Why India Still Doesn't Have a 100 Crore Hemp Brand: Canazo India's Sukrit Goel on Building in Cannabis

India has had legal medical cannabis since 2019. There have been national TV features, clinical case studies, government approvals, and genuine patient outcomes. And yet, no hemp brand in the country has crossed 100 crores in revenue. Not one.

Today's guest has been inside this industry longer than most. Sukrit Goel founded Canazo India and took the brand onto Shark Tank India Season 3, but the Shark Tank moment is really just one chapter. He's sat at every point in the value chain, from manufacturing and licensing to doctor networks and brand building, in an industry that's still fighting a stigma that predates Independence.

Before cannabis, Sukrit tried plant-based meat, honey, and hydroponics. Each one taught him something about product-market fit before he ever stepped into the sector that would define his career. Then a personal health scare, a hemorrhage that left him half paralyzed on one side, led him to medical cannabis imported from the US to heal himself. That's how Canazo was born.

So we asked him the question that matters most for anyone watching this space: what actually needs to happen for India to produce its first 100 crore hemp brand? Is it regulation? Distribution? Consumer trust? And is AI already changing how a category this sensitive gets built?

Key Takeaways: Building a Regulated Brand From Scratch

The Regulatory Reality:

• Hemp, cannabis, bhang, and vijaya are all the same plant. The only difference is which part of the plant is used and the THC concentration, with anything under 0.3% THC generally classified as hemp
• Building a manufacturing setup from zero, including AYUSH norms, clinical trials, shelf-life studies, and licensing, takes 6 to 8 months
• Private labeling under an existing manufacturer's license can get a brand to market in 25 to 30 days

The Distribution Problem:

• Meta ad accounts get banned if flagged, and Google doesn't allow cannabis advertising at all, leaving founders working through loopholes just to reach customers
• Offline retail is stuck because chemists won't stock a product that only generates five or six prescriptions when a normal product generates a hundred
• Doctor networks work best as a second line of treatment, after two or three other options have already failed

The Shark Tank Effect:

• Canazo's website crashed the night the episode aired, and order volume from those 10 to 15 days took three and a half years to become the new daily normal
• The real value wasn't the traffic spike, it was the credibility stamp that told consumers a scrutiny-heavy show like Shark Tank had already vetted the brand's legal compliance
• In a category full of unverified sellers, that single credibility signal became Canazo's biggest sales driver

Q: Before we get into the business, can you give us your background?

Sukrit Goel: So talking about my background, I mean it's not in the medical field at all. Cannabis was something which started out of passion actually. I did my Bcom basically from HR College, then my MBA from NMIMS, and after that I was exploring what all can be done. That was a point where I thought, okay, why not do something which actually works very well for people.

Along with that, having a history where I had personally got a hemorrhage at a time where I was half side paralyzed, and I used medical cannabis to cure myself that time, obviously had to import from the US, that's a different story altogether. I wanted to do something being from a business background but wasn't really sure what to do. Struggling with ideas, and then finally just stumbled upon medical cannabis, and that's how we started.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The founder didn't pick the category, the category picked him through a health crisis. That's usually the difference between a founder who survives the boring middle years and one who quits at month six.

Q: For everyone who's confused, what is cannabis, what is hemp, and what's actually legal in India?

Sukrit Goel: To be very frank, everything is the same. You talk about cannabis, hemp, bhang, vijaya, everything is the same plant. There's just different words as per different books and different states. The only difference is which part of the plant you're talking about. The part below the seed, below the leaves or the buds, is what we now call hemp, made from the seeds or stalks or roots, and that's also good for medicinal properties.

Then you have the leaf, the vijaya leaf, which is currently legal in India and from which medicines are made, CBD, THC, everything. The bud is what's known as marijuana, and that's not legal in India. Both the leaf and the bud have the same compounds, the bud just has a much higher concentration. Internationally people use buds to make medicine, but in India right now we're using leaves. Now they've started categorizing hemp as a plant that doesn't give a high because THC content is below 0.3%. Cross that and it starts getting called marijuana or cannabis or weed.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: One plant, four names, and an entire industry's legality hinges on a decimal point. That's not a regulatory framework, that's a tightrope.

Q: What's the single biggest thing holding this industry back from building a unicorn?

Sukrit Goel: Honestly there are two things. Number one, education. It's there, but people are still not very aware of it. What the scene was four years back, obviously it's not the same now with Gen Z coming in and people becoming more open to it. People are actually going back to their roots. There was a time when it was nothing to do with cannabis, people were a lot into allopathic medicines. Now there's a huge shift in consumer psychology where they're going for alternative treatments.

But the stigma is still there, that it's only used for getting high or it's a type of drug. What will the family say, what will my surroundings say, even though there's no problem. Today people use opium in cancer treatment and there's no taboo, because it's coming from a farmer background. A lot of people are using benzodiazepines to abuse kids' anxiety and depression medication, when cannabis could be used instead. There's nothing bad with cannabis, but the taboo and the mindset needs to be broken, which is happening gradually.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Every regulated category has the same villain: not the law, but the living room conversation. You can win over a regulator faster than you can win over a mother-in-law.

Q: How did India end up putting cannabis under the narcotics act in the first place?

Sukrit Goel: It was legal in India for a very long time. When the British came, it got banned. This was something by which India was actually earning, and people were doing very well and were very healthy using cannabis. Internationally too it was the same, if you look at old countries and their old medicine systems, there's a format of cannabis being used, even as cough syrups. But after the British came, that's exactly what happened, they banned it.

In India, the 1985 act put cannabis under the narcotic category. After that, the leaves were not put under the ban, only the bud was. Getting that lifted for proper medicinal use is a big challenge because that's like changing the whole law book. But a lot of agencies and companies are working towards it, trying to uplift the ban. We're very open to it too, things would become cheaper and more affordable. But no one messes with narcotics, to be very honest.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Colonial-era paperwork is still shaping India's medicine cabinet in 2025. Sometimes the biggest startup blocker isn't a competitor, it's a 140-year-old law nobody's gotten around to rewriting.

Q: For a compliant product to actually get to market, how much time and paperwork does it take?

Sukrit Goel: It fully depends on which route you're taking. If you're taking the manufacturing route, which I personally took because I wanted the best quality and not to do a reselling job, that takes a lot of time. First is your factory, which has to fulfill certain norms as per AYUSH. Then you need a clinical trial along with a shelf-life study, then protocol testing for pesticides and everything in the product. Once that's done, you go to AYUSH for approval. If the documents are in place, you get approval, then your license, the cannabis license, which currently only two or three people have for manufacturing.

Post that, you need a separate narcotics licensing for the raw material, cannabis itself, and once that's done you finally make your own product and formulation. That's somewhere around 6 to 8 months of starting up. The second route is where you build a brand off someone who's already manufacturing. I'm already manufacturing for a couple of other brands too. In that case it's normally a 30-day start because the products are already registered, and it's just private labeling or white labeling. That happens around 25 to 30 days.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Two routes, two completely different businesses. One builds a moat over 8 months, the other rents someone else's moat in 30 days. Know which game you're actually playing before you start.

Q: Distribution seems like a nightmare here. Meta doesn't even allow ads on the category, right?

Sukrit Goel: Meta allows also, doesn't allow also. I mean everyone's trying to use loopholes, and I'm personally trying to do that, but if it catches hold, the account gets banned. Ultimately that's the only way to reach people, because Google for sure doesn't allow it, it's only Meta where we can still try, otherwise there's no other option to tell consumers, hey, we're in the market.

The other way is going through the doctor network, which is also very important. For doctors, this is actually a second line of treatment. Normally doctors don't ever prescribe this as the first line, once they try two or three other things and it's not working, that's where they say, okay, let's try medical cannabis. Though medical cannabis gives the maximum results, it's still not the first line treatment.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: When your two biggest ad platforms can shut you down overnight, your actual distribution channel is trust, built one doctor and one word-of-mouth customer at a time.

Q: What about offline retail through chemists and pharmacies?

Sukrit Goel: Offline retail has a lot of problems right now because it's a medical prescription-based product. A lot of doctors don't write prescriptions for it, so chemists aren't very keen on keeping it, because they want a faster turnaround time. If you're talking about 100 prescriptions for a normal product, this will see maybe five or six. So keeping it with a chemist is tough, and you can only really talk to the doctors near the chemists who do stock it.

But overall it's improved a lot. Four years back versus now, a lot of doctors themselves are seeing the results, seeing how it's happening in international markets, and now they're actually open to writing much more than they were four years ago.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Supply chains for stigmatized products don't scale on logistics, they scale on proof. Every doctor who sees a real result becomes a distribution node you can't buy with ad spend.

Q: Take us back to the night your Shark Tank India episode aired. What was actually happening behind the scenes?

Sukrit Goel: We still remember, it was February, somewhere around 10:50, 10:55. People were watching and that very moment the amount of orders that spiked were insane. I opened my website and it wasn't working. I was constantly on a call with my web developer because we never expected that much traffic. He boosted it, we bought different plans, all the way to support the traffic. It was too good, and honestly the next 10 to 15 days the same followed.

Those 15 days were like when we just started a company all over again. We were pretty small at that time, we never had that much staff, everyone was literally just packing orders. It took me three and a half years to actually reach that daily volume again, and now, touch wood, we've crossed it. Now it's double the amount we got in those one or two crazy days, packed on a daily basis.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A viral moment isn't your growth strategy, it's your stress test. The founders who survive it are the ones who quietly spend the next three years building the infrastructure to make that spike the new normal.

Q: What do you think it was about Shark Tank that had that kind of lasting impact, visibility or credibility?

Sukrit Goel: Very frankly, one thing is that once the episode airs, the reach is there for 10, 15 days, and then after a year or a year and a half, people tend to forget, there are so many episodes that air. But what happens with a category like ours is that once you have that tag, people know, okay, they've come on Shark Tank, it's a legit company, what they're giving is legal. Because there are a lot of companies out there and you don't know how legal or illegal they are, and no one wants to get into a problem with that kind of product.

Once you've been on Shark Tank, people know you have all the legal requirements, because Sony isn't going to air a brand that doesn't have the legal documents in place. That's the major thing that changed for us, people started trusting us, they knew we were a credible brand and not just trying to fool people. That's what actually increased my sales.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: In a category where illegitimate players are the norm, credibility isn't a marketing asset, it's the entire product. Shark Tank didn't sell Canazo's oil, it sold proof that the oil was real.

Q: How are you using AI in the business today?

Sukrit Goel: AI, I mean designing, number one. The ads that used to take us a lot of time, the UGC ads especially, obviously that's user generated content and it takes real people, but when it comes to photos or videos, before you had to have a proper designer doing that. I wouldn't say it's replaced a designer and it never will, but it powers the designer to make much better posts. If a piece of work took 10 days before, now it takes 2 days and comes back with much better designs. People always thought AI takes jobs, I don't feel it takes jobs, it empowers people and makes the job easier and faster so more can be done.

Second, I was very bad at writing mail. A lot of legal papers, a lot of things, and after ChatGPT came along, you just give a voice command and it's done. It's become very, very easy, otherwise I always had to hand it to someone else because I had so much else going on.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI didn't hand this founder a shortcut, it handed his team a speed multiplier. Ten days of design work compressed to two days isn't replacement, it's leverage.

Q: You also mentioned AI voice calling. How does that actually work for a business like yours?

Sukrit Goel: These days just giving an offer like that doesn't work a lot of the time, people want that personal touch, and the humanized AI voice these days is such that you don't actually recognize it's a human or an AI. Initially when that voice came you knew it was AI and you'd cut the call, but now you don't. The main thing is, with 5,000 or 10,000 customers, practically a person cannot call all of them, but an AI can, so every month you can cover those customers just to understand if they're liking the product or if any change is required.

A lot of time if you send offers on WhatsApp people don't read it, or on email it goes into promotions. This is a good way to actually reach them. I'm not saying all 5,000 will pick up, but even if 100 or 500 see it and 10% of that purchases, that's a good 5 to 10% conversion rate, which is not bad.

I actually had one of these calls happen to me, from a bank, and for the first 15 seconds I couldn't tell it was an AI agent. Then I understood, and since it's my own interest, I said let's check their guardrails. I asked about the bank in Canada, it answered, then I said tell me about the bank in French, and for 15 minutes I was just testing it. The amount of information it has, even in ChatGPT, if I put anything about my company, it knows more about my company than I could write myself.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: When an AI agent can out-explain your own company to you, the bar for "personal touch" just moved. The brands that win won't be the ones avoiding AI voice, they'll be the ones that make it indistinguishable from care.

Q: Looking back across manufacturing, supply chain, and brand, what's been the toughest part of the whole journey?

Sukrit Goel: I would say initially the most important and toughest part has been getting the licenses. That's been hard, and licenses are not that easy.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: In a regulated industry, your first real competitor isn't another founder, it's the paperwork. Win that fight and everything after it feels manageable.

Q: Has brand building itself been hard in a taboo industry, or has acceptance come easier than expected?

Sukrit Goel: Honestly I would say it's been hard, but I came on Shark Tank very early, maybe four or five months after starting the company. That worked very well for me because I acquired a good audience on the back of which I could run ads and get everything moving. So touch wood, I didn't have to see that hard face much.

I've since invested in a couple of other companies and tried to follow the same framework, and it didn't work out the same way, maybe because it was later, and when I started it was first-mover advantage. There were only three or four companies to name back then, now everyone's in the market. I got my own sweet pace to experiment with labels, designs, everything. If I did it today, it might be the exact opposite. When people have seen your brand for four or five years, they tend to go for that old brand because they know you've done the research. We've had that time to actually build R&D, we've tied up with CSIR and other institutes to improve our medicines.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: First-mover advantage isn't about being first to launch, it's about being first to earn the years of trust that a five-year-old brand has and a five-month-old one doesn't.

Q: You have a CBD oil for pets on the website. What's the use case there?

Sukrit Goel: Before that, I'll tell you, we actually did a trial with the Indian Army, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, for hip dysplasia in retired army dogs. It works very well for pain, the heavy pain, and for separation anxiety, or the anxiety pets feel from loud noises during Diwali, they bark a lot because it's uncomfortable for them. CBD relaxes them, it works on the CB1 and CB2 receptors, just like it does in humans, because both are mammals. It calms them down so they don't feel that anxious, and it also works on inflammation caused by pain.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Same receptors, same relief, different species. Canazo didn't invent a new product line, it just noticed the biology doesn't stop at humans.

Q: How did the pet line actually come about?

Sukrit Goel: I've never had a pet, but my wife has a Chow Chow, and it was her idea that we should build something for pets too. I said okay, but she said, they can't speak, so you need to do a trial first, because if something happens they don't know what to do. So we did the trial and that's how we got into the pet market. I never would have launched it on my own since I'd never had a pet and had no clue, but she'd used it herself, she said why not try it for pets, and that's how the whole thing started.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The best product lines rarely come from a boardroom, they come from someone at the dinner table saying "what about the dog."

Q: Your wife is also your co-founder. How do you keep that from turning into a 24/7 negotiation?

Sukrit Goel: For us, work is one, personal is one. Till 7pm she's like I shout at her about everything for work, but after 7pm her dialogue is, now I am the queen, now you will listen, now the work time is over, you're no longer a CEO. When we're working it's a very different thing altogether. You cannot always mix it up, the moment you start mixing it, it won't work. I keep my personal life separate, otherwise things just get messed up.

That's also why I never brought friends into my company as employees. I told them, if you ever want to come, come as a co-founder at the same level, never as an employee, because then that friendship issue happens, you can't tell them anything honestly. Either you lose a friend, or you lose an employee, or you lose both, and both is the worst outcome.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A hard cutoff at 7pm sounds small, but it's the difference between a marriage that survives a startup and one that becomes the startup.

Q: What would you tell someone in the early days of their entrepreneurial journey?

Sukrit Goel: Don't stop trying. For me, the first thing I tried was plant-based meat, that was 6 months I probably wasted. Then I started selling honey, but that needs a lot of volume and companies like Dabur are already there, tough to make space. Then I tried hydroponics, which was good, but the market for a 3,000 rupee pot in India just wasn't there. Then, fourth, I stumbled upon medical cannabis.

From all these, either you spend 8 to 10 years in a field and get really good at it, or you're ready to try three or four times. In those attempts you learn there has to be a right market fit before you launch, which I'd studied in school and college, but practical is different, the actual costing, what people will actually buy. By the time I got to cannabis, I took care of all the four Ps of marketing, product, price, everything, and that's where it actually worked.

If anyone wants to start a business, first, have three ideas in hand, not because you should chase all three, but because your first idea won't necessarily work, so have a backup. Second, know the industry you're getting into well enough to do something in it yourself. My wife's biomedical background meant if a doctor asked me something and she wasn't there, I wouldn't have a clue. You need a partner or someone from the field, otherwise if that one person who knows the craft leaves, you're stuck. Third, find a co-founder. Solo businesses exist, but there are ups and downs, moments you'll break down, and going through that alone is tough.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Four failed ideas before the one that worked isn't a resume gap, it's the R&D nobody puts on a pitch deck.

Final Thoughts: The Plant Isn't the Problem, the Paperwork Is

Sukrit's closing perspective: "There has to be a right market fit before launching a product, which I had studied in school and college, but practical is different."

The bottom line: India's medical cannabis industry doesn't have a demand problem or even really a product problem. What it has is a trust deficit built on decades of stigma and a regulatory framework still shaped by a 1985 narcotics act. Sukrit's path through it, six to eight months to build compliant manufacturing from scratch, a doctor network built one relationship at a time, and a Shark Tank appearance that functioned less as marketing and more as third-party verification, shows that in this category, credibility is the actual product.

For founders eyeing this space, the practical implications are clear. Distribution will be harder than any other consumer category, Meta is a loophole and Google is closed entirely, so doctor relationships and word of mouth matter more than performance marketing ever will. AI is already quietly doing real work here too, cutting design turnaround from 10 days to 2 and letting a small team run monthly check-in calls with thousands of customers that would be impossible to do by hand.

What's coming next is less about new products, more about the ban on the bud being lifted, which would open pricing and access up considerably. Until then, the founders who win this category will look a lot like Sukrit: patient enough to spend three and a half years rebuilding a 15-day spike into a daily baseline, and stubborn enough to keep going after plant-based meat, honey, and hydroponics all failed first.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more about Canazo India?

Sukrit Goel: You can check out our website at canazoindia.com. We have products for anxiety, for pain, and if you're dealing with any of these concerns you can speak to our in-house doctors and get a proper prescription.

Final words: Building in a stigmatized, heavily regulated category means the fastest path to scale isn't a growth hack, it's proof. Proof that your license is real, proof that your product works, proof that someone else already vetted you. Sukrit spent five years accumulating that proof one clinical trial, one doctor relationship, and one Shark Tank episode at a time. That's the actual playbook for India's first 100 crore hemp brand, not a shortcut, just the long way done properly.

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