBITDA reached $17.7 million, free cash flow stayed positive at $5.7 million, and the streak extended to a 16th straight quarter of positive operating cash flow. They credit yield gains, tighter expense control, less discounting, and bud-tender demand for TerrAscend’s own brands, with New Jersey the standout — gross margin held near 58.5% even as prices fell roughly 30% year over year.
On strategy, TerrAscend wants to be an acquirer, not the acquired — going deeper in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, eyeing Florida’s strong branded operators ahead of adult use, and in talks with other MSOs on deals of varying size, including reverse mergers. The company kept fortifying its balance sheet through an oversubscribed $21.8 million convertible debenture financing, extending maturities to 2031, retiring higher-cost debt, and maintaining share repurchases. A special shareholder meeting is set for August 24 to vote on a share consolidation, clearing the NYSE’s $4 price bar for a potential uplisting. And in a newsy aside, Ghanem confirms TerrAscend is running a credit-card pilot, pointing to a prior Florida test that lifted basket size 20–30%.
In segment two, Winstanley unpacks the federal hemp-THC fight. He frames the Senate’s four-week delay — pushing the ban from November 12 to December 11 — as symbolic but real, a signal Congress now has an appetite for a hemp pathway, even as several states and attorneys general keep pushing stricter enforcement. He points to a wave of bills, including Beth Van Duyne’s just-introduced beverage measure and the broader Barr–Craig framework, and argues the future is low-dose edibles and beverages under a federal backstop, with THCA flower and synthetics on the way out. We get into the interstate-commerce asymmetry between hemp and state cannabis, proposed per-milligram excise taxes, and why the policy environment stays unpredictable as partisan coalitions shift.
