Behind The Brands interview with Arcana’s CEO & Co-founder, Andrew Berman, and Michael Klein, Chairman & Co-Founder

 

Tell us about your products. What do you make or sell, and what should people know about it?

 Andrew Berman, “At Arcana, we focus on the foundation of cannabis: genetics. Our work starts with iconic strains developed by some of the most respected breeders in the world, people whose cultivars shaped the modern cannabis market. We preserve, authenticate, and evolve those genetics into a living library of seeds, slips, and tissue cultures. With Arcana genetics, people know they’re getting authenticity, stability, and innovation backed by decades of experience and science.”

This work leads to 3 business lines:

1. Arcana Seeds – a direct-to-consumer platform, serving both domestic and international customers.
2. Arcana Nursery Sciences – offering unique, healthy, “DNA sequenced” genetics from tissue culture, slips, and licensing models.
3. Arcana Knowledge-Based Services – launching in 2026, featuring seminars on cannabis operations – including breeding, cultivation, and IPM – classes on solventless hash and rosin production, and a full spectrum of consulting services.

Please introduce us to the people behind the brand. 

 Andrew Berman, “Arcana is built by a rare mix of legacy and regulated market leaders. The Collective includes legendary breeders and cultivators like Chemdog, Josh D, OG Ghost, Ras Kaya, Rev Fuji, and Suny Cheba, who collectively hold the IP to some very famous strains. It also includes two industry executives who’ve run multi-state operators, built public companies, and navigated the ups and downs of legalization. Together, we’ve created a Collective that honors the past while pushing the industry forward.”

 

Arcana’s dictionary definition is “specialized knowledge or information known only to the initiate.”  It’s significant because our members include legacy OGs who collectively have lots of specialized knowledge to share.

 

What inspired the launch of your brand? Was there a defining moment or problem that pushed you to create it?

 Michael Klein, “We are driven by a desire to fix the legal industry and give it an opportunity to live up to its potential; up until the present, the legal cannabis industry has failed to live up to expectations and is at a crossroads. It has suffered from finance-driven, “get-rich-quick” business models, entrepreneurs who prioritize profits over the plant, a tortured supply chain, yielding a market flooded with subpar products and artificial, hemp-based cannabinoids. In the end, consumers suffer.”

All of the Arcana partners were Bio365 living soil customers. We began discussing the industry’s challenges, including quality, financial success, leadership, and monetizing the IP these foundational OGs had developed, encompassing both genetics and plant knowledge. After several years of discussions, Arcana Collective was born. It was always a discussion on how to monetize their incredible IP in an industry characterized by a rush to the bottom and massive industry losses. Arcana Collective is a first-of-its-kind collaboration uniting eight of the most respected OG cannabis breeders and businessmen, ushering in a renewed era defined by unwavering quality, authenticity, a return to traditional cannabis values, and financial success. Arcana wants to reset the conversation, protect breeders’ IP, elevate authentic cultivars, and give cultivators and consumers access to genetics from a trusted source.

What makes your brand stand out? From product quality to brand story—what sets you apart in the industry?

 Michael Klein, “Three things come to mind: Knowledge, science, and fairness.”

 The definition of Arcana is “Specialized knowledge or information possessed only by the initiate.” Our team of OG legends boasts over 200 years of combined experience in nurturing the plant and its genetics. This allows for scaled, science-driven breeding and sharing of that knowledge with the community.

When we think about science, we start with the premise that today’s consumers have little assurance that a strain is genuine, and even if it were, its lineage may have been unjustly appropriated from its originator. Through DNA gene sequencing, we can authenticate every strain and its heritage, so consumers know exactly what they’re getting. It also allows us to assess stability and uniqueness, provide predictability in subsequent generations, and cultivate new plants with the most beneficial traits.

Because of its federal prohibition, cannabis is far behind other crops in plant research for breeding, cultivation, and post-processing. Arcana is eager to integrate our team’s collective plant knowledge with technologies such as tissue culture, gene-based breeding, organic living soil, and solventless extraction.

For too long, in our industry, the people who have contributed the most to the plant, its breeding, and its cultivation have not been rewarded in proportion to their contributions. Strains are misappropriated, and corporate C-suite management rakes in much larger salaries than the talented cultivators who deliver plant quality. Our PAC program supports our goal of being fair. Specifically, the program expands collaborations to include external breeders and cultivators. In reverence to the distinct knowledge that each individual possesses, Arcana ensures every collaborating member gives Permission to incorporate their genetics, receives the deserved Acknowledgement, and is compensated in line with its financial success.

Could you walk us through your process? Do you grow, source, or extract uniquely? Are there any farming, sustainability, or innovation details worth sharing?

 Andrew Berman, “For more than a year, we have been working in concert, cross-breeding our foundational strains with a diverse array of popular cultivars, paving the way for regular future releases of unique cannabis genetics. We are doing everything at a very cool facility we’re building out in Shelton, Washington, called “Ghost Town.” Ghost Town incorporates state-of-the-art clone and tissue culture technology, including 16 breeding rooms, science-based soils, and organic practices to ensure healthier genetics at lower costs. Ghost Town also has indoor, mixed light and outdoor spaces so we can test our strains in all three environments. Ghost Town also includes a state-of-the-art solventless hash lab to support the techniques of Ras Kaya, one of today’s premier solventless hash makers.  Our process blends legacy wisdom with modern science, so the results are both culturally authentic and scientifically validated.”

 

What challenges have you faced as a cannabis brand or entrepreneur, and how did you overcome them?

 Andrew Berman, “The challenge has always been the same: cannabis doesn’t play by the rules of any other industry. From 280E to overregulation to capital flight, the environment is unforgiving. For breeders, the challenge has been invisibility and lack of compensation for their life’s work. For operators, it’s the inability to stand out in a market flooded with commoditized products. Arcana exists to solve both challenges at once. By uniting legacy breeders with experienced operators, we’ve built trust on both sides of the equation, and that trust is what makes this model work.”

 

What’s next for your company? Any new products, partnerships, or big goals on the horizon?

 Michael Klein, “Arcana Collective is cultivating a better future for cannabis by putting the plant and its values back at the forefront. Our goals are to provide the market with a continuous stream of superior, clean, and authenticated genetics from a trusted source, to help the industry improve its product quality by sharing our knowledge on better breeding, cultivation, and post-processing, and to contribute to the industry’s transition to an organic future.”

Our team has been working together for over 18 months, developing new strains, selecting winners, and testing them over multiple cycles. We built a campus in Shelton, Washington, optimized for large-scale breeding and testing. The first fruits of this collaboration will be released at MJBizCon and will include roughly 20 foundational and newly-bred strains, offered as either seed or slip. The campus, with its 16 specialized breeding chambers, can deliver over 1000 new strains a year for selection. Hundreds of strains will be selected and tested each year and released quarterly. We will supply the market with a steady flow of new, quality, clean genetics.

“We have just begun our first external collaborations with two legendary breeders under our PAC program and expect the results from those collaborations to be released in 2027.”

 

In 2026, we will launch our Knowledge-Based Services business. This will include seminars, webinars, and a broad line of consulting services to bolster the knowledge and quality of both industry and home growers by sharing the deep knowledge of the plant possessed by our team.

2026 will also see the launch of our Arcana Organic brand, combining our organically raised and developed genetics with organic cultivation inputs and SOPs supplied by us, and grown by an Arcana-certified licensed cultivator. This will provide operators with a supported path to an organic future and offer consumers a better, safer product.

The industry today is fragmented, overregulated, and overtaxed – conditions that stifle quality and profitability while driving consumers to the illicit market. Arcana addresses those problems head-on by uniting a team of the industry’s most legendary breeders and cultivators with their foundational strains. The goal is to offer seeds of these time-tested genetics, develop new strains that no single breeder could develop alone, and unlock decades of wisdom for a new generation. Arcana plans to empower breeders and cultivators, provide consumers with authentic products, and strengthen the foundation of the legal market. We want to do something special for both domestic and international cannabis enthusiasts when it comes to how this industry is perceived, how consumers appreciate the plant, and how cultivators grow.