Cannabiz Awards for Australia and New Zealand

02The story so far

The 2024 edition gives the clearest single-night tale. Tasmanian Botanics took home three awards in one evening: Cultivator, Manufacturer and Company of the Year¹. Local community coverage framed it as a big win for a company based in the Brighton municipality of Tasmania¹. The same report described a large greenhouse operation with a workforce of about 140 full-time staff¹. The company's work building a local workforce in a lower-income area was also highlighted as evidence of its ethics¹.

Two years later, the spotlight swung across the Tasman. At the 2026 edition, Puro New Zealand was named Cultivator of the Year, and its co-founder Sank Macfarlane was recognised as Business Leader of the Year². The write-up ties those wins to a year that included Puro's first shipment of New Zealand-grown organic cannabis medicine to the UK under a NZ$16.1 million supply agreement². As with the 2024 account, this comes from a source cheering the winners on.

The 2026 winners list shows how wide the awards cast the net, with categories covering cultivation, manufacturing, clinics and nursing, wholesale and distribution, hemp products, start-ups, innovation and campaigning². Hemp Product of the Year, for example, went to HemPanel, and Golden Days Cultivators was named Start-up/Launch of the Year². Put together, it reads less like a single-trophy contest and more like a tour of the supply chain and the services around it.