Thanks for coverage Forbes!

Over the past decade, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the city known for its close proximity to the local Amish, has been reinventing itself, investing in its downtown by encouraging a vibrant arts scene and welcoming boutique shops.

This week, the city added an award-winning dispensary to its revitalized downtown commerce area, The Apothecarium.
The dispensary is cropping up on the East Coast after establishing itself as one of the top dispensaries in San Francisco. TerrAscend, a North American operator, bought PA-based Ilera Healthcare last year and has been transitioning their stores into The Apothecarium locations. A store in Plymouth Meeting, Penn. was rebranded at the end of March, but the Lancaster dispensary store is the first newly built outlet of The Apothecarium on eastern shores.

The 4,300-square foot store takes design cues from its West Coast counterpart, which was ranked by Architectural Digest as one Best-Designed Marijuana Shops Across America. As competition stiffens even in medical markets like Pennsylvania, smartly designed spaces should give cannabis dispensaries an edge. The Apothecarium Lancaster works hard to keep theirs razor sharp.

Greg Rochlin, CEO of Ilera Healthcare, said that The Apothecarium Lancaster retains the warm and modern aesthetic that made The Apothecarium in San Francisco popular, but translates it for the local market. For instance, while the seating areas seem to borrowed from the pages of a CB2 catalog, all of the cabinetry in the store was custom built, a nod to the area’s heritage of DutchCrafters.