About Poof
Built in Toronto, for Canada’s cannabis market, by people who started as customers.
Poof started as a marketplace we built for ourselves. We wanted an easier way to shop for cannabis: find a specific product at a store nearby, place the order, and know it wouldn't be gone from the shelf before we got there.
How Poof started
Building that marketplace put us in hundreds of conversations with retailers, and a pattern kept surfacing. Independent stores were competing with large chains on price, on unequal terms. Not because they ran worse stores, but because chains could negotiate directly with major brands for margin the independents couldn't touch.
So we changed what we were building. Instead of just helping customers find products, we help brands and independent retailers work together in a way that actually moves product.
What we do
Brands already spend on marketing. Most of that spend ends at an ad view. It never connects to a shelf. Poof points that same spend at the retailers stocking the brand's products: a brand adds a line of code to a product page or campaign, and when a shopper clicks Add to Cart, we find the closest licensed retailer holding live stock, write the order into that retailer's point-of-sale system, and hand the customer to their checkout.
The retailer takes the payment, fulfills the order, and keeps the customer. The brand sees which marketing produced actual retail sales. Getting on the shelf is the old game. Moving product off the shelf is how brands earn more shelf space, and how they walk into new stores with proof instead of a pitch.
For independent retailers, that flips the usual dynamic. Instead of pay-to-play listing fees, the value shows up as demand: an e-commerce storefront, a place on the poof.ca marketplace, and inclusion in a retail ad network funded by brand campaigns. We take nothing from the retailer. Brands pay us a percentage on what we market. The retailer's job becomes what it should be: being a great operator and fulfilment partner for the brands they stock.
How we think about it
We route orders to the closest store that can fulfill them fastest, never to whoever discounted hardest. Retailers set their own prices and keep their own margins. A marketplace that ranks by price turns into a discount board, and everyone on it loses.
Checkout runs on the retailer's own merchant account and POS. We never touch the payment or hold the funds. Platforms that own the checkout eventually own the customer, and then they raise the rate. We'd rather route the demand and get out of the way.
Most cannabis technology was built for the US first and adapted for Canada second, and the fit never quite lands. Canada's rules for retail, brands, and marketing are further along, and a more mature market deserves tools designed for it from the start. Every order is fulfilled by a licensed retailer; we don't sell cannabis, hold inventory, or process transactions. The compliance stays where the licence is.
The team
We're a team drawn from across the cannabis industry: marketing, e-commerce, events, and retail tech. People who have run campaigns for licensed brands, built dispensary platforms, and sat on the retailer side of the counter. Small by design, close to the market by necessity.
Where we are
Poof Technologies is based in Toronto and was incorporated in 2021. We spent our first years inside the market, running campaigns, building integrations, and listening to retailers, before shaping that experience into the platform we run today.
Work with us
Whether you're a retailer looking to grow online or a brand trying to turn marketing into sell-through, the fastest way to understand Poof is to see it running on your own products.