Founding a chain of dispensaries wasn’t part of Tom Schmidt’s retirement plan. But Minnesota’s CBD market was taking off, and he had time on his hands – so when a friend asked if he wanted to be part of a newly launched CBD company, Schmidt said yes.
That decision turned into Wildflower Cannabis Co., which opened its flagship store in Northeast Minneapolis followed by a second store in Minneapolis's North Loop. A few years later, Schmidt opened a third location in Bloomington, this time as a licensed cannabis dispensary. Today, all three Twin Cities stores sell adult-use cannabis.
The move into cannabis was the plan from day one. "Our goal was always to transition to cannabis from CBD," says Schmidt. "We never had the intention to stay CBD."
Building a Dispensary Business in a Market That Changes Every Year
Minnesota has rewritten its hemp and cannabis rules repeatedly, and Wildflower has felt every revision. The shifting legal landscape even forced the company to rebrand early on, when its original name ran into intellectual property restrictions.
"Minnesota is a challenging market because they change everything every year," Schmidt says. "There hasn't been a lot of consistency."
That instability also shaped how Schmidt approached technology. Wildflower started out on general retail and restaurant-oriented POS systems, none of which were built for cannabis. As the team prepared to replace them, Schmidt went looking for a platform that could run the existing CBD business today and carry Wildflower into licensed cannabis retail without a second migration later.
Why Wildflower Chose Cova POS
Schmidt learned about Cova at MJBizCon. After evaluating several of the major cannabis POS platforms, Wildflower became one of Cova's earliest customers in Minnesota. Two primary criteria decided it.
- A clear path from CBD to cannabis. Cova could support Wildflower's hemp-derived CBD sales and its planned transition into licensed cannabis on the same platform.
- An open ecosystem. With a background in software and product development, Schmidt wanted open APIs and strong third-party integrations so he could swap individual tools without rebuilding his entire operation.
Schmidt expected the cannabis software market to be far more restricted than mainstream retail, which made openness a priority.
"It sounds great to have one place to call," he says. "But the reality is, if something doesn't work and it's not what you want, you have no real other options. That was one thing I really liked about the Cova platform. Being open meant I didn't have to throw everything out if I wanted to replace one part of what I was doing."
That flexibility paid off. Wildflower changed its eCommerce and mobile app provider more than once while keeping Cova as the foundation. "I'm not stuck with one solution," Schmidt says. "I can try different platforms until I find the one that really fits how I want to operate."
Today, Wildflower uses the same technology stack at all three stores. Carrot powers the company's online store and mobile app, while Tentech handles digital menu boards, print menus, digital price tags, and the QuickBooks integration. Cova sits at the center, feeding product data to each of them.
How Cova Supports Wildflower's Education-First Approach
Plenty of dispensaries say they focus on education. Schmidt built Wildflower's business model around actually funding it.
Wildflower pays competitive wages and covers the cost of cannabis retail courses at local colleges, which staff can complete on the clock. The current push is to get every employee medically certified. "Everyone says they focus on education," Schmidt says. "I'm not sure everyone then also invests in their staff to really provide that on an ongoing basis."
The goal is to move customers past potency-only shopping and generic sativa and indica labels toward the details that actually describe a product: terpenes, cannabinoids, and flavonoids. To put that information in front of shoppers, Wildflower invested in digital shelf tags that are easy to update. Cova pushes product information directly into those displays, so the data on the shelf stays current without manual re-entry.
Cova also shortens the path from new hire to knowledgeable budtender. Every new employee works through the learning management system included with Cova during their first couple days, before stepping onto the retail floor. On-the-job training follows.
The Results: Reliable Uptime, Fast Onboarding, and a Real Partner
Since switching to Cova, Wildflower has not gone down because of a Cova issue. During the one outage the stores did experience, caused by a third-party cloud provider, all three locations kept selling as normal.
Other highlights Schmidt points to include:
- Budtenders up and running in a couple of hours. After completing Cova's built-in training, new staff are typically comfortable on the POS within hours of hitting the floor. "There have been no complaints about Cova or anything related to point of sale operations," Schmidt says.
- Responsive, knowledgeable support. Cova's team helps troubleshoot even when the root cause sits with another vendor in Wildflower's integrated stack.
- Cost-effectiveness on thin margins. "Dispensaries operate on pretty thin margins if you're not fully vertically integrated," Schmidt says. "It's really nice to have a solution that is cost-effective with great support and frequent updates. It's not an abandoned product. It's constantly getting better."
Schmidt also credits Cova for showing up in Minnesota long before the market opened. Cova's team, including its CEO, visited the state multiple times to run education sessions for prospective operators, more than a year before most other vendors arrived. Schmidt valued that the guidance wasn't a sales pitch. "Whether you choose Cova or not, here are the things you really need to be concerned with," he says, describing the approach. "There's a lot of interest in having the market be successful and having the entrepreneurs building companies be successful."
Advice for New Cannabis Retailers
Wildflower's next step is adding medical cannabis to its licensed adult-use operations. Recent rule changes in Minnesota have made that transition easier, and getting the full staff medically certified is part of the preparation.
For operators thinking about opening their own store, Schmidt's advice is straightforward. "Opening a retail dispensary is a lot harder than people think it is, especially to do it well," he says. "Every state operates differently. Cova has been a really great partner in navigating that."
Whether you're moving from hemp and CBD into licensed cannabis or replacing a POS that's holding you back, Cova's cannabis POS gives you a stable, compliant foundation with the flexibility to choose the integrations that fit your business. Book a demo to see how Cova can support your stores today.