If you work in cannabis in Europe, Mary Jane Berlin sits on the calendar like a northern star. It is a trade fair, a festival, a policy pulse check, and a talent market all threaded through the same hallways and beer garden benches. Every year the same questions come up: which sessions are actually worth sitting through, which brands matter this cycle, and where the real deals happen once the halls close. This guide is written for the operator, investor, and product lead who wants a useful sweep of the event without romantic gloss.
I’ve walked this show as an exhibitor, a speaker wrangler, and a founder trying to stretch one pass into a month of lead flow. Mary Jane rewards focus. It also punishes the unplanned. If you know what the three pillars are, you can get most of what you came for: the speaker lineup as your map, the brands as your intel, and the afterparties as your distribution channel for trust.
Why the speaker lineup is the real schedule
The posted agenda is a helpful skeleton, but the marrow is who shows up to say the quiet parts out loud. A typical Mary Jane lineup pulls from five buckets: policymakers and lawyers reading the regulatory tea leaves, medical and research clinicians talking patient outcomes and quality controls, cultivation and processing experts, consumer brand builders, and capital allocators. The mix matters because cross-traffic is where your decisions get sharper.
If you are a founder or importer wrestling with Germany’s phased legalization and the evolving CanG framework, the sessions with policy advisors and attorneys will do two things. First, they provide a timestamped interpretation of what can be done right now, not six months from now. Second, they surface the gray zones that everyone is quietly exploiting, for example, what counts as transformation in a manufacturing step or how social clubs are vetting compliance documentation. The value is less about slides, more about hallway follow ups once you hear who is taking which risk.
The medical track is where bureaucracy meets outcomes. Expect talks on standardized dosing, Stability data, and real-world evidence from pain, spasticity, and anxiety cohorts. If you plan to enter the medical channel, watch for two tells. When a clinician talks about titration and dropouts, you learn the operational burden on pharmacies and patients. When a QP from a GMP facility mentions batch rejection rates and root cause analysis, you get a handle on cost of goods volatility and what your buffer stock needs to be to weather it.
Cultivation and processing speakers often sound like a niche interest until you’re standing in your warehouse staring at a rejected shipment. The sessions on post-harvest handling, moisture activity, terpene retention, and microbial mitigation are not abstract. They tie directly to shelf life, sensory quality, and the pass rate of your certificates of analysis. If you sell flower, make time for at least one technical talk, then find that speaker later and ask for their worst month. People tell the truth if you ask the right question.
The brand and retail conversations sound friendlier, but they are running experiments you can borrow. German consumers are still forming preferences under a shifting legal ceiling. Brand builders who survived last year’s compliance whiplash tend to be blunt. They will talk about packaging reprints that burned a quarter’s budget, point-of-sale training that finally moved repeat purchases, and the skunk vs fruit tug of war that divides shelves. The themes repeat, but the numbers change, and those numbers anchor real decisions.
Finally, capital panels help you sense risk appetite. If you hear family offices asking about downside protection and asset backing, you are in a capital preservation cycle. If fund managers are pushing for scalable compliance services and software, they are hunting a different multiple. Price talk is also telling. When people start floating pre-money valuations on hallway whiteboards, you can gauge whether it is time to raise or to buy.
How to read the room when facts are in flux
Berlin’s regulatory environment is iterative. You will hear confident predictions and see documents that contradict each other. This is normal. The way through is to listen for specificity. If a speaker cites a clause, a publication date, or an authority’s guidance letter, that goes in the “actionable” column. If they speak in generalities or tell stories without dates, it is mood music, useful for sentiment, not for your SOPs.
Take notes with verbs, not nouns. “Submit notification within 10 days,” “validate humidity to 58 to 62 percent,” “hold buffer stock equal to 1.5 months of pharmacy demand,” “shift to nitrogen-flushed jars for SKUs above 15 percent terpene loss in 60 days.” Verbs convert hallway talk into instructions.
One more thing, bookended sessions can be deceptive. The first talk frames a topic, the last one attracts the stragglers who stayed to ask hard questions. If you have to choose, attend the first to set context, then catch the last 15 minutes of the closing slot and position yourself near the microphones.
Brands that matter and what they signal
Every Mary Jane season has its constellation of brands. They fall into a few archetypes that reveal where the market is going. Rather than list logos, focus on what they are doing differently.
There is the compliance-native brand. They build packaging with space for variable data, keep design minimal to survive label changes, and negotiate with printers for rush runs without rush fees by offering predictable volume. They tend to have lower gross margins early, then outcompete when regulations tighten and others stumble. If you see heavy use of QR codes linked to live batch data, you are looking at someone who wants to future-proof against authentication requirements.
Another type is the terpene-forward craft operator. These booths sit on the sensory edge of the hall, glass jars under lights, a line of people sniffing. In a medical context the “craft” https://penzu.com/p/4a5bbc6f6083b75a story lands differently. The operators who win this lane are not selling romance, they are selling consistency and gentle cure. Ask them how they measure terpene drift between harvest and retail. If they can cite percentage retention over 30 and 90 days, they take the science seriously. If they talk in poetry, enjoy the aroma and move on.
Then there are the medical incumbents branching into adult-use adjacent accessories or education products. They bring GMP discipline and pharmacist relationships, which gives them a runway to build trust in any retail channel that opens. Watch how they speak about pharmacovigilance and adverse event reporting. If they are comfortable discussing it on the floor, their compliance spine is strong, and their partners will sleep better.
You will also see software and services aimed at the German social club model. Membership management, seed-to-sale tracking adapted to club operations, identity verification, even yield optimization for small cooperative grows. Many are early. The ones worth your time will be candid about pilot results, churn, and payment recovery headaches. Ask for numbers, ranges are fine. The operators who can speak to 90-day retention and average ticket size have actually shipped code into messy environments.
Lastly, watch for European importers building a distributed quality moat. They often look dull on the surface, but they are buying options on supply. If they are negotiating multi-country sourcing with harmonized specifications, and if their QPs can explain how they normalize COAs across labs, they can absorb shocks and still deliver. In a market that breaks in random places, reliability is a brand.
What a strong day looks like, hour by hour
You can drift and still have a good time at Mary Jane, but if you need outcomes, structure the day. Here is a crisp pattern that has worked for teams I’ve advised.
- Morning, 9:30 to 12:30: Two targeted sessions, one compliance or policy, one operations or medical. Leave five minutes early to beat the hallway crush and get to the speaker with one clear question tied to your situation. Early afternoon, 12:30 to 14:00: Booth reconnaissance in one hall. Move fast, no more than five minutes per booth unless it is a fit. Collect cards sparingly, write two words on the ones you keep to trigger recall later. Mid afternoon, 14:00 to 16:00: Pre-booked meetings. Cap at three, 30 to 40 minutes each, with a buffer so you are not breathless and late. The goal is not to close, it is to qualify and get to the next step. Late afternoon, 16:00 to 18:00: One brand or retail session for consumer context, then decompress with a coffee meeting where you compare notes with a colleague. Decide which two after-hours events matter. Evening, from 19:30: One quiet dinner with a small group, then one party where you make yourself find three people you have only emailed. Leave on a high note before midnight if you have a morning session.
That is one of the two allowed lists. Everything else you can keep in your head.
The afterparties: where trust, not volume, changes hands
There are official events and a swarm of side gatherings. The question is not which is coolest. It is where you can have a 10 minute conversation that actually moves an opportunity forward. Big branded parties are good for vibe checks and opportunistic introductions. They are bad for nuance. If you need to discuss supply chain hiccups or data room access, invite the person to a quieter bar around the corner. Berlin has plenty where the music sits at conversation level.
Guest lists are fluid and FOMO is part of the game. You do not need to be everywhere. Aim for one high-signal invite-only event and one big tent scene. At invite-only gatherings, the vibe is friendly but watch the bandwidth of your host. They are usually juggling 30 relationships. Make it easy: be precise, ask for one thing, and if the answer is “email me,” send it within 12 hours while the memory is fresh.
At large parties, the skill is surfacing specificity. “How are things?” leads to fluff. “What are you underinvesting in because of the current enforcement climate?” gets people talking. If you are shy about being direct, use a true anecdote from your own work to lower the guard: “Our last batch sat at customs four days longer than expected. We changed our buffer rule from 1 month to 45 days. What are you seeing?” You give before you get.
Logistics matter more than people admit. Hydrate, stash a protein bar, and wear shoes you would stand in on a warehouse floor. If you operate on two coffees and one pretzel, your judgment will slide by 10 p.m., and that is when you will say yes to the wrong thing. I have seen term sheets floated at midnight that looked different in the morning. Do yourself a favor, set a decision rule: no binding commitments after 9 p.m. without a 24 hour cooling period.
Scenario: the importer with a thin runway
Consider Lena, a Berlin-based importer with two SKUs in pharmacies, a 7 person team, and 5 months of runway. She needs either a bridge investment or a strategic partnership to extend to 12 months. Her risks are supply variability and a packaging change that may hit in the next quarter.
What she does before Mary Jane: books three meetings with GMP-certified suppliers who can meet her potency and moisture specs, flags a lawyer-led session on CanG updates, and schedules coffee with a fund that has two relevant portfolio companies. She preps a one-page metric sheet: last 90 days sell-through, rejection rate by cause, current buffer stock, and packaging reprint exposure in euros and weeks.
Day one she attends the compliance session, hears a specific interpretation that impacts her labeling, and confirms it with the speaker in the hall. Afternoon she meets a supplier who can provide a second source with a 10 percent higher COGS but better rejection stats. At the evening event she meets a distribution partner who has spare warehouse capacity and can take over last-mile to pharmacies for 2 euros per unit less than she is paying now. After a quiet drink they agree on a pilot.
Day two she checks a medical session that sharpens her view on patient titration. She realizes her patient guide is too thin and likely causing dropouts. She gets the name of a pharmacist who trains patients effectively and books a Friday slot to learn their onboarding flow. At the party that night, she speaks with the fund partner for ten minutes. He asks for her metric sheet and suggests a joint call with two CEOs next week.
What typically goes wrong in this scenario is over-scheduling and vague asks. Lena stays concrete. She walks out with one operational win, one potential partnership, and a live investor thread. That is a good show.
The practical wrinkle with compliance content
Compliance talks can slide into jargon fast. You will hear terms like Qualified Person, GDP, narcotics prescriptions, magistral preparations, post-market surveillance, and pharmacovigilance. Keep a pocket translation.
Qualified Person, the person who signs off that your batch meets GMP. If you are importing, ask how they handle discrepancies between original and local lab results. Good Distribution Practice, how you move product without breaking it, literally and legally. Magistral preparation, pharmacy-level compounding which matters if you want flexibility in dosing forms. Pharmacovigilance, a structured way to catch and act on adverse events. If a vendor is breezy about this, proceed with care.
A question I like to ask after any compliance-heavy panel is, “what are two rules that sound clear but break in practice?” You will hear the traps that never make it onto slides.
Meetings that stick: cadence, collateral, and follow through
The most effective exhibitors do three things that others skip. They prepare for 15 minute meetings with a tight flow, they carry simple collateral that lives in your inbox without friction, and they send next steps fast.
A tight flow sounds like this. Thank you for coming, quick mutual context, qualification in four questions, a narrow demo or sample check if relevant, and a clear next step with a calendar suggestion. That is it. You do not need to convey your entire origin story. People remember how you handled their constraints.
Collateral should be lightweight. A one-pager PDF with three proof points and two numbers that matter beats a glossy brochure every time. If you are a grower, show potency distribution across batches, not just the peak. If you are software, show error rates or reconciliation time saved, not just screens. If you are a distributor, show on-time delivery percentage and claims rate, and define your terms.
Follow through speeds you up because attention decays by the hour during fairs. A short email before you go to sleep with the agreed next step and any promised attachments moves you to the front of the line. This is unglamorous and it wins.
Sensory quality, shelf life, and what people rarely say out loud
Flower quality drifts in transit. People talk about terpenes and cure, fewer talk about moisture activity and packaging headspace. If your job touches product, watch for stands that bring up water activity targets and how they validate it on arrival. A common failure pattern is product that leaves the facility at 0.62 aw and arrives below 0.55 aw two weeks later, which flattens aroma and brittles the bud. The fix is not always more humidification. Sometimes it is reducing the air volume in the jar or moving to barrier pouches for certain SKUs. The technical sessions will give you the vocabulary, but the truth surfaces in quiet conversations with quality managers who carry a small hygrometer in their pocket.
On extracts and edibles, the German context is conservative, but innovation hangs around the edges. You will see talk about precise dosing, carrier oils, and absorption curves. The serious operators test beyond what is required. They run accelerated stability at 40 degrees Celsius and 75 percent relative humidity even when the regulator does not ask. Why, because it is cheaper to learn in your lab than in your returns bin.
Retail, social clubs, and a customer who is still deciding
German consumers are still figuring out how they want to buy, what form factors they trust, and how to parse labeling that is often technical. Retailers and social clubs are experimenting with education, which is where a lot of brand narratives die or thrive. If you are a brand owner, spend time watching a budtender or club staff explain your product to a customer. Do not interrupt. Notice which phrases land. When the staff reaches for a metaphor, that is the line you should steal or fix.
Packaging and signage are in flux. The operators who survive change cycles have a reprint strategy. They maintain design files that swap legal panels without touching the creative core, they negotiate with printers for variable data windows, and they track how long regulatory approvals take so they can back-schedule. If you hear a brand brag about a flashy box but they cannot tell you the lead time from design freeze to shelf, you know where they will hurt later.
Capital on the floor, what the questions reveal
Investors at Mary Jane tend to be candid in private and cautious in public. What they ask tells you where they believe the risk sits. Questions about gross margin resilience under compliance costs signal fear of regulatory drag. Questions about customer acquisition cost in pharmacy channels flag skepticism about marketing efficacy. If someone asks about your last three supply disruptions and what you did after each, take notice. They are measuring anti-fragility, which matters in markets that wobble.
If you are raising, bring an ask that fits the context. Crowded floors are not for deep diligence. A crisp pre-seed or bridge story might run like this: 18 months of operating history, 300 pharmacies ordering at least once, 22 percent month over month growth last quarter driven by one distribution partner, new second-source supplier signed, use of funds split between packaging update, inventory hedge, and sales ops. The follow up is the data room link and a 30 minute call on a quiet day.
Common failure modes and how to avoid them
Three patterns recur every year. First, people chase density over quality and end up exhausted with a stack of business cards they do not remember. Second, exhibitors over-complicate their booth experience and can’t get to the point quickly. Third, afterparties become social rather than strategic, which is fine unless you came for outcomes.
The fixes are simple, not easy. Cap your daily meetings, build a booth script with only one variation for technical visitors, and set one objective for each evening event before you walk in. If that sounds rigid, consider the alternative, three days of noise that felt busy and moved nothing forward.
A handful of small, practical notes
Cash and cards both work, but lines for food can run long at peak times. Eat at odd hours and you will pick up the best hallway conversations because others linger less when they are hungry. Phone batteries die, bring a small power bank and a 1 meter cable that does not tangle in your bag. If you hand out samples of anything legal to sample, carry a small trash bag so your booth does not turn into a collage of empty sachets and sticky napkins.
If you are staffing a booth, schedule real breaks. Humans who stand for eight hours get short, and that comes through in tone. A 20 minute walk outside resets you better than another espresso. If you are walking the floor, wear a jacket with pockets that can separate “follow up” cards from “interesting but not urgent.” It saves you an hour later.
What changes if the rules shift mid-season
Germany’s cannabis landscape can change mid-cycle. If that happens close to Mary Jane, the fair becomes a referendum. Your plan should have two branches. Branch A, nothing significant shifts, proceed with your current objectives. Branch B, a material change arrives, you pivot your time into sessions and conversations that clarify the new reality and its enforcement velocity.
Under Branch B, drop half your pre-booked meetings and replace them with short consultations with legal and regulatory voices. Move your after-hours energy into smaller gatherings where you can trade interpretations with people who have skin in the game. Delay any irreversible commitments until you have triangulated from three independent sources.
If you can only do one thing well
People pack Mary Jane with expectations and leave with sensory overload. If your calendar is already tight, reduce your ambition. Pick one of the three pillars and do it thoroughly. For a compliance-heavy quarter, plant yourself at the policy and medical track, take notes with verbs, and build relationships with three specialists you can email later. For a sales quarter, spend your mornings on the floor qualifying prospects, your afternoons in scheduled meetings, and your evenings at one party where your buyers congregate. For a hiring quarter, treat the speaker lineup as a roster and recruit politely around the edges without poaching on the floor.
You will feel like you are missing out. You are, by design. Focus is what turns three days in Berlin into a quarter’s worth of momentum.
The bottom line on Mary Jane Berlin
Mary Jane is a mirror and a marketplace. The speaker lineup tells you what is considered knowable, the brands on the floor show what is actually being executed, and the afterparties reveal who trusts whom. If you treat the show as a live operating environment, not a conference to wander, you will get what you came for. The details are practical and unglamorous. Ask concrete questions, carry real numbers, keep your energy steady, and reserve your yes for the daylight.
If you do that, you will leave with fewer business cards, more clarity, and at least one conversation that turns into revenue, resilience, or both. That is all this fair owes you, and it is enough.