SEATTLE – Vaporizer pens are still hot and infused drinks keep creeping upward in popularity, but cannabis flower remains the king of cannabis sales in both the United States and Canada, according to a new report from the market analysts at Headset.
While the category isn’t quite the juggernaut it once was, between January and June 2021, flower outsold the next most popular category, vaporizers, by a factor of more than two to one in the U.S. In Canada, flower sales nearly tripled those of the country’s second-most-popular category, pre-rolls.
“Cannabis Flower: An Analysis of Category Data & Performance” also reveals flower’s U.S. market share has remained between 40 percent and 50 percent for the past three years. Canadian flower, on the other hand, claimed 78.4 percent of the market in March 2019 but by June 2021 had slipped to a share of only 49.3 percent.
“Flower tends to start at high market share and then drop because it is the least processed product type and therefore the easiest to get to market quickly,” the report’s authors wrote. “In January of 2020, Cannabis 2.0 [i.e., non-flower] products started being sold [in Canada], and the introduction of these new categories took away from flower’s market share.”
Among the report’s other findings:
- Nevada and Ontario stand out as the best markets for flower, with the category accounting for 56 percent of all sales.
- California is the recreational market with the lowest flower sales share, at 41.9 percent.
- The most popular flower category in Canada is indica, which contributes more than 40 percent of sales. Hybrid is the most popular category in the U.S.
- In both markets, 3.5 grams is the most successful package size, accounting for more than half of all flower sales.
