Hall of Flowers Sacramento 2026 runs November 4 and 5 at Cal Expo, 1600 Exposition Boulevard, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. It is the first Hall of Flowers ever held in Sacramento, ending an eight-year run at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa. Licensed retail buyers attend free.
This guide covers what changed for 2026, the new programming worth planning around, how retailers get a free badge, and how to work both days so the trip pays for itself.
In This Post
- Key Takeaways
- What's New at Hall of Flowers Sacramento 2026
- Craft Sungrown Takes the Outdoor Stage
- Tactical Talks: Six Sessions, Free With Your Badge
- Day 2 Opens to the Public
- Hall of Careers Brings Hiring to the Show Floor
- How Retailers Get In Free
- How to Work Both Days
- Meadow at Hall of Flowers
- Common Questions
Key Takeaways
- Hall of Flowers Sacramento 2026 takes place November 4 and 5 at Cal Expo in Sacramento, its first show at the venue and its first in Sacramento after eight years in Santa Rosa.
- Licensed California retail buyers attend free, subject to a vetting process that requires an active retail license.
- A new outdoor Craft Sungrown Showcase gives 16 small-batch, sun-grown farms a dedicated stage, including Briceland Forest Farm, HappyDay Farms, Henry's Original, and Talking Trees.
- Tactical Talks, a new six-session series produced with Budist, covers trade credit, price compression, and private label. Every session is free with a show badge.
- Day 1 is business-to-business. Day 2 opens to ticketed consumers for a festival format with direct-to-consumer sales from exhibitor booths.
What's New at Hall of Flowers Sacramento 2026
The biggest change is the address. After eight years at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Hall of Flowers has moved its Northern California show to Cal Expo in Sacramento, and November 4 and 5 will be the first time the show has ever run in the state capital.
Co-founder Rama Mayo pointed to access as the reason, citing proximity to Sacramento International Airport and the show's position in the capital. For buyers driving in from the Central Valley, the Sierra foothills, or Southern California, Sacramento sits at the intersection of I-5 and I-80 instead of an hour northwest of it. Hotel inventory is deeper and cheaper than Sonoma County in harvest season.
The move was not universally welcomed. Sonoma County Tourism president and CEO Claudia Vecchio told the Press Democrat that losing the show is a loss for the county, which had built cannabis into its visitor strategy. Hall of Flowers put Santa Rosa on the map as a cannabis destination for eight years, and that history is part of why the move got as much attention as it did.
Cal Expo also solves a practical problem the Sonoma fairgrounds had started to run into. It is a 350-acre site with substantially more indoor and outdoor space, which is what makes the rest of this year's additions possible: a dedicated outdoor showcase, a session track, and a hiring floor all running alongside the main exhibit hall.
Craft Sungrown Takes the Outdoor Stage
Hall of Flowers is adding a dedicated outdoor Craft Sungrown Showcase for the first time in 2026, built specifically for California's small-batch, sun-grown cultivators. Putting it outdoors is the point. These are farms whose product is defined by growing conditions, and the showcase gives them a setting that matches how they grow instead of a booth under exhibit-hall lighting.
Sixteen farms are participating: Briceland Forest Farm, Down OM Farm, Emerald Spirit Botanicals, Emerald Triangle Craft, Farm Cut, Garcia Hand Picked, Gold Standard, HappyDay Farms, Henry's Original, Mendocino Natural Farms, POET, Rootimentrees, Talking Trees, Trinity Roots, Whitethorn Valley Farm, and Woods Goods.
Actor Woody Harrelson, who co-owns The Woods dispensary, framed the case for the category in the show's announcement:
The three most important factors for good herb are sun, soil, and water.
Woody Harrelson, co-owner, The Woods
For retail buyers, this is the most efficient hour at the show. Craft sungrown is a category that is difficult to source at scale and difficult to evaluate from a line sheet. Having 16 vetted farms in one outdoor footprint means you can compare them side by side, meet the people who grew the product, and leave with a shortlist instead of a stack of business cards.
Tactical Talks: Six Sessions, Free With Your Badge
Tactical Talks is a new six-session series produced by Hall of Flowers and Budist, and every session is free with a Hall of Flowers badge. The sessions run at noon, 1 p.m., and 2 p.m. on both days, and the topics are the operational problems buyers and brands argue about privately: who is extending credit to whom, what discounting is doing to margins, and whether building your own brand is worth it.
Two of these are worth rearranging your floor time for if you run a dispensary. "Show Me The Money" is a trade credit conversation with a retailer and a lender on the same stage, which is rare. "The Race to the Bottom" puts a retailer and a brand executive together on discounting, and whichever side of that invoice you sit on, the other side's math is useful to hear out loud.
💡 How Meadow handles this: Discounting is the fastest way to move product and the fastest way to erase a quarter, so the decision is usually about where the floor sits, not whether to discount at all. Building a Dispensary Discount Strategy That Protects Margin →
Day 2 Opens to the Public
Day 1 of Hall of Flowers Sacramento is business to business, and Day 2 opens to ticketed consumers 21 and over for a festival format with live entertainment, food, the Iconoclasts speaker series, and direct-to-consumer sales from exhibitor booths. Hall of Flowers first ran this hybrid format at its 2024 Santa Rosa show and has carried it forward since.
The organizers are promoting a world record attempt for the most cannabis sales in one place. Treat that as an attempt rather than a result, but the underlying shift is real: exhibiting brands now have a second day to sell through directly instead of relying entirely on Day 1 wholesale conversations to justify the booth. Brands that exhibit also receive an allotment of consumer tickets to hand to their own followers.
For retail buyers, Day 2 is a research day disguised as a party. You will watch several thousand consumers choose between the exact brands sitting on your buy list, in real time, with their own money. That is a cleaner read on sell-through potential than any line sheet or rep conversation, and it is the one thing you cannot get from a Day 1 appointment.
Hall of Careers Brings Hiring to the Show Floor
Hall of Careers runs on the Hall of Flowers floor both days, co-hosted by Shelf Alchemy, and puts cannabis employers and candidates in the same room for scheduled interviews. Candidates and employers register separately in advance.
Staffing is a standing problem in California retail, and most dispensary hiring still happens through job boards that surface applicants with no industry context. A floor where candidates have already self-selected into cannabis is a different pool. If you are carrying open budtender, inventory, or delivery driver roles into the holidays, registering as an employer costs you a form and some floor time you are already spending at the show.
How Retailers Get In Free
Licensed California retail buyers attend Hall of Flowers at no cost, subject to a vetting process. Applications go through the retailer page at hallofflowers.com, and approval requires an active retail license. Operators who have not opened yet can still apply, but Hall of Flowers requires a building permit for a storefront plus city approval in place of an active license.
A few logistics worth putting on the calendar now:
- Badge pickup starts the night before. Hall of Flowers takes over Coin-Op Sacramento on November 3 from 6 to 9 p.m. for early badge pickup, pizza, and free arcade play.
- Hotels are listed on the show site. Hall of Flowers maintains a Sacramento hotel page, and Cal Expo sits about ten minutes from downtown.
- Consumer tickets are separate. Day 2 public tickets are sold through the show's Sacramento ticket page, independent of the retailer application.
How to Work Both Days
Plan the two days as two different jobs, because they are. Day 1 is for appointments, pricing conversations, and the sessions. Day 2 is for watching consumers interact with the brands you are evaluating and for closing on anything you were undecided about after Day 1.
A practical approach that works for buyers who come back with real orders instead of a tote bag:
- Build the list before you arrive. Pull your bottom-performing categories from the last 90 days and walk in knowing which three shelves you are actually shopping for.
- Give the Craft Sungrown Showcase a dedicated block. It is outdoors and separate from the main hall, which means it gets skipped by people working the floor linearly.
- Write terms down at the booth. Trade credit, deal structure, and minimums get renegotiated by memory three weeks later if nobody recorded them.
Then there is the part nobody plans for. You come back from a two-day show with a dozen new SKUs you committed to, each one needing a vendor record, a Metrc transfer, a margin target, and a spot in the menu before it can sell. That intake work is where a good buying trip quietly turns into three weeks of catch-up, and it is the reason strong sourcing decisions sometimes never show up in the P&L.
Coming back from Hall of Flowers with new vendors is only worth it if the product hits your shelves fast. Meadow handles receiving, Metrc reconciliation, and menu publishing in one system, so a new SKU goes from manifest to menu in minutes instead of days. Book a Call to Learn More
💡 How Meadow handles this: Inbound transfers from a new vendor are the most common place inventory counts and Metrc fall out of sync, usually because the manifest and the physical count were reconciled in two separate places. How to Reconcile Metrc for Your Dispensary →
Meadow at Hall of Flowers
Meadow is powering in-booth sales again at Hall of Flowers Sacramento, as it has at the California shows since 2019. Exhibiting brands run compliant transactions directly from their own booth instead of sending buyers to a central dispensary line, which is the difference between a conversation at peak interest and a sale that happens somewhere else an hour later.
That first year in Santa Rosa, roughly two dozen brands sold samples directly from their booths on Meadow, including Kiva, Cookies, Cresco, and Dixie Elixirs. Watch how it works on the floor.
By Hall of Flowers Ventura in 2025, the format had gone further. The show dropped its central dispensary entirely, and brands ran their own sales from their own booths. Pacific Stone, working with Sublime Delivery, brought their own hardware, loaded their own menus, and ran the booth start to finish with no onboarding and no troubleshooting.
Our event package is preloaded with your catalog, Metrc compliant out of the box, and built to collect customer contact information so the relationships you start at the show survive past it.
Brands exhibiting in Sacramento who want to run in-booth sales can reach the team at events@getmeadow.com. Come find the Meadow crew on the floor November 4 and 5.
Common Questions
When and where is Hall of Flowers Sacramento 2026?
Hall of Flowers Sacramento 2026 takes place November 4 and 5, 2026, at Cal Expo, 1600 Exposition Boulevard, Sacramento, CA 95815. Show hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. This is the show's first year at Cal Expo and its first in Sacramento.
Is Hall of Flowers free for licensed retailers?
Yes. Licensed retail buyers receive complimentary badges, subject to a vetting process. Approval requires an active retail license, or a storefront building permit plus city approval for operators who have not opened yet. Apply through the retailer page at hallofflowers.com.
Is Hall of Flowers open to the public?
Day 2 is. November 4 is a business-to-business day for licensed industry. November 5 opens to ticketed consumers 21 and over for a festival format with direct-to-consumer sales, live entertainment, and the Iconoclasts speaker series. Day 2 consumer tickets are sold separately through the show's Sacramento ticket page.
Why did Hall of Flowers move from Santa Rosa to Sacramento?
Co-founder Rama Mayo cited accessibility, pointing to Sacramento International Airport and the show's position in the state capital. Cal Expo also offers more indoor and outdoor space than the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, which is what accommodates the new outdoor Craft Sungrown Showcase alongside the main exhibit hall.
Do I need a separate ticket for Tactical Talks?
No. All six Tactical Talks sessions are free with a Hall of Flowers badge, including the complimentary retailer badge. Sessions run at noon, 1 p.m., and 2 p.m. on both November 4 and November 5.
Can brands sell directly from their booth at Hall of Flowers?
Yes, on Day 2. Exhibiting brands can run direct-to-consumer sales from their booths during the November 5 festival day, which Hall of Flowers supports through an app-driven shopping experience. All sales must run through a licensed retailer, which is why in-booth activations are structured with a retail license partner.
More Resources for Dispensaries
- Hall of Flowers Ventura 2025: In-Booth Sales, Standout Brands and the Future of Cannabis Events
- 3 Strategies to Secure the Best Vendor Deals for Your Dispensary
- Cannabis Dispensary SOPs: Receiving Inventory
- Metrc Reporting for Dispensaries
Make the Most of What You Bring Back
A good show gives you new vendors, better terms, and a shelf plan worth executing. Meadow is the POS California retailers use to execute it, rated 4.9 out of 5 on G2 and built for cannabis retail since 2014 as Y Combinator's first cannabis startup.
If you are heading to Sacramento, come back ready to move. We will show you how receiving, Metrc, and your menu work when they run in one system.
