Cannabis is the one vertical where the building itself has to hold a licence. Scoping a requirement here starts with what the site is authorized to do, not with the rate card.
Almost every other product category can be moved into any competent industrial building. Cannabis cannot. Under the Cannabis Act and its regulations, storing cannabis on behalf of a licence holder is a licensed activity, which means the third party doing the storing has to hold the applicable federal licence and the building has to be a site named on it. A warehouse that is perfect on every other dimension, location, ceiling height, dock count, labour pool, is simply not an option if it is not licensed.
That single fact reorders the whole search. The addressable set of buildings shrinks from the hundreds available in a given market to the handful that are already authorized, and the practical questions become licence scope, security build, and excise handling rather than dollars per pallet. Requirements that assume a normal 3PL search will stall for weeks before anyone says so out loud.
The second thing that reorders the search is the destination. Adult-use product bound for retail moves through provincial wholesalers, and each board runs its own ordering, labelling, palletization, appointment, and delivery-window rules. An operator that already ships into the board you sell through has already paid for that learning curve. One that has not will pay for it with your inventory.
None of this is optional and none of it can be retrofitted quickly. When an operator says they can take cannabis, these are the six things to confirm in writing before the requirement goes any further.
Storing or handling cannabis for a licence holder is itself a licensed activity. Confirm the class of licence, the activities it authorizes, and that the specific building address is a named site on it. A licence held at another facility does not travel.
The regulations set out physical security requirements for the site perimeter, the operations area, and the storage area: intrusion detection, continuous visual monitoring with recordings retained, restricted access, and a record of every person who enters and leaves a storage area. This is a construction and systems program, not a policy document.
Key positions at a licence holder require Health Canada security clearance, and clearances take months to obtain. Ask who currently holds one at the site, not who has applied.
Excise stamps are province-specific, controlled, and accountable. Whoever applies or stores them needs the CRA licence, a secured stamp inventory, and reconciliation to the unit. Unaccounted stamps are a licence problem, not a shrink problem.
Lot and batch level inventory that reconciles to the federal tracking system, with monthly reporting. The WMS has to hold lot, batch, weight, and packaged-date attributes, and reconcile physical counts to the reported balance.
Destruction of unsaleable product is witnessed, documented, and reported. Confirm the operator has a written procedure and the witness roster to execute it, because returns and expiry from provincial boards land back at the warehouse.
Licensed cannabis capacity does not price off a published band. The security build, the personnel, and the reporting overhead are real costs that sit on top of the underlying industrial rate, and they vary too much by site to publish honestly. What can be published is the ordinary industrial baseline the premium sits on top of, and the rate for the ancillary inventory that should not be inside the vault at all.
| Line item | 2026 range | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Ambient pallet storage, ancillary and non-cannabis inventory | $12 – $40 | per pallet / month |
| Pallet handling, in or out | $7 – $20 | per pallet, per move |
| Pick, pack and ship, first unit | $2.50 – $7.00 | per order |
| Secured licensed storage | Quoted per requirement | depends on licence scope and security build |
Warehouse Bridge network data for the ordinary industrial line items. Licensed cannabis storage is quoted per requirement because the security and compliance overhead is site-specific; we will not publish a band we cannot source. Full city-by-city tables are in the Canadian Warehouse Market Report, and the 3PL cost calculator models a market-specific figure.
Ask these in the RFP rather than at the site visit. The answers narrow a shortlist faster than any rate comparison, and they are all verifiable.
What licence do you hold, what activities does it authorize, and is this address a named site on it?
The only question that determines whether a conversation continues. Ask for the licence number.
Which provincial boards do you currently ship into, and what is your rejected-delivery rate with them?
A board relationship in production is worth more than a stated capability. A rejection rate the operator cannot quote is a rejection rate nobody is measuring.
Who at this site holds a current Health Canada security clearance?
Clearances take months. Applications in progress are not coverage.
Walk me through your excise stamp reconciliation.
Stamp custody is where cannabis warehousing most often goes wrong, and the answer is either immediate and specific or it is a problem.
Show me the quarantine, recall-hold, and destruction-pending locations.
They either physically exist inside the storage area with WMS statuses behind them, or the returns flow is going to become your problem.
The process, and the compliance questions that belong in the requirements document rather than the site visit.
Dedicated versus multi-client, and where a compliance-heavy program justifies dedicated space.
The lighter-weight evaluation for requirements that do not justify a full RFP.
Customs-bonded storage, for import flows that need duty deferral alongside a controlled-goods build.
Procurement templates: the 3PL RFP template puts the compliance questions above into a requirements sheet vendors respond to line by line.
No. Storing cannabis on behalf of a licence holder is a licensed activity under the Cannabis Act and its regulations, so the third party has to hold the applicable federal licence and the building has to be a named site on that licence. An unlicensed warehouse cannot take the inventory regardless of how good its security is, which is why a cannabis search starts from the small set of already-licensed sites rather than the full industrial market.
The Cannabis Regulations set out physical security requirements covering the site perimeter, the operations area, and the storage area: intrusion detection, continuous visual monitoring with recordings retained for a defined period, restricted and controlled access, and records of every entry to and exit from a storage area. Key personnel at the licence holder also require Health Canada security clearance. The build cost and the clearance timeline are the two reasons licensed capacity is scarce and does not appear on short notice.
Adult-use product bound for retail generally moves through the provincial wholesaler in each province, and each board sets its own ordering system, case and pallet configuration, labelling, appointment booking, and delivery windows. The practical consequence for a warehouse requirement is that operator experience is board-specific: shipping successfully into one board says little about the next one. Name your boards in the requirement and ask which ones the operator ships into today.
No. Packaging components, hardware, accessories, displays, and merchandising material are ordinary goods and can sit in ordinary industrial capacity at ordinary rates. Splitting that inventory out of licensed space is usually the single largest cost reduction available on a cannabis network, and it frees vault capacity for product that actually has to be there.
Dried cannabis is typically held in a controlled ambient band with humidity control to protect moisture content and terpene profile, while edibles, beverages, and some extracts follow their own product specification and may require refrigeration. Because the requirement varies by product form, specify the temperature and humidity band per SKU family in the requirement document rather than asking for climate-controlled space generically.
Warehouse Bridge operates no warehouse of its own. There is no building we need to fill, so the operator that fits the specification wins the work. For a cannabis requirement, the useful first conversation is about licence scope, compliance profile, and volume, before any building is on the table.
Call (289) 907-3794 or email solutions@warehousebridge.ca. Program structures and thresholds are set out on the enterprise page.
This page is operational guidance for scoping a warehouse requirement, not legal or regulatory advice. Licence scope, security obligations, and excise duties should be confirmed with Health Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency, and your own counsel.
Volume, market, and compliance profile. We come back with the operators that can actually hold the requirement, and what the responses should look like.
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