In early 2024, Northern Leaf was close to liquidation. The Jersey medical cannabis cultivator had raised more than £30 million and was bringing in only £400,000 in revenue. As Business of Cannabis reported yesterday, it closed 2025 with 6.75 tonnes produced, £8 million in revenue and its first EBITDA-positive year.
An expensive asset that wasn’t selling
In 2021 Northern Leaf secured the first commercial licence to grow high-THC cannabis granted in the British Isles in more than two decades. It spent £12.5 million buying and retrofitting 100,000 sq ft of glasshouses left over from the island’s old tomato industry. On paper it had everything: a facility, a licence and a location. In practice it was running at 25% of capacity.
In April 2024 a reverse merger with Scottish company Voyager Life fell through after its fundraising failed. In May, Ed Wilkinson and Wray Herbert-King, operators with California experience, put in a £2.5 million convertible loan note, unsecured and interest-free over three years. Wilkinson took control in July with a heavy load: around £9 million of secured debt and £3.5 million owed to legacy creditors.
What changed inside the glasshouse
The turnaround did not come from an expansion or a new funding round. It came from operations. Wilkinson had lived through California’s 2021 price crash, and new CEO Steven Tan brought his own genetics library. The main changes were:
- Buyer-driven genetics. A continuous phenohunt that rejects 90% of seedlings, selecting for yield, smell, density, cannabinoid content and ease of processing.
- Fewer, larger batches. Less cleaning and reset time between cycles. Processing went from 100 kg in 32 days to 250 kg in 8.
- Value added on site. In-house cryopasteurisation, a non-irradiation treatment that cuts microbial load while preserving terpenes, under MHRA GMP certification.
- Capacity use. From 25% to 75% of the facility in use, with more than 50 staff.
The commercial result shows up in where the product goes: 3.6 of the 6.75 tonnes produced in 2025 were exported to Germany, now its main market.
Jersey as an export platform
The island has advantages the company knows how to use: proximity to the continent, a regulator that processes export permits quickly and a favourable tax base. According to Fruitnet, Jersey’s cannabis sector generated more than £12 million in 2025, attracted nearly £50 million of investment and turned a profit for the first time.
The risks are clear too. Energy accounts for around a third of production costs, and in Germany competition from Colombia and South Africa, with cheap labour and favourable climates, is getting tougher. That is why Northern Leaf’s next step is to hold on to more of the value chain: treatment, processing and packaging on the island rather than outsourced abroad.
What it means for business
- Distressed assets are not automatic write-offs. In a consolidating market, a licensed facility with a strong operating team can be worth more rescued than liquidated. There is an alternative to the big acquisitions by Curaleaf or Aurora.
- Capital is no substitute for know-how. Northern Leaf raised £30 million without selling; what changed the P&L was how cultivation and processing were run.
- Selling into Germany takes price and paperwork. With Latin American and African supply pushing in, European producers compete on pharmaceutical quality, short lead times and proximity.
- The margin sits downstream. Whoever controls treatment, packaging and batch release keeps more value than whoever sells bulk flower.
Growers looking for buyers, investors eyeing undervalued assets, laboratories and distributors in need of certified supply: these are the profiles that sit at the same table at Spannabis B2B Bilbao 2027, on 11 March in the VIP Hall at the BEC. If you want to close that kind of deal, book your B2B table or get your ticket.