Top 10 Ways People Are Consuming Cannabis in 2019

How many products contain cannabis? Hundreds. Flower – of course – and pre-rolls. Vape pens and concentrates like shatter and Live Resin. Creams and massage oils. Chocolate chip cookies, coffee sodas, pills, strawberry taffy, powders for adding to hot tea or cold juice. Companies are rolling out myriad new products in pot-friendly states every week — it’s remarkable.

Naturally, some products are more popular than others. And sales are booming (forecast to reach $40B by 2024).

Do you know which forms are the most popular way to consume cannabis?

We’d like to share with you what we’ve learned from analyzing retail sales across the largest legal markets in the US.

We mined our GreenEdge™ Retail Sales Tracking database, the most powerful, reliable and comprehensive platform for cannabis retail sales tracking in the world, to determine the Top 10 most popular products in the key states of California, Colorado and Oregon. And since consumers speak with their wallets, we decided to examine dollar sales rather than units sold.

Without further ado, here are the Top 10 product categories among cannabis consumers from January through May, 2019:

1. Flower. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. We all had joints, bowls and bongs long before we could easily buy weed-infused kombuchas. Good old flower was there first, and it remains on top. Sales: $768 million.

2. Vape cartridges: This category only looks at vapes and vape-accessories that come with cannabis and are sold in dispensaries— not the pot-free vaporizers you can buy online. And they are extremely popular — rising all the way to No. 2 in our list. Sales: $473 million.

3. Pre-rolled joints: Forms of inhalation claim all of the top 3 ways people take their weed. Pre-rolls include plain Flower, and those that are “infused” with concentrates. To keep things simple, we just looked at the broad joint category, including infused. Sales: $157 million.

4. Gummies: People who like eating their ganja are especially fond of the sweet and sour and chewy treats. This is no surprise, at all. Gummies have been and will continue to be a popular way to consume cannabis. Sales: $147 million.

5. Live Resin: A favorite among aficionados of non-traditional ways to consumer, Live Resin is a type of butane hash oil that is extracted from fresh cannabis plants that are immediately frozen as soon as harvested. Sales: $85 million.

6. Dropper: Droppers’ popularity has been spiking for several years, and now they represent one of the most popular forms of cannabis consumption: fill the dropper with a dose, squirt it into your mouth, and savor the flavors, like tropical fruits and berries (along with cannabis). Sales: $62 million.

7. Disposable vapes: As we know, vape pens are extraordinarily popular with cannabis consumers, and most people buy cartridges (No. 2 on this list) which they fit into their pens when the previous cartridge’s oil is all gone. But some vape pens come pre-filled with cannabis oil, and are tossed when the oil runs out — no option for just plugging a new cartridge of oil into the pen. Sales: $62 million.

8. Wax: As the name suggests, wax concentrates can resemble the texture of traditional candle wax. Depending on its finished form factor, it’s known by the names budder, badder, honeycomb and crumble.  Sales: $40 million.

9. Shatter: This stiff, glass-like form of concentrate, which often gets inhaled after it is heated on a dab rig, was a popular form of concentrate from the beginning — in fact, when Colorado first began legal adult-use sales in 2014 it was the second-most popular kind of concentrate in the state for the year, behind wax. Back then, vape was a minor category. But now, shatter is behind vape and wax in the concentrates race to supremacy. Sales: $38 million.

10. Chocolate bars: Rounding-out the Top 10 we have another edible. Chocolate bars were the No. 1 way of eating weed back when adult-use sales were first made legal; in Colorado, during 2014, chocolate bars grabbed 20 percent of the edibles market, compared to 17 percent for gummies. But trends have changed dramatically. Still, chocolate squeaked into the Top 10. Sweet! Sales: $33 million.

Cover photo by Arthur Poulin on Unsplash