For a fourth straight year, the Central Florida Fairgrounds plays host to the Florida Groves Festival this weekend. It’s one of a series of events promoted across the state that help weave together the colorful and disparate threads of Florida’s expanding cannabis scene. Much of this activity, business and personal, takes place here in Central Florida, which has been positively epicentric to the medical marijuana movement in the Sunshine State since it originated, over 30 years ago.
Florida Groves is just one in a succession of festivals promoted over the past decade-plus by Cody Edwards and Patrick Gay, childhood friends born just one day apart. That one day apart is one of the very few days since that they’ve ever spent separate, or not in close communication. They’ve been running 710 Dab Day-branded events across the state since about 2013, but Florida Groves is the jewel in their tandem crown.
“It’s all self-financed,” says Edwards on the phone from Jacksonville. “I got done playing football after freshman year. It was cool, it got me into school, but I wanted to do more creative things. I was always a ‘cannabisseur’, and at that time, 2014, the whole medical marijuana scene was starting to blossom.”
Dab Day was born where Edwards was born, in Miami. Bolstered by a staff that started with family and friends, but has now grown to include dozens of paid employees and volunteers (the perks are dank, as you can imagine), they run events all around Florida, including Tampa and Jacksonville.
After the passage of Amendment 2 in Florida on the November 2016 ballot, business statewide started hot from its first days of implementation the following year. The market was already primed from a failed ballot initiative process in 2014 and an extended debate over low-THC variants that began while Rick Scott was still governor. Politically inclined readers may note that changes in the ballot initiative process were driven, in large part, by a desire on the part of some lawmakers to slow the momentum of legalization. It seemed inevitable until the last election, where a lot of good ideas just hit the wall, along with some of the people responsible.
While the failure of Amendment 3 (a bid to legalize recreational marijuana) on last year’s ballot surely cost Florida billions of dollars, the market as-is remains surprisingly vibrant. According to the most recent update from the Office of Medical Marijuana Use, we currently have 905,556 medical marijuana card holders in Florida. With processing fees at $75 per year, that’s almost $68 million in free money for the state right there.
Getting the card requires a prescription from a licensed doctor, which may range from $100 to $300, depending on who they are and who you are. We have approximately 2,391 doctors statewide licensed to prescribe the stuff, 80 of whom are listed in Orlando. So, taking $200 as the average, that’s another $181 million in fees for the doctors — an average of $76,000 per doctor, per year.
“Depending on how you feel about the economy, where we’ve been, where we’re going, a lot of people in the industry, at the end of last year, were hopeful that we’d see an uptick coming into this year,” Edwards says. “It just doesn’t feel like that’s quite here yet, but that didn’t scare us. We’ve been out here grindin’ since day one, so we weren’t turned off at all, and we come at everything head-on.”
“Dab Day and Florida Groves are technically separate entities,” adds Edwards, “but from the beginning, and to this day, we used all of our resources and connections to leverage Florida Groves.”
Despite its symbiotic relationship with the cannabis scene, the Florida Groves Festival is about much more than marijuana. It is, first and foremost, a music festival, and a damned good one at that.
Pop deconstructionist Oliver Tree is this year’s the main event, headlining a bill on Sunday that includes Fortunate Youth, The Floozies, The Hip Abduction, Zen Selekta, Tasty Vibrations, Impulse Live, Gemini Trix and Project Pluto. Saturday sees Big Gigantic closing out a lineup that includes Shwayze, Boogie T, Little Stranger, Evalution, Jarv, Jason Leech, Know Good and Big Wig. Notable locals like the Supervillains and Dizzlephunk are satisfyingly sprinkled in among the out-of-towners.
There are so many festivals going on across the state in the spring and summer months, pretty much every weekend, and there’s tons of money to be made when it’s done right. But it’s a highly saturated, highly competitive market, and it falls upon the promoters to meticulously plot out not just the logistics of their events, but the staff, the vendors, the volunteers and sundry diversions. No matter how good the music is at any festival, folks can get bored quickly without an abundance of ancillary fare. Florida Groves brings in world-class skateboarding, glass-blowers and (ahem) pickleball to keep the heads happy.
Sponsors include several key players in “cannabiz,” including AYR, Blazy Susan, Curaleaf and King Budz, as well as more mainstream companies like Sweetwater Brewing, Michelob Ultra and Raising Cane’s. According to organizers, the festival is around 90 percent sold out at the time of writing, so if you didn’t get a ticket your (metaphorical) buzz may be killed.
Florida Groves is bigger and better than ever this year, which is great for them. But past is merely prologue in the festival biz, and the focus is always forward.
“I wouldn’t say it’s gotten easier,” Edwards says, “just because we’ve tried to scale up every year, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. Year one, I would say we were probably at about 1,200 attendees; that was a one-day, one-stage event, very small footprint. This year, we’re hoping to see 6,000 to 8,000 unique attendees across two days and three stages. The footprint is massive, and the sponsor activations are on another level, compared to previous years. It’s looking really good!”
Even though Florida is weirder and more contentious than usual this year, there’s still good news here and there, and the growth of Florida Groves suggests real momentum developing for the Florida-grown festival industry and for the cannabis market. The two have grown increasingly intertwined, and that’s good for all of us.
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This article appears in The 420 Issue 2025.