May 12--On-demand transportation company SideCar has partnered with Meadow, a "full-service cannabis concierge," to do medical marijuana deliveries for patients in the Bay Area, the two San Francisco start-ups announced Tuesday.
Under the arrangement, when medical marijuana card-holding patients order cannabis from one of Meadow's partner dispensaries, some of the deliveries will now be made by SideCar drivers.
Meadow CEO David Hua said the partnership offers dispensaries a turnkey delivery system, allowing them to leverage SideCar's technology and network of drivers instead of investing in their own delivery services.
"One thing that really appealed to us about SideCar is they started with delivering people, then they moved into people and packages, so we thought, 'OK, can they deliver medicine?'" Hua said. "When you think about it logistically, it's no different, but there's a lot of compliance you have to follow."
The level of compliance needed appealed to SideCar because, according to SideCar CEO Sunil Paul, the company had been looking to dabble with "highly curated" deliveries.
"When we launched our delivery capacity, one of the things we knew we were capable of doing but didn't yet have partners for was specialized deliveries," Paul said. "That is, having a curated set of drivers with particular training credentials."
Under the partnership, all SideCar drivers who perform medical marijuana deliveries will also have to be card-carrying patients of the dispensaries for which they deliver. Drivers will not deliver more than the legal carrying limit of eight ounces of medical marijuana, and the packages will be in a locked box in the trunk. To ensure the safety of the drivers, all transactions are cashless, and customers using the service have to be verified card holders.
The service is only available in the Bay Area, although SideCar's more general "people and packages" delivery service is now available in Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston, and will soon expand to San Diego, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Package deliveries now account for 50% of the volume of SideCar deliveries.
