Dutchie.. Trouble At T’ Mill?

I’m Troy Allen Melquist, a cannabis tech founder building infrastructure for dispensaries and live‑commerce. I’m not rooting for anyone’s failure—but I am looking at Dutchie trajectory and seeing a risk profile that operators cannot afford to ignore. When your POS, ecommerce, and payments all ride on a single vendor, governance drama and financial distress become your operational problem, not just theirs.reformingretail

Does Dutchie really care for your Dispensary?

From $3.75B rocket ship to distressed platform

Dutchie rode the cannabis funding boom to a multibillion‑dollar valuation, fueled by massive rounds and aggressive acquisitions of POS players like Greenbits and LeafLogix. By early 2024, reports showed a harsh reality check: a new round that chopped the company’s valuation down to roughly $400 million—an almost 90% drop from the 2021 peak. Sacra

As a founder, I know that kind of collapse almost never ends quietly. It usually means layoffs, rushed cost‑cutting, and strategy pivots driven by investor survival, not operator stability. When your vendor’s equity story implodes, you should assume they will protect the cap table first and your store second—or not at all.sacra

Dutchie has lost most of its Value and that is a sign of a dying company.

Governance civil war: founders vs. board

This isn’t just a numbers story; it’s a leadership story. Dutchie’s board executed a sudden ouster of its co‑founders, triggering lawsuits that describe the move as a corporate coup and challenge the legitimacy of current leadership. Public reports and filings detail a board meeting where pre‑written resolutions removed the founders from both executive roles and board seats in one swoop.forgeglobal

When founders are suing their own company to be reinstated, you’re looking at a governance civil war, not healthy succession planning. Companies in that state are far more likely to make abrupt, opaque decisions—selling assets, sunsetting products, or cutting off support—because internal factions are fighting over control under extreme pressure.forgeglobal

Dutchie rather fight legal battles for non payment to its vendors, removing its founders, shorting companies it buys of promised stock and cash, and fighting it’s own employees in court!

The $24.7M hardware bet: how leadership treats commitments

The ScanSource hardware dispute tells you a lot about how Dutchie leadership approaches commitments. Dutchie locked into an order worth around $24.7 million for custom monitors and POS hardware—devices etched and configured specifically for Dutchie, non‑cancelable by design. The distributor later claimed Dutchie told them to halt production and refused to pay, leaving tens of millions in inventory and unpaid obligations on the table.geekwire