Currently, 90 percent of Jersey’s cannabis production comes from Northern Leaf. In 2025, the company exported £8.4 million ($11.3 million) worth of medical marijuana to markets including the UK and Germany (regulations mean it is only permitted to grow for export and cannot sell to customers in Jersey). Tan has much greater ambitions. He points to another famous Jersey export, Jersey Royal potatoes. “Jersey’s potato industry did £40 million in 2025,” he said. “I am already doing a quarter of the potato industry on 5 percent of the land. On 20 percent of the land, I could create an industry worth more than the potato industry. That is where it will get interesting.”
Born in Malaysia to a Chinese dad and Irish mother, Tan, 50, wanted to become a vet, but after graduating from university in 1998, ended up developing software for Citibank. He was making good money, but his heart wasn’t in finance. What really interested him was growing weed. “I loved the science of it, the genetics, the seeds, the smells,” Tan says.
The early 2000s were the perfect time for an inquisitive young business grad to get into the cannabis business. Across the world, governments were legalizing medical marijuana and moving towards decriminalization over draconian sentencing.
Tan began bouncing around jurisdictions that were relaxing laws on cannabis, working as a consultant in California, the Netherlands, and Canada. “I started to see these legal frameworks opening up. The minute they existed, I went there,” he says.
Jersey has a somewhat unique regulatory environment. As a Crown Dependency, it has close ties to Britain, but is not a part of the UK. Crucially, it is self-governing: It can make its own laws. Jersey’s main reputation today is as a tax haven, attracting some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and companies, thanks to its lack of capital gains tax and 0 percent corporation tax for most companies. Along its coastline, next to twee beachside cafes and Nazi bunkers (the Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by Hitler’s forces in World War II), you can find offices of international banks and wealth management firms catering to the super rich.
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