Infused Chocolate Still Spikes in Winter After Grön’s Sale

Marijuana-infused chocolate still sells hardest in January and February, even after Oregon’s chocolate specialist sold to the country’s largest gummy brand. Christine Apple, founder and CEO of Grön, said those two months are her strongest chocolate stretch. Headset, the Seattle cannabis data firm, put chocolate at 9.4% of U.S. edible sales and 14.2% in Canada in early 2025, with gummies above three-quarters of the aisle in both countries.

On January 5, 2026, Wyld announced it would buy Grön. The winter spike did not disappear. The independent chocolate maker did.

The Chocolate Maker Sold to a Gummy Giant

Apple built Grön in Oregon in 2015 as cannabis-infused dark chocolate bars. By the time Wyld published the deal, Grön sold 75 products in 9 U.S. states and Canada. Chocolate was still the brand’s calling card, and it was not the business. Apple said about 70% of Grön’s sales were gummies and a little more than 20% were chocolates, and that the split disappointed her.

THE JANUARY 2026 DEAL

• Wyld’s reach: 16 U.S. states and Canada, about 7,500 regulated stores.
• Grön’s reach: 9 U.S. states and Canada, about 4,500 stores, 75 products.
• People: About 1,400 staff in the combined group, roughly 1,100 at Wyld and 300 at Grön.
• Terms: Undisclosed. The companies said recipes, names, and packs stay separate, with no “a Wyld company” line on Grön wrappers.

Aaron Morris, Wyld’s founder and CEO, called it a scale-up of a brand that was already winning. Headset’s category page now says Wyld takes about 15% of all U.S. edible dollars, a hold no flower brand matches. The buyer already owned the gummy aisle. The seller owned the chocolate reputation.

Joining forces with Wyld allows us to thoughtfully scale what we do best while staying true to who we are.

Christine Apple, founder and CEO of Grön, January 2026 announcement

Wyld’s own note says Grön is joining the Wyld family of brands and will keep the product and point of view that made it known. That is a distribution story dressed as a craft story. Grön gets California-sized pipes. Wyld gets a chocolate kitchen it did not have to build from scratch, plus a winter gift SKU that gummies do not fully replace.

Gummies Still Hold More Than 75% of Edibles

Headset’s latest public category read, covering September 2025 through August 2026, puts $2.2 billion in U.S. edibles and $257.6 million in Canada, fourth in both countries. Average U.S. edible prices sit near $11 an item and fell about 7% year over year, the steepest drop Headset lists among major categories. Most of that spend is a 100-milligram pack of ten 10-milligram gummies, or about $1 per 10 milligrams.

Women account for 42% of edible dollars, against 32% in flower and 34% in vape pens, and Baby Boomers and Gen X together make up more than half of edible spend. That shopper mix is why a chocolate bar still belongs on a Valentine’s plan even when the planogram is a wall of gummies.

CHOCOLATE VERSUS GUMMIES, EARLY 2025

Those shares are the last clean split Headset gave around the winter interviews. They have not been replaced by a newer public chocolate print, and nothing in the 2026 category page suggests the gummy floor cracked. Blair MacNeil, then president of Tilray Canada, argued that regular chocolate was growing at five times the infused kind and that the gap meant leftover demand. Statista and Grand View Research put the conventional chocolate market above $120 billion a year, with 4% to 5% yearly growth through 2030. Infused bars have not caught that curve.

Chocolate Cannot Share a Room With Gummies

Apple’s factory problem is physical, not a branding memo. Boiling a gummy mix throws steam. Chocolate hates water. She said the two lines have to take turns in the same kitchen, and that chocolate wants air drier than 50% humidity and rooms that stay at or below 70-71 degrees Fahrenheit. Tempering is what gives a bar its snap. Skip it, and fat and sugar separate into a dusty film. The bar is still stable. It looks like it failed.

WHAT THE CHOCOLATE LINE REQUIRES

• Dry air: Keep humidity below 50%, because steam from gummy cooks ruins the batch.
• Cool rooms: Hold chocolate rooms at or below 70-71 F, then run delivery vans near 65 F.
• No store fridge: Cold shelves, then warm air, leave a white film when the bar comes back to room temperature.
• Temper for snap: Poor tempering splits fat and sugar; Apple said even bloomed chocolate “will literally last forever.”

That is why a company can “win” edibles on gummies and still starve its chocolate SKU. Every extra gummy cooker makes the chocolate room harder to protect. Reverse licensing was Grön’s workaround before the sale: Apple’s team brought people, tools, sales staff, and vans into a partner’s licensed kitchen, paid a small fee, and shipped the same inputs so every site followed the same recipes. Quality control meant flying staff in. It did not mean running chocolate in the steam of a gummy line.

Jordan Shimada, director of supply chain and procurement at Kiva Confections in Alameda, California, said Christmas and Valentine’s Day sit so close that the planning cycle feels stacked. Kiva’s Terra bites and chocolate bars were 22% of its sales in those interviews, with Michigan its largest chocolate market after California. The calendar rewards whoever already has a dry room booked. It does not create one.

Cocoa Came Off a Record and Stayed Expensive

When Apple and MacNeil sat for those winter 2025 interviews, cocoa was the other vice on the line. The International Cocoa Organization had stockpiles down 36% year over year. Futures for March delivery were more than four times higher than five years earlier. Apple blamed blight on cacao trees in the narrow belt where they grow, including swollen shoot disease. Tilray’s long contracts, she said, kept Chowie Wowie insulated. Grön absorbed the bill through automation and decade-old supplier ties, and she noted Grön was the first Fair Trade Certified cannabis company.

COCOA FROM THE SPIKE TO SEPTEMBER 2026

1. 2023/24 season: The International Cocoa Organization records a global deficit of 492,000 tonnes.
2. December 2024: New York cocoa trades at a record above $12,900 a tonne.
3. February 2025: ICCO stockpiles sit 36% lower than a year earlier; blight and long contracts split Tilray from smaller makers.
4. 2024/25 season: ICCO later moves the balance into a small surplus as grindings fall and West African arrivals recover.
5. September 25, 2026: Trading Economics prints cocoa futures at $5,553.60 a tonne, down 19.61% from a year earlier, with a 52-week range of $2,846 to $7,078.

The crash from the 2024 peak did not return cocoa to the cheap years before the blight. It left a mid-range price that is still a tax on a bar and a rounding error on a pectin gummy. Smaller chocolate makers who ate the 2024 bill did not get a rebate in 2026. They got a buyer, a partner, or a thinner slot on the shelf.

Why Canadian Chocolate Bars Stop at 10 Milligrams

Canada is the better chocolate market on share, 14.2% against 9.4% in the United States, and it is a worse market on dose. Health Canada treats food-like cannabis as edible cannabis and sets a precautionary 10 mg of THC per container. The Cannabis Regulations bar the labelled total from exceeding that 10 milligrams. A pack can hold two 5-milligram squares. It cannot hold a U.S.-style 100-milligram bag. That is one-tenth the THC in a common American gummy pack, in a country where gummies still take more than 75% of edible sales.

MacNeil said the cap also lightens the excise hit, because there is so little cannabis in each pack compared with flower, vapes, and pre-rolls. Tilray leaned into that math with Chowie Wowie, wrapping fillings in infused Belgian milk chocolate and running the bars through a cooling tunnel. The company put food scientists from sister firm Manitoba Harvest on both gummies and chocolate and said it was adding chocolate capacity. In December 2023 it rolled out a Chowie Wowie Belgian chocolate line in peanut butter, praline, and soft caramel, including 10-milligram THC and 10-milligram CBD bars.

Non-infused chocolate in the marketplace is growing at five times what infused chocolate is growing at. That would tell me there’s a built-up demand that I think will make its way into the THC-infused side.

Blair MacNeil, president of Tilray Canada

Headset had Chowie Wowie as Canada’s No. 1 infused chocolate in that early 2025 window, with sales up 35% year over year. Irwin Simon, Tilray’s chairman and CEO, still listed chocolate edibles among the company’s leading Canadian positions on the fiscal second-quarter call. Headset’s July 2026 brand snapshot, posted August 3, 2026, showed a different tape: Chowie Wowie sales down 21.5% year over year, average price up 27.8% to $6.90, 32 SKUs, and a drop from No. 9 to No. 12 in Ontario edibles. The resurgence MacNeil described ran into a higher sticker on a 10-milligram bar.

Stores Still Run Out of Chocolate in New York

The demand Apple kept describing was not a Canada-only quirk. “We can’t keep chocolates in stock,” she said of New York, and New Jersey partners were asking for bars too. Kiva reported the same pull in New York’s young adult-use market. Michigan carried Kiva’s chocolate after California. Those are gift states and cold-weather states, which is the same calendar Apple named: January, February, Christmas, Valentine’s Day.

Some shoppers still bounce off the cocoa taste and stay on fruit gummies, which is one reason the 9.4% ceiling has been so sticky. Others treat a bar as the thing you bring to a dinner, not the thing you portion into a Tuesday night. Grön’s New York problem in 2025 was a sell-out, not a surplus. In early September 2026, a Schenectady dispensary was still advertising Grön on the shelf, months after the Wyld notice. The brand did not leave the counter. It left the independent column.

Wyld now owns the dry-room know-how, the Fair Trade chocolate relationships, and the winter spike, and it already owned the gummy majority. Tilray still has the Canadian chocolate badge and a 10-milligram cap that makes every bar a sharing square. Cocoa is no longer at a record, and it is not cheap. January will try again to prove Apple right about the season. The aisle has already voted on the format.