Key Takeaways
- Gron Ventures and Red Tech secured a $61.5 million arbitration award against Cookies Creative Consulting for fraud and breach of contract.
- The arbitration revealed Cookies mismanaged investments and failed to preserve key evidence during proceedings.
- Berner, the founder, has left his roles at Cookies, raising questions about who controls the brand’s identity and assets.
- The Cookies arbitration underscores the challenges cannabis companies face in balancing cultural identity with corporate governance.
- The outcome suggests that cannabis founders must understand control dynamics when accepting outside investment.
One of the most recognizable brands in cannabis is facing a legal and financial reckoning after investors Gron Ventures Fund I and Red Tech Holdings announced that they secured a final arbitration award worth more than $61.5 million against Cookies Creative Consulting & Promotions.
Gron Ventures announced the award on September 9th, saying retired Orange County Superior Court Judge Gail Andler, serving as an arbitrator through the American Arbitration Association, ruled in favor of Gron and Red Tech following hearings conducted over more than two dozen days. According to the announcement, the award includes damages, attorneys’ fees and costs. Gron said the arbitrator rejected all of Cookies’ counterclaims and designated Gron and Red Tech as the prevailing parties.
The September 9 announcement was issued by Gron Ventures, one of the prevailing investors. Beard Bros Media has not independently reviewed a publicly available copy of the complete final arbitration award. Throughout this article, descriptions of the arbitrator’s findings that originate with Gron’s announcement are therefore attributed accordingly rather than treated as allegations.
According to Gron, the arbitrator found that Cookies and company president Parker Berling defrauded Gron and Red Tech in connection with a proposed transaction that would have paid the investors $57 million for their interests in Cookies and a subsequent Series A financing. The announcement says the arbitrator separately found Berling personally liable for securities fraud and intentional interference with contract. Gron also said Cookies was found to have breached agreements involving undisclosed related-party transactions, the terminated buyout agreement and the Series A financing.
The findings are serious. But the story is bigger than a dollar figure or another ugly corporate lawsuit.
Cookies became important because it represented something cannabis companies had spent years trying to prove was possible. A brand that originated inside cannabis culture could become nationally recognizable, cross into fashion and music, license its identity across multiple markets and turn a founder’s cultural credibility into enormous commercial value.
Now, the fight surrounding Cookies provides a very different lesson about what can happen when cannabis culture, institutional capital, corporate governance and founder control become intertwined.
How Gron Ventures and Red Tech Became Cookies Investors
According to Gron Ventures, Red Tech invested $10 million in Cookies and Gron invested another $5.5 million during 2019 and 2020. Both investments were made through convertible promissory notes. Together, that put $15.5 million of outside capital into a company that was rapidly becoming one of the most visible brands in legal cannabis.
The relationship eventually deteriorated into accusations that went far beyond ordinary disagreements over investment returns.
When litigation connected to Gron and Red Tech surfaced publicly in 2023, reporting from MJBizDaily described investors accusing Cookies of mismanaging their investment through alleged self-dealing and financial arrangements that benefited company insiders. The dispute was part of a wider collection of legal battles involving Cookies at a time when the company was expanding aggressively through licensing, retail and brand partnerships.
Cookies and its leadership did not quietly accept that portrayal.
Berner publicly characterized investors involved in the dispute as “shark” investors attempting to take his company, while Cookies accused Gron and Red Tech of operating as predatory lenders engaged in an effort to seize control. Gron’s September 2026 announcement says Cookies ultimately pursued counterclaims seeking more than $60 million from the investors. According to Gron, those counterclaims were rejected in the final arbitration decision.
That history matters because this has never simply been one side accusing another side of failing to pay a bill.
Both camps have portrayed themselves as defending the company from the other.
The $57 Million Deal at the Center of the Dispute
One of the central issues described by Gron involves a proposed transaction that would have paid Gron and Red Tech approximately $57 million for their Cookies interests.
According to the September 9 announcement, the arbitrator found that Cookies and Berling caused that transaction to be canceled before implementing a Series A financing that materially changed the investors’ position. Gron says the arbitrator characterized that Series A transaction as a “sham” and found that it was used to erase Red Tech’s stake and convert Gron’s note into a substantially reduced ownership interest.
Gron also said the arbitrator found that Series A shares were issued without payment to an entity connected with 12/12 Ventures, a fund associated with Berner, Berling and Matt Barron. The arbitration findings, as described by Gron, further involved undisclosed related-party transactions that allegedly directed Cookies business toward affiliated companies.
For cannabis founders, this portion of the dispute deserves attention far beyond the personalities involved.
Convertible notes, financing rounds, licensing entities, affiliated companies and investor protections sound like the boring machinery behind a cannabis brand until something goes wrong. Then those documents can determine who owns what, whose approval is required, how existing investors can be diluted and whether the founder whose identity is inseparable from a brand actually controls the corporate entity carrying that brand.
Cannabis spent years fighting to gain access to conventional capital.
The Cookies dispute is a reminder that conventional capital comes with conventional corporate consequences.
The Arbitration Also Included Findings About Evidence Preservation
The September 9 announcement includes another significant element that should not get buried underneath the $61.5 million figure.
Gron says a forensic review determined that Cookies and Berling withheld documents during discovery and that wiping software was used to delete files from Berling’s computer after preservation obligations had arisen. According to Gron, the arbitrator imposed monetary and evidentiary sanctions related to that discovery conduct.
Those findings are separate from simply disagreeing with investors over how a financing agreement should be interpreted. Discovery sanctions address how evidence was handled during the proceeding itself, making them an important part of understanding the severity of the arbitration outcome described by Gron.
The arbitration also appears to have been exhaustive rather than a quick procedural decision. Gron says hearings took place over more than two dozen days before the final award was issued.
Cookies Had Previously Claimed a Major Arbitration Victory
The history becomes more complicated because this is not the first time an arbitration decision connected to Cookies has generated headlines.
In February 2025, SFGATE reported that Cookies was celebrating an interim arbitration award that the company viewed as a significant victory in another part of its complicated investor battles. Parker Berling declined to answer detailed questions about the dispute at the time but told the publication that Cookies was pleased with the interim award and remained committed to building the company into a “100 year brand.”
That earlier reporting illustrates how difficult the Cookies litigation history has become to reduce to a simple winner-versus-loser narrative. Multiple entities, investors and related disputes have moved through arbitration and California courts, sometimes producing competing claims of victory.
Court records also show continuing litigation involving entities carrying the Cookies name, including proceedings over arbitration awards and attempts to confirm or vacate them.
That is precisely why the September 2026 final award involving Gron and Red Tech deserves careful separation from other Cookies litigation, rather than blending it into one giant legal mess.
Where Is Berner in Cookies Today?
Perhaps the most consequential issue raised by the Gron announcement is not the $61.5 million award at all.
It is the question of who controls Cookies.
Gron’s September 9 statement says Gilbert “Berner” Milam has left his positions as Cookies CEO and board member and is now operating through Cookies SF. The release further claims that Berner, through Cookies SF, is engaged in separate litigation seeking control over Cookies intellectual property and trademarks. Gron says Cookies board member Matt Barron has also stepped down, leaving Parker Berling as company president and the remaining director.
Those assertions deserve independent scrutiny because they come directly from one side of the arbitration dispute, but the underlying question is enormous.
Consumers do not generally think about Cookies as a stack of limited liability companies, licensing agreements, trademarks and financing documents.
They think of Berner and Cookies as the same thing.
That perception is part of what made the brand valuable in the first place.
But corporate law does not necessarily treat the founder, the operating company, the trademark owner, the retail licensee and the cultural identity surrounding a brand as one unified entity. When those interests diverge, the consumer’s understanding of who “owns” a brand can look very different from the legal reality.
That is where this dispute becomes relevant far beyond Cookies.
When Cannabis Culture Becomes Corporate Property
Cookies helped change expectations around cannabis branding.
The company demonstrated that cannabis could produce a brand identity capable of moving well outside the dispensary. The blue Cookies logo became recognizable across apparel, music, retail storefronts and licensed cannabis markets. Berner’s own public persona was deeply intertwined with that growth.
That model created enormous opportunities, but it also created a structural problem familiar to founder-led companies.
The cultural identity can belong emotionally to the founder while the economic rights belong to corporations, investors, lenders, licensees and intellectual-property entities governed by contracts most consumers will never see.
For legacy cannabis entrepreneurs, the contradiction is especially sharp.
Legalization told people who had built cannabis businesses through relationships, reputation and culture that survival required becoming more corporate. That meant lawyers, capitalization tables, investor agreements, licensing arrangements, boards, financing rounds and intellectual-property structures.
Those tools can help a company scale.
They can also determine who gets control when relationships collapse.
The lesson from Cookies should not be that cannabis founders should refuse outside investment. For companies trying to build national brands while dealing with federal prohibition, limited banking access, enormous tax burdens and state-by-state licensing, capital is often unavoidable.
The lesson is that capital is never just money.
What the Cookies Fight Means for Cannabis Founders and Investors
There has been a tendency in legal cannabis to treat “culture” and “business” as opposite sides of an argument. One camp supposedly understands the plant and the people, while another understands spreadsheets, contracts and scale.
Real companies do not have the luxury of choosing one.
A cannabis brand built entirely on culture without sound governance can become vulnerable as it grows. A company built entirely around financial engineering without cultural legitimacy may never build a brand consumers care about in the first place.
The companies most likely to survive long term have to understand both.
That means founders need to know what happens to their voting control after every financing round. They need to understand dilution provisions, conversion rights, related-party transaction rules, intellectual-property ownership and what powers investors receive when certain conditions are triggered.
Investors have responsibilities of their own. Cannabis remains an industry where federal illegality, inconsistent state markets, price compression and rapidly changing regulations can make conventional financial expectations difficult to apply. Capital cannot enter cannabis expecting all of the upside of an emerging market while pretending the industry’s structural problems do not exist.
The Cookies dispute shows what happens when those competing interests stop functioning as a partnership.
Lawyers take over the conversation.
Berner provided Beard Bros Media with the following response:
“Despite spending many years and more than $7,000,000 attacking Berner, an arbitrator recently found that he did nothing wrong. Gron’s award is against Cookies SF’s insolvent former licensee, CCC&P. The Cookies brand, meanwhile, is thriving. Cookies is looking forward to releasing its award-winning blueberry genetics line in the coming months and putting this distraction behind us.” – Berner, Founder of Cookies SF
This Is Bigger Than One $61.5 Million Award
It would be easy to cover this story as another cannabis company getting dragged through court.
That misses what makes Cookies important.
Few cannabis companies have built a stronger connection between a founder, a cultural identity and a commercially valuable brand. Cookies helped establish that a cannabis company could become something closer to a lifestyle brand than a traditional dispensary label.
The fights now surrounding the company expose the complicated backside of that success.
Who owns the trademarks? Who controls the company? What protections do investors have? How much authority does a founder retain after taking outside money? Where does brand value actually live when the personality behind the company becomes separated from the corporate structure?
Those questions are not unique to Cookies.
Cannabis is entering an era in which many of the brands created during legalization’s first decade are confronting succession, consolidation, investor pressure and changing ownership structures. Founders who once controlled nearly every part of their companies are discovering that scaling a brand can mean distributing pieces of that control across financing agreements, licensing deals and intellectual-property entities.
Cookies may simply be one of the biggest and most visible examples.
For years, cannabis entrepreneurs fought to be taken seriously as legitimate businesspeople.
Now comes the less glamorous part.
Legitimate businesses have shareholders. They have boards, fiduciary obligations, and contracts.. And when the people involved disagree over who owns the future, sometimes they have $61.5 million arbitration awards.
The cannabis industry should pay attention not because Cookies is uniquely dysfunctional, but because the fundamental tension behind this fight exists inside countless growing cannabis companies.
Culture can create extraordinary value.
Capital can help scale it.
But if nobody is absolutely clear about who controls that value once the money comes in, eventually somebody else may be making that decision.
Sometimes, that somebody is an arbitrator.
Frequently Asked Questions
Red Tech invested $10 million and Gron invested $5.5 million in Cookies during 2019 and 2020, both through convertible promissory notes, putting a combined $15.5 million of outside capital into the brand. Their relationship with Cookies later deteriorated into public disputes, with investors accusing the company of mismanagement through self-dealing, and Cookies leadership, including Berner, characterizing the investors as “shark” investors trying to seize control of the company.
The dispute centers on a proposed transaction that would have paid Gron and Red Tech approximately $57 million for their interests in Cookies. According to Gron, the arbitrator found that Cookies and Parker Berling canceled that deal and instead pushed through a Series A financing that the arbitrator characterized as a “sham,” which erased Red Tech’s stake and significantly reduced Gron’s ownership interest. Gron also says the arbitrator found that an entity tied to 12/12 Ventures — a fund connected to Berner, Berling, and Matt Barron — received Series A shares without making any payment.
According to Gron’s announcement, Gilbert “Berner” Milam has stepped down from his positions as Cookies CEO and board member and is now operating through a separate entity, Cookies SF. Gron claims Berner, via Cookies SF, is pursuing separate litigation seeking control over Cookies’ intellectual property and trademarks. Matt Barron has also reportedly left the board, leaving Parker Berling as company president and the sole remaining director. These claims come from one side of the dispute and haven’t been independently verified.
The Cookies dispute is a cautionary tale about what happens when cannabis culture, outside capital and corporate governance collide without clear agreement on control. Founders need to understand how financing rounds, dilution provisions and intellectual-property ownership can affect their authority over the brand they built, while investors need to recognize the unique regulatory and financial pressures facing cannabis companies. As the industry matures, more founder-led brands are likely to face similar tensions between cultural identity and corporate structure.
