Noah Stokes
Age: 33
Company: The Cannabis Distribution Company
Location: Portland, Oregon
Position: Founder and CEO
Noah Stokes is a problem solver.
The CannaGuard founder and CEO says he likes to “find a pain point and then find a solution.” The many pain points of the marijuana industry led Stokes to his newest venture, The Cannabis Distribution Company, a licensed wholesale/distribution company in Oregon.
“I believe that if you can solve a problem, it makes selling it really easy,” he says.
Stokes had been handling secure transport for a lot of cannabis companies, because none of the larger and better-known secure transport companies were willing to work with cannabis companies. Security firms often rely on government contracts and work with banks, which could be threatened by also working in cannabis.
“If nobody’s going to do it, we’re going to do it,” Stokes says.
He also saw the need for a centralized distribution center to ship cannabis products out to retailers. Through CannaGuard, Stokes regularly connected the two sides of the industry and decided to formalize the relationship into a new company to leverage economies of scale.
The Cannabis Distribution Company now has a 40,000-square-foot, cannabis-only warehouse in Portland, where it houses not only its transportation division, but also trimming and packaging, as well as having connections to labs for product testing.