Finding Genuinely Craft Cannabis in Ontario: Badges, Micros and Designations

Three things get called craft cannabis in Ontario and they are not the same thing. The OCS Craft designation is about how the flower was dried, trimmed and packaged. The Ontario Grown badge is about where the cannabis was grown. A federal micro-cultivation licence is about how much floor space a producer is allowed to use. A product can carry any one of them without the other two. Here is what each actually certifies, and what none of them certify.

The three things, side by side

1. The OCS Craft designation

This is a merchandising designation applied by the Ontario Cannabis Store to dried flower submissions, including pre-rolls. We checked the criteria directly with OCS's published supplier guidance rather than relying on secondary summaries, because the definition has been restated more than once since it launched in 2021.

As OCS currently publishes them, a product qualifies when:

• The growing facility produces less than 10,000 kilograms of dried flower per year. This is a facility-output threshold, not a licence class.
• The flower is hang dried. OCS describes this as cutting the plant at the base of the stalk and hanging it in a temperature-controlled and humidity-controlled room for 10 to 14 days.
• The flower is hand trimmed. In OCS's words, "the plant is trimmed manually with specialized scissors and no automated machinery."
• The flower is hand packaged. OCS's stated reason is that hand packaging "minimizes damage from overhandling and maintains product integrity."

Three honest caveats about this list.

OCS does not publish a revision date on the criteria page. The page carries a 2025 update reference in its assets, but no explicit effective date appears in the text. If you need certainty on a specific criterion for a commercial decision, OCS directs questions to its merchandising team.

We could not confirm whether licence class forms part of the test. The published criteria describe facility output in kilograms, not the type of federal licence held. A standard-licensed producer running a facility under the 10,000 kilogram threshold appears, on the published wording, to qualify. We are not asserting that it does, only that the published criteria do not exclude it.

The designation describes method, not outcome. Hang drying, hand trimming and hand packaging are process facts. They are verifiable and they are meaningful to people who care about process. They are not a statement that one product is better than another, and OCS does not present them as one.

2. The Ontario Grown badge

This is the newest of the three and the most commonly confused with Craft, because both are OCS badges that appear in the same place.

OCS launched the Ontario Grown badge on 27 June 2025, applying it at launch to roughly 700 items. The criterion is a single, simple one:

• At least 75 percent of the cannabis inputs must be grown in Ontario.
• It currently applies to dried flower and non-infused pre-rolls only, though OCS has said it may be extended to other categories.
• Suppliers must attest to the attribute in writing.

Note what the badge does not say. It says nothing about facility size, nothing about drying or trimming method, and nothing about who owns the producer. A very large Ontario greenhouse qualifies on the same terms as a small Ontario farm, provided three quarters of the input was grown in the province. It is a provenance marker, and that is all it claims to be.

Note also the 25 percent. A product carrying the badge may contain up to a quarter of its cannabis from outside Ontario. That is a deliberate tolerance, not an oversight, and it reflects how blending works in commercial production.

3. A federal micro-cultivation licence

This one is not an OCS designation at all. It is a class of licence issued by Health Canada under the Cannabis Regulations, and it never appears as a badge on a shelf tag. The only way you see it is by recognising the licence holder named on the package.

The classes and their limits, as Health Canada publishes them:

Two of those numbers changed recently and a lot of published guidance has not caught up. The Regulations Amending Certain Regulations Concerning Cannabis, published in the Canada Gazette Part II on 12 March 2025, raised the micro-cultivation canopy limit from 200 square metres to 800 square metres, and the micro-processing annual threshold from 600 kilograms to 2,400 kilograms. Any source describing a micro as a 200 square metre operation is describing the pre-March 2025 rules.

Eight hundred square metres is roughly the footprint of two and a half tennis courts. It is small relative to a commercial greenhouse and quite large relative to what most people picture when they hear the word micro.

What hang drying and hand trimming actually involve

Since the Craft criteria are process criteria, it is worth knowing what the processes are, and what the alternatives are that the designation excludes.

Hang drying means the whole plant is cut at the base of the stalk and hung intact in a room with controlled temperature and humidity, for 10 to 14 days in the OCS description. Moisture leaves the flower slowly, travelling out through the stem and leaf material that is still attached. The alternative at scale is to strip the flower from the plant first and dry it on racks or in a chamber, which takes considerably less time and less room volume per kilogram.

Hand trimming means removing leaf material from the flower with scissors, one head at a time. The alternative is a trimming machine, typically a tumbler with a cutting mechanism, which processes a far greater volume per hour. Machine trimming applies mechanical agitation to the flower surface; hand trimming does not. That is a physical difference in handling, and it is what the criterion is describing.

Hand packaging means the flower is placed into its container by hand rather than dispensed by automated filling equipment. OCS's stated rationale is minimising damage from overhandling.

All three are labour intensive, which is the reason they correlate with facility size. A facility producing under 10,000 kilograms a year can staff these processes. A facility producing many multiples of that generally cannot, and the criteria are in effect describing a scale of operation through the methods that scale permits.

Worth restating: these are descriptions of handling, not assertions about the finished product. OCS publishes them as method criteria and we are repeating them as method criteria.

Why the micro category is under pressure

The licensing numbers above show new entry concentrated in micros at the same time as the total licence count falls. The mechanism behind that is mostly fixed cost.

A federal licence carries the same core obligations regardless of size: physical security requirements, a quality assurance person, mandatory testing of every lot, recordkeeping and monthly reporting into the Cannabis Tracking and Licensing System. Those costs do not scale down with canopy area. Spread across an 800 square metre canopy they land very differently than across an unlimited one.

The excise floor compounds it. At $1.00 per gram plus the provincial adjustment, the duty is identical for a micro and for the largest producer in the country, and it is levied on weight rather than on value. We work through that arithmetic in where your $10 gram actually goes.

That combination is why the March 2025 increase in the micro-cultivation ceiling from 200 to 800 square metres mattered more than it looked. It did not change any compliance obligation. It changed how much production those obligations could be spread across.

Why the three get conflated

Because each one correlates loosely with the others without implying them.

Micro-cultivation licence holders tend to hang dry and hand trim, because at 800 square metres the capital cost of machine trimming is difficult to justify. So a lot of Craft-designated flower does come from micros. But the Craft criteria are written around facility output and method, not licence class, and the OCS Craft page makes no reference to licence type.

Similarly, a small Ontario micro will almost always qualify for Ontario Grown, because it grows everything it sells in one place in Ontario. But so will a very large Ontario producer, and the badge does not distinguish between them.

The word craft itself does most of the damage. In other product categories it carries a set of informal associations that do not transfer. In Ontario cannabis it has one specific meaning, set by one organisation, and it is a defined list of four process criteria.

What the licensing data shows

The micro category is now where most new federal licensing activity sits.

StratCann's analysis of Health Canada data, published 31 August 2026, found that in the first eight months of 2026 Health Canada issued 45 new cannabis production licences, of which 32 were micros. That is 71 percent.

• British Columbia took 18 of the 45, 15 of them micros.
• Ontario took 12, split evenly at six micro and six standard.
• There were 56 revocations over the same period, 46 on request and 10 by the Minister.
• The net effect was a loss of 11 licences, against a total of about 900 federal cannabis licences in force at the end of August 2026.

Read carefully, that is two separate stories. New entry is now overwhelmingly small-scale. And the total number of licence holders is falling, because exits outnumber entries. Both things are true at once, and the second is the reason products disappear from shelves without warning.

What to actually look for on a package

If you want to know how something was made, the shelf tag and the label between them will tell you most of it.

1. The licence holder name. Every legal package names the federal licence holder that produced it. This is the most useful starting point on the label, because you can look up what class of licence that holder has.
2. Any OCS badge. Craft and Ontario Grown appear on OCS listings and are usually carried through to store shelf tags. They mean the two specific things set out above and nothing more.
3. The packaged on date. This is not the harvest date, and the difference matters for hang-dried flower in particular. We go through it in packaged on is not harvested on.
4. The format. Whether a pre-roll is infused changes whether the Ontario Grown badge can apply to it at all.

If what you actually care about is solventless processing rather than cultivation scale, that is a fourth and entirely separate axis. We cover it in solventless, rosin and what craft cannabis actually means, and the pressing methods in our Canadian hash guide.

What none of these tell you

This is the part most coverage leaves out, so it is worth stating plainly.

• None of them is a quality grade. Craft describes method. Ontario Grown describes origin. A micro licence describes floor area. None is assessed against any measure of the finished product beyond the mandatory testing every legal producer must pass.
• None of them tells you about the cure. Hang drying for 10 to 14 days is a criterion. What happens after that, and how long the flower sat before packaging, is not.
• None of them is about effects, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What is on the label is cannabinoid content, terpene content where the producer reports it, format and dates.
• The Ontario Grown badge is attested, not audited. OCS requires suppliers to attest in writing. That is a contractual mechanism, not a physical verification of every batch.
• Craft is a submission, not a right. A product qualifies when it is submitted and accepted. A qualifying product whose producer never submitted it will not carry the badge.

The short version

Ask which of the three you actually mean. If you mean grown in Ontario, look for the Ontario Grown badge and accept the 75 percent threshold. If you mean hang dried and hand trimmed at a facility under 10,000 kilograms a year, look for the Craft designation. If you mean a genuinely small producer, look up the licence holder's class with Health Canada, and remember that micro now means up to 800 square metres rather than 200.

We are happy to look any of this up with you at the counter, including the licence holder behind a given package. Come by 811 Dundas St W, or browse what we carry. For the market context behind all of this, see eight years legal, what the numbers say.

Sources

• OCS supplier guidance, Craft Cannabis criteria: doingbusinesswithocs.ca
• OCS supplier guidance, Ontario Grown badge: doingbusinesswithocs.ca
• OCS, Ontario Grown Cannabis badge launch, 27 June 2025: ocs.ca
• Health Canada, Types of cannabis and industrial hemp licences: canada.ca
• Regulations Amending Certain Regulations Concerning Cannabis (Streamlining of Requirements), Canada Gazette Part II, vol 159 no 6, 12 March 2025: gazette.gc.ca
• StratCann, licensing analysis, 31 August 2026: stratcann.com