Boy Ramsahai Saw the Edibles Market a Decade Before Most of Us

Boy Ramsahai does not smoke. He has said so, in public, repeatedly, including on a two-hour Dutch podcast he gave in late January. He built one of Europe's largest cannabis seed companies, Royal Queen Seeds, from a standing start in 2009 to roughly €65 million in revenue by 2024, without personally being a consumer of the plant's most common use case. The exception he makes is edibles. Specifically, edibles with THC, taken for sleep. He said it plainly on the Lotgenoten Podcast:

"I prefer things with a drink or candy instead of smoke, because I don't like [smoke] for your health."

That line is not a throwaway. It is the thesis of his career transposed onto his own medicine cabinet.

The bet on edibles, stated out loud

Ramsahai used the January interview to frame edibles not as a segment but as the category's destination.

"Edibles are the biggest market, better than the smoking market. In ten years you'll see a lot more edibles than now. And smoking is getting less and less."

In the same conversation he connected this to legalization specifically: where cannabis is only tolerated rather than legal, edibles cannot exist as a retail product, so the category only unlocks when the regulatory door actually opens. Referring to the ten Dutch municipalities currently running the national closed-supply-chain experiment, he said:

"Those ten municipalities have chocolate, brownies, gummies, lollies, drinks. And if that gets legalized further, there's still a big chance to grow it."

The argument holds regardless of phrasing. A legal smoking market is a known quantity. A legal edibles market is the part of the consumer base that was never going to smoke in the first place, which is most consumers. That group has been buying nothing from legal cannabis for fifty years because the smoking format did not fit their lives. Format change unlocks demand that category change alone does not.

This is the argument EdibleRank has made since launch, and it arrives at the same place Ramsahai did from the opposite direction. He came at it as a seed company founder watching which SKUs his commercial customers could actually sell to end consumers. EdibleRank came at it as a consumer-facing authority site looking at who was actually buying. The two vantages converge on the same answer.

Why Germany matters more than the US, for now

In the same interview, Ramsahai called Germany Royal Queen Seeds' single largest European market, and he was direct about why.

"Since April 1, 2024, cannabis has been completely legalized in Germany. Smoking, you can have X grams with you."

Germany is 83 million people, a legal framework that took effect less than two years ago, and, per Ramsahai, an explosion of demand that reached every category of product the moment the law changed.

"When it opened two years ago, an explosion broke in the cannabis world. Tents, seeds, fluids, vaporizers, everything that with cannabis was sold."

The American cannabis story gets most of the English-language press coverage, and the numbers there are bigger in absolute terms. But the American market is structurally fragmented (state-by-state legal patchwork, federal illegality, banking constraints) and the growth has stalled. California adult-use pricing dropped from $2,000 a kilo at the peak to around $450 now, per Ramsahai's own numbers. Canadian legal operators are overleveraged against a consumer base that mostly already had black market access. Germany is the cleaner thesis: single national framework, single currency, sudden demand unlock, and the category maturity curve ahead of it that the US has already traveled.

Ramsahai's commercial strategy reflects this ordering. Royal Queen Seeds moved its headquarters from Veghel to Barcelona in 48 hours in response to Dutch political pressure, opened a US operation in Oregon to track federal legalization, and treats Germany as the growth engine of European revenue. The move patterns are legible. Europe is where the near-term growth compounds. The US is the long option.

The founder template

There are two patterns in Ramsahai's career worth naming specifically, because both translate.

The first is the willingness to build against the regulatory grain. When he started Highlife Magazine in the early 1990s as a publisher covering the Dutch coffee shop economy, banks refused him, politicians called him a criminal, and Dutch courts summoned him repeatedly. His response was to build anyway and expand the magazine into eight countries. When Dutch seed law tightened in the mid-2010s, he moved operations to Spain in two days rather than accept domestic constraints. This is not a founder who waits for the rules to be favorable. He builds inside whatever regulatory window exists and repositions when the window changes.

The second pattern is the one EdibleRank is most directly modeled on: the combination of deep category commitment with personal distance from consumption. Ramsahai does not have to be a heavy cannabis user to understand what the market needs. His understanding comes from decades of close observation, from the sales calls he made as a Telegraaf advertising rep in the 1980s, from the coffee shop owners who explained the industry to him face to face, from the editorial discipline of running a professional trade magazine before running a product company. The category knowledge is earned through sustained analytical attention, not through personal consumption. That combination is how he built a business with €65 million in revenue before handing it to his son.

The American cannabis media often confuses authority with personal heaviness of use. Ramsahai's career suggests that authority comes from taking the sector seriously over time, independent of whether the writer or founder personally rolls joints on weekends.

What this means going into November

The US federal hemp ban takes effect November 12, 2026. The analysis EdibleRank has published on that event names edibles as the category most reshaped by the shift. Ramsahai's January interview makes the same point from the supply side. A market without legal cannabis cannot develop edibles. A market with legal cannabis does not stay in the smoking format for long. The American hemp ban pulls roughly twelve million edibles consumers out of the unregulated channel and redirects them to state-licensed dispensaries, most of which have edibles programs designed to absorb exactly this kind of migration. Germany, operating under different rules but similar pharmacological dynamics, has been absorbing its own surge since April 2024. For the US-side mechanics, see our analysis of the November 2026 hemp ban.

The through-line is that the consumer preference for edibles over smoking is stable, growing, and visible to anyone running a cannabis business at scale. Ramsahai has been stating it publicly for years. The rest of the industry is beginning to catch up.

A personal note

Ramsahai is one of two founder figures whose work informed the decision to build EdibleRank. The other is Arjan Roskam, whose edibles commentary is covered in a separate piece on this site. What both have in common is long-horizon commitment to cannabis as a commercial category, an unflashy analytical posture, and an early read on edibles specifically as the format the category was heading toward. If you are reading EdibleRank and wondering whose thinking the site is downstream of, these are the two names. It is a small list on purpose.