Only two weed companies made Time's Best Companies list — you can guess who

Time and Statista put out their America's Best Companies list every year, and this time around, out of more than 7,200 companies that met the bar to even be considered, only two plants-touching cannabis operators cracked the final list of 1,000: Trulieve and Green Thumb Industries. If you've been following this industry for more than a minute, that's basically the two safest bets in the room.

The ranking weighs three things — employee satisfaction (built off roughly 217,000 worker surveys), financial performance for companies doing at least $100 million in revenue, and sustainability transparency. It's not a cannabis-specific list bending over backwards to be nice to the plant; it's the same rubric Time uses for every other industry, and these two MSOs cleared it anyway.

Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers called it "a tremendous honor and a direct reflection of the durability of our business," adding that being one of only two cannabis companies recognized "speaks to the passion and dedication of our team." Coming off a year where price compression has been squeezing margins across almost every multistate operator, that kind of external validation matters — it's the sort of thing that shows up in a due-diligence deck the next time a bank or an institutional investor is deciding whether cannabis money is respectable money.

For everyone else in the industry, the real takeaway isn't the trophy — it's the reminder that mainstream recognition is still scarce enough to be genuinely newsworthy. When two companies making a federally restricted product get filed next to the same 1,000 companies as everyone else, it's a small, real sign of how normal this business is starting to look from the outside.