Tokyo Smoke is a third-wave coffee shop that is redefining and elevating the cannabis experience. By combining coffee, clothing and cannabis, the unique lifestyle brand is a leading example of how Canada’s cannabis market is maturing and evolving to cater to the needs of a more mainstream audience.

Located just as few blocks southeast of Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park, Tokyo Smoke combines a coffee bar and general store inside an old industrial shipping dock. The store’s menu of custom roast coffee, high-end teas and other goods are based on the brand’s four proprietary strains of marijuana: Go, Relax, Relief and Balance. Each of these strains is specially selected to provide consumers with the kind of cannabis experience they are looking for.

Trend Hunter recently had a chance to talk to Tokyo Smoke co-founder Alan Gertner about the company’s mission to elevate the cannabis experience. Gertner compares cannabis to coffee by describing how each industry has evolved over time. He goes on to explain how Tokyo Smoke is ushering in “third-wave marijuana” by making the cannabis experience both beautiful and delightful for the consumer. In Gertner’s words, Tokyo Smoke was built to aid in the transition to normalization through the creation of “a store where marijuana could look beautiful and marijuana could fit seamlessly into the rest of your life.”

With cannabis culture rapidly becoming a mainstream phenomenon, Tokyo Smoke is leading the charge in fostering a reliable, understandable and ultimately beautiful movement.