OCR approves eight cannabis manufacturing licenses on a notice dated four weeks before it was published

As of August 5, 2026. The Office of Cannabis Regulation published a public notice on August 4 listing eight applicants approved for Cannabis Manufacturing Licenses, with each applicant’s merit score out of 1,000 points. The notice itself is dated July 8, 2026, 27 days before it reached OCR’s press releases page.

The notice, titled “Public Notice: Approved Cannabis License Applicants and Scores,” says the approvals are issued under the Virgin Islands Cannabis Use Act and the territory’s Cannabis Rules and Regulations, and that the list “reflects all applicants who have successfully met the approval threshold” under the merit-based process those rules set. OCR did not publish the threshold score.

The eight approved applicants

St. Thomas, five approvals:

• Nature Nurse VI Ltd., 949
• Fyah Burn Production LLC, 864
• KCV Associates, 699
• Elevated Concepts LLC, 684
• Natural Mystic Solutions, 604

St. Croix, two approvals:

• Virgin Herb LLC, 770
• Sun Systems Ltd., 738

St. John, one approval:

• TDD LLC, 710

Scores run from 949 down to 604, a spread of 345 points. Nature Nurse VI Ltd. scored 85 points above the next applicant.

Five of the eight already hold cultivation licenses

Five names on the list already hold conditional commercial cultivation licenses from the first cultivation round: Nature Nurse VI Ltd., Fyah Burn Production LLC, Natural Mystic Solutions, Virgin Herb LLC, and TDD LLC. Each is approved to manufacture on the island where it is approved to grow. Cannabis cannot legally move between the three islands, so an operator that grows and manufactures on the same island keeps both steps inside one supply chain.

Three names are new: Sun Systems Ltd. on St. Croix, and KCV Associates and Elevated Concepts LLC on St. Thomas. None of the three appears in an earlier OCR award notice covered on this site.

TDD LLC holds St. John’s only conditional cultivation license and one of the three conditional dispensary licenses awarded there in January. With this approval it holds a license or approval in all three categories on an island where no other operator holds a cultivation license. The other two St. John dispensary holders, Virgin Abis and Healthy Alternatives, have neither a cultivation license nor a manufacturing approval.

The July 8 date and the July 16 window

On July 16, 2026, OCR opened a second-round license application window with a September 15 deadline. That notice listed manufacturing among the categories opening for the first time, on all three islands.

The approvals published August 4 are dated eight days before that window opened, and nothing OCR has posted reconciles the two. OCR has not said which application intake produced the eight approvals, whether applicants who file by September 15 compete for slots alongside them, or how many manufacturing licenses the territory will issue in total. The Cannabis Use Act caps commercial cultivation at 35 licenses territory-wide. The notice cites no comparable cap for manufacturing.

The rubric behind the scores

A scoring rubric for manufacturing has been part of the Cannabis Rules and Regulations since they were adopted in 2024. It sets 1,000 points as the total available to a manufacturing applicant and weights the components, including up to 150 points each for the business plan and services offered, the operations plan, and the suitability of the proposed facility. The operations plan covers supply consistency to dispensaries, manufacturing methods and product variety, quality and quarantine procedures, and an environmental plan addressing carbon footprint, alternative energy, wastewater, and exchanged air.

The same rules set out what the license permits. A Cannabis Manufacturing Licensee may “Manufacture, process, internally test, package, and label Cannabis Products,” and “Store, sell, purchase, receive, transfer, and transport Cannabis Items to and from other Licensees on the same island.”

The notice does not mention fees. The Cannabis Use Act sets a maximum application fee of $10,000 for a manufacturing license, per the USVI cannabis license fee guide. OCR has not published an annual fee for manufacturing licensees comparable to the cultivation fee tiers the Cannabis Advisory Board set in October 2024.

The same operators scored lower on manufacturing

OCR published a cultivation score list carrying the same July 8, 2026 date, which allows a direct comparison for the five operators who appear on both. Four of the five scored lower on manufacturing:

• Nature Nurse VI Ltd.: 1,000 on cultivation, 949 on manufacturing
• Fyah Burn Production LLC: 1,000 on cultivation, 864 on manufacturing
• Virgin Herb LLC: 995 on cultivation, 770 on manufacturing
• Natural Mystic Solutions: 720 on cultivation, 604 on manufacturing
• TDD LLC: 650 on cultivation, 710 on manufacturing

The two rubrics weigh different things, so these are scores on two separate applications rather than one operator measured twice. The widest gap is Virgin Herb’s, at 225 points. TDD is the only one of the five to score higher on manufacturing, and its 650 on the July cultivation list is itself 150 points below its October 2025 cultivation score.

What is unclear

• The numeric approval threshold applicants had to clear.
• Whether any manufacturing applicants were denied, and how many applied.
• Whether these are conditional approvals subject to build-out and inspection, as the cultivation and dispensary awards were. The notice says “approved for Cannabis Manufacturing Licenses” without the word conditional.
• Whether the Cannabis Advisory Board reviewed the list before OCR published it, and at which meeting.
• Why the notice sat 27 days between its stated date and its publication.

What to watch

• Any OCR statement reconciling the July 8 approvals with the September 15 application deadline.
• A published annual fee for manufacturing licensees before September 15.
• Any Cannabis Advisory Board agenda or minutes recording action on the manufacturing list.
• The first Certificate to Operate in any category. OCR has issued conditional licenses or approvals across cultivation, dispensary, and now manufacturing, and no Certificate to Operate has been announced.