Swade Is Coming to Your Side of Missouri

How BeLeaf Medical turned a St. Louis cannabis brand into a statewide operation — and why BesaMe Wellness customers in Kansas City are waking up to a different name on the door.

If you've walked past a BesaMe Wellness dispensary in the Kansas City area lately and noticed something different about the signage, you're not imagining it. BesaMe is becoming Swade — and the story of how that happened is one of the more compelling chapters in Missouri cannabis.

Swade Cannabis didn't start as an acquisition play. It started as a dispensary brand created by BeLeaf Medical, a vertically integrated cannabis company headquartered in Earth City, Missouri. BeLeaf was founded in 2019, but its roots go back further — the company held a Missouri Department of Agriculture license to grow industrial hemp for CBD starting in 2015, giving its cultivation team a meaningful head start when the state's medical cannabis program launched. On June 11, 2020, BeLeaf's Sinse cultivation facility in St. Louis County became the first cannabis grow operation in Missouri to pass state inspections and begin operations. Five months later, Swade opened its first dispensary in St. Peters.

The co-founder behind the brand is Mitch Meyers — a St. Louis marketing legend who spent the 1980s at Anheuser-Busch, where she created the Spuds MacKenzie character and helped launch Bud Light into becoming the best-selling beer in the world. She later co-founded Zipatoni, a St. Louis advertising agency that represented Miller, Bacardi, and Energizer before selling to Interpublic Group in 2003. In 2025, Inc. Magazine named her to its Female 500 Founders List. When she describes what she wanted Swade to feel like — warm lighting, a deli-counter display where customers can see and smell flower before selecting it, budtenders who know your name — you hear the same instincts that built some of America's most recognizable consumer brands.

For BeLeaf's first few years, Swade was a St. Louis story. The company raised a $23 million credit facility from AFC Gamma in August 2021 to expand its cultivation capacity, later growing that facility to $26.1 million in August 2024 to fund additional acquisitions. By early 2025, BeLeaf had raised roughly $37.9 million in total financing — all of it, notably, from Missouri investors rather than outside venture capital.

BesaMe Wellness launched in 2021, building five locations in the Kansas City metro: Barry Road KC, Liberty, Smithville, North Kansas City, and Warrensburg. Founded with principal Jack Mitchell involved, BesaMe focused on patient experience and holistic wellness, developing a loyal customer base in western Missouri.

The two companies announced the acquisition on April 2, 2025 — a date BesaMe itself flagged with a social media post reading "It might be April Fool's Day but this is not a joke." It wasn't. Swade assumed management of all five BesaMe locations immediately under a Management Services Agreement while awaiting final regulatory approval from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The geographic logic was simple: BeLeaf had depth in St. Louis and almost no presence west of Columbia. BesaMe had exactly the opposite. The acquisition didn't just add five stores — it gave BeLeaf's vertically integrated supply chain a footprint across the whole state.

Perhaps no one embodies the deal's symmetry more than Joey Pintozzi, BeLeaf's Chief Strategy and Revenue Officer. Pintozzi was one of BesaMe's original hires — part of the team that opened the first store. "There were 13 of us in that little old store," he told Greenway Magazine, "and so many of them are still intact and have become leaders of the company now." When BeLeaf acquired BesaMe, Pintozzi found himself on the other side of the table.

As of early 2026, Swade operates twelve locations across Missouri: Cherokee Street, Delmar, Eureka, The Grove, Overland, and St. Peters in St. Louis; and Kansas City Barry Road, Liberty, North Kansas City, Smithville, Warrensburg, and Rolla on the western and central side of the state.

The brand has been building out its service layer. Swade launched the Potline — a dedicated customer service line (1-833-MYSWADE) where consumers can speak with knowledgeable staff before ever walking through the door. Meyers has made older adults a deliberate focus of Swade's outreach. She hired Sarah Figueroa, a gerontologist, as Swade's Wellness and Aging Consultant — a role designed to reach the cannabis-curious consumer over 60 who has never set foot in a dispensary. "There's been no education between then and now to this target customer," Meyers told Greenway. "They do not realize the products that are now out there that are targeted for medical."

If you search for Swade's Kansas City locations in Missouri's Division of Cannabis Regulation database — or in directories like MOGanja that draw from it — you may still see the BesaMe Wellness name attached to those licenses. Regulatory paper trails move slower than social media rebrands. The DCR data reflects legal entity names, which can lag months behind operational realities. MOGanja actively tracks these transitions and updates profiles as ownership changes are reflected in official records.

The BesaMe-to-Swade story is a signal about where Missouri cannabis is heading. The operators who secured licenses in 2019 and 2020 are consolidating. Companies with capital, supply chains, and operational infrastructure are absorbing the ones without. Swade's twelve-location footprint — backed by BeLeaf's vertically integrated production and $37.9 million in financing, and led by one of St. Louis's most experienced brand builders — positions it as one of the most geographically complete independent operators in the state.

The little store with 13 people has come a long way.

MOGanja tracks all 241 licensed dispensaries in Missouri using data from the Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation. View all Swade Cannabis locations at moganja.com/dispensaries.