Brandon Trainor, Operations Manager at Talaria and Digital Marketing Strategist and Analytics Manager at PufCreativ – Interview Series

Beyond successful cultivation and retail operations, the logistics surrounding the safe transportation and delivery of cannabis products are just as crucial. A multitude of regulations govern cannabis transit, alongside numerous environmental factors that become increasingly critical the further a dispensary is from a cultivation facility. Because of vast differences in geography, climate, road infrastructure, and market size across states, the logistical challenges behind each shipment can vary widely. Additionally, specific cannabis product types carry their own distinct delivery rules, often adding extra steps to the distribution process.

For a deeper look into the logistics of large-scale cannabis retail deliveries—as well as notable retail trends across state markets—mycannabis.com spoke with Brandon Trainor, Operations Manager at Talaria and Digital Marketing Strategist and Analytics Manager at PufCreativ.

What topics and subjects of social sciences did you study while attending Rowan University?

At Rowan, I earned my bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies with a concentration in Social Science. A lot of my studies centered around understanding human behavior, social structures, culture, government, and how different groups and institutions interact with each other.

I think one of the biggest things I took from that education was learning how to look at an issue from multiple perspectives. Social science teaches you that there usually isn’t just one variable influencing an outcome. You have economic factors, social factors, regulations, individual behavior, and a lot of other things happening simultaneously. I actually use that type of thinking quite a bit today, especially when I’m analyzing operations or consumer data.

Prior to entering the cannabis industry, what roles and jobs did you hold? What would you say were the most transferable skills that you took with you from those early roles?

Before entering cannabis, one of my most relevant positions was working in final-mile delivery as a dispatcher and hiring manager. I was responsible for evaluating drivers, looking at route data, determining staffing needs, hiring employees, and helping create more efficient routing plans.

Looking back, that experience transferred almost perfectly into cannabis logistics. Dispatching taught me how to think quickly when something goes wrong because transportation almost never goes exactly according to plan. A driver can call out, a vehicle can have an issue, traffic can completely change a route, or a customer can suddenly need their delivery at a different time.

The hiring side also taught me how important the person behind the wheel is. You can build the best route in the world, but if you don’t have dependable people executing it, it doesn’t matter.
Customer service was another major transferable skill. Cannabis is highly regulated, but at the end of the day you are still providing a service to another business or consumer, and communication is extremely important.

What exactly caught your professional interest about working in the cannabis industry? What opportunities and experiences did you envision in the cannabis industry that you didn’t think were possible in other industries?

What attracted me was that cannabis was essentially an entire industry being built in real time.

When I entered the industry, especially in New Jersey, there weren’t decades of established procedures telling everybody exactly how things had to operate. Companies were figuring out retail, delivery, compliance, logistics, technology, marketing, and consumer behavior at the same time.

That was exciting to me because I didn’t necessarily want to enter an industry where everything had already been figured out. Cannabis gave me an opportunity to actually participate in building systems.

I also saw how many different industries were eventually going to exist within cannabis. It wasn’t just cultivation or selling cannabis. There was transportation, technology, compliance, analytics, marketing, real estate, security, packaging, and finance.

That meant somebody like me could take experience from logistics, operations, analytics, and customer service and apply all of those skills within the same industry.

While serving as Service Delivery Specialist at Curaleaf, how did your role and duties change throughout that time? Simultaneously, how did the New Jersey regulations surrounding cannabis deliveries change?

My role at Curaleaf evolved considerably.

I started much closer to the retail side of the business, but eventually became heavily involved with home delivery. I worked alongside district management and members of the corporate team as we developed and operated Curaleaf’s New Jersey delivery program.

Eventually I was overseeing an approximately 11-person delivery team. My responsibilities included scheduling, routing, communicating with customers regarding their orders, inventory control, METRC compliance, and creating SOPs for the delivery operation.

What made that experience unique was that New Jersey’s cannabis market itself was evolving at the same time. Adult-use cannabis sales only began in New Jersey in 2022, and the state continued developing the rules surrounding transportation, delivery, wholesalers, and distributors afterward. The CRC subsequently established specific license categories for wholesalers, distributors, and consumer delivery services.

So there was definitely a feeling that we were helping build an operational model while the regulatory framework around the industry was still maturing. That experience taught me that cannabis operations have to be adaptable. You cannot build an SOP once and assume it will remain unchanged forever.

What are your current duties with Talaria as Operations Manager? How do your duties change depending on the product format that is being transported, flower vs. concentrates or edibles?

My role at Talaria is much more focused on large-scale B2B transportation and regional operations.

I oversee transportation and dispatch operations across multiple markets. That includes scheduling drivers, creating and optimizing routes, communicating with cannabis operators, resolving transportation issues, monitoring operating costs, creating SOPs, training drivers, and making sure our transportation procedures remain compliant.

I also work directly with clients. That is important because every operator is different. One client might need transportation several days per week across multiple facilities, while another might have a much smaller or more specialized operation.

From a transportation perspective, flower, concentrates, and edibles all require secure and compliant handling, but the actual logistics can be different.

Flower can take up significantly more physical space relative to its value, so vehicle capacity and load planning become important. Concentrates can represent a large amount of value in a much smaller physical footprint. Edibles and manufactured products can involve a high number of individual SKUs and cases.

So I am always considering not just the dollar value of what we’re transporting, but the physical size of the shipment, number of units, pickup and receiving requirements, security, chain of custody, and the amount of time each stop is going to require.

What are some commonly occurring issues when it comes to the logistics behind successful cannabis transports? How do you and the Talaria team create solutions for those problems?

One thing people don’t always realize about transportation is how many variables can affect one route.

Traffic is probably the most obvious, but you also have vehicle issues, last-minute order changes, facility receiving windows, driver callouts, delays at previous stops, paperwork discrepancies, inventory discrepancies, weather, and customer scheduling changes.

Cannabis adds another layer because you can’t always solve a problem the same way you would in ordinary transportation. Everything still has to remain within the regulatory and security requirements of the market you’re operating in.

Our approach at Talaria is to build redundancy into the operation.

We communicate constantly with drivers and clients, monitor routes, maintain backup options when possible, and adjust routes as conditions change. I spend a lot of time looking at route efficiency because one small delay early in a route can create problems for five additional customers later that day.

Communication is probably our biggest tool. If something happens, the goal is to identify it early enough that we can create a solution before the client even feels the full impact of the problem.

From your experience, what would you say are the most burdensome or otherwise problematic regulations that impact both Talaria and your clients’ distribution needs?

I wouldn’t necessarily describe regulation itself as the problem because this is an industry that obviously needs strong inventory controls and security.

The difficulty comes from the amount of operational friction that can occur when you combine transportation regulations, inventory tracking, manifests, security procedures, facility requirements, and different license types.

Cannabis transportation isn’t the same as moving ordinary consumer goods. Product movement has to be accounted for, and businesses have very specific permissions regarding what they can transport and where they can transport it. In New Jersey, for example, a Class 4 distributor transports bulk cannabis between licensed cannabis businesses, while a Class 6 delivery service handles retail-purchased cannabis going to consumers.

That means you have to think about compliance before you think about pure transportation efficiency.

The biggest burden for operators is probably that something which would be an easy logistical adjustment in another industry can require additional consideration in cannabis. You can’t simply improvise without asking what that change means from a compliance and chain-of-custody perspective.

There is also the larger issue that cannabis remains federally prohibited while states operate legal cannabis markets. That creates complications throughout the industry that companies transporting ordinary products simply don’t experience.

Through your experience with onboarding them, why do you think retired law enforcement and military members are ideal employees for cannabis transportation and distribution? Does their military or law enforcement experience provide them with a greater understanding of their job duties and logistics?

Definitely.

One of the things I’ve been involved with is recruiting retired law enforcement professionals, and there are several qualities that translate extremely well into cannabis transportation. The first is accountability. You’re transporting a high-value, highly regulated product, and you need somebody who understands that procedures aren’t suggestions.

They also tend to have strong situational awareness. They pay attention to their surroundings, understand security, communicate clearly, and generally remain calm when something unexpected happens.

Military and law enforcement backgrounds can also translate well into understanding chain of command, documentation, time-sensitive assignments, vehicle operations, and following an SOP consistently.

At the same time, I don’t think the uniform automatically makes somebody a great cannabis transportation employee. They still have to be dependable, professional with clients, adaptable, and comfortable learning cannabis regulations.

But when you find somebody who combines those characteristics with that background, they can be extremely effective in this type of operation.

Through all the research and projects you’ve assisted on as Digital Marketing Strategist and Analytics Manager with PufCreativ, what are the most fascinating trends and patterns you’ve noticed about the cannabis industry, both in New Jersey and in other states as well? What have been some major, far-reaching changes that you’ve noticed from the data and research you oversee?

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned through PufCreativ is how different cannabis markets can be from state to state while consumer behavior itself can still be remarkably similar.

I work with cannabis brands across different markets and analyze social media performance, consumer intelligence, digital trends, PR, engagement, and campaign performance.

One of the biggest changes I’ve seen is how much more important short-form video has become. There was a period where cannabis companies could post a good product photo and generate significant engagement. Now we’re seeing much stronger opportunities around Reels, TikTok-style content, trending audio, strong text hooks, personality-driven content, and videos that feel native to someone’s feed rather than traditional advertising.

Another fascinating trend is that some of the strongest content doesn’t directly sell cannabis at all.

Culture, humor, education, employees, behind-the-scenes content, events, and content connected to larger internet trends can create significantly more attention than simply putting a product on a table and taking a photograph of it.

I’ve also watched cannabis companies become much more sophisticated with data. Instead of simply asking, “How many followers did we gain?” we’re looking at what caused a spike, what content format created it, whether another platform responded at the same time, what people were actually saying about the brand, and whether attention resulted in meaningful action.

Cannabis marketing is starting to mature from simply having a social media presence into actually understanding consumer behavior.

What are some notable future plans for yourself and for Talaria? How do you predict that your role will change as the New Jersey industry expands and changes at the same time?

For me, I want to continue growing on the operations and business-development side of cannabis.

I’ve now had the opportunity to see the industry from several completely different perspectives. I’ve worked inside a dispensary, helped operate home delivery, worked in marketing and analytics, and now oversee B2B cannabis transportation.

That gives me a pretty unique view of how the different pieces of the supply chain connect.

For Talaria, I think there is a major opportunity as New Jersey’s supply chain becomes more developed. The state has continued licensing businesses across cultivation, manufacturing, retail, wholesale, distribution, and delivery, which creates a larger and more complicated network of businesses that need to move product.

As that happens, I think my role becomes less about simply managing individual routes and more about building the infrastructure that allows us to scale.

That means developing teams, improving our SOPs, using data to make transportation more efficient, strengthening client relationships, helping expand our services, and creating systems that can work whether we’re moving product for five clients or fifty.

That’s probably what interests me most about where I am now. I entered cannabis because I wanted to be part of an industry that was still being built, and even several years later, I still feel like I’m getting the opportunity to do exactly that.

Thank you for joining us, Brandon! For more information on Talaria, please visit its website. For more information on PufCreativ, please visit its website.