Higher Data has ranked the top cannabis brands entering 2020. Using our real-time dispensary menu data, we ranked brands based on the number of products each has stocked in medical and recreational dispensaries across North America.
Why are there 200x more dispensaries per capita in Oklahoma than New York?
Measuring access through dispensary density
One theme we’ve been tracking in the cannabis industry is how structural differences in state licensing programs affect consumer access to marijuana. Access can be affected by factors ranging from prices and regulations on permitted forms of cannabis to the travel time to the nearest dispensary and open business hours. All these measures of access can be analyzed using CannaRadar, Higher Data’s cannabis license database, including the focus of this post: access as measured by the per capita number of dispensaries in each state.
Dispensaries per capita is a useful metric because it incorporates a measure of supply (number of dispensaries) and a measure of demand (population) while remaining relatively easy to understand and interpret. States with a higher number dispensaries per capita are likely very competitive while states with lower number of dispensaries per capita face less pricing pressure.
Number of dispensaries per 100,000 people
Ultimately, there are substantial differences in dispensary density between states:
Medical vs. recreational: Medical-only states with lax regulations and low-cost licenses like Oklahoma and Montana top the chart with 47 and 27 dispensaries per 100,000 people, respectively. On the other end of the spectrum, populous states with heavily regulated medical programs like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut all have fewer than 0.25 dispensaries per 100,000 people.
California vs. Colorado: While California has the most active licensed dispensaries, it has fewer than Colorado when we take population into account. Colorado has about 20 dispensaries per 100,000 people while California has closer to 5 dispensaries. This makes sense when thinking about the relative populations of the two states, but isn’t immediately clear just looking at the total number of licensed dispensaries in each state.
CannaRadar’s already-cleaned data allows subscribers to make this analysis even more granular to focus on their markets of interest. For example, for a retailer operating in California, we could gain a zip code or county level understanding of dispensaries per capita.
Download a free CannaRadar data sample or subscribe today to give your business the tools to make data-driven decisions by clicking here.
Create your own cannabis business density analysis
Our analysis can be recreated by CannaRadar subscribers using Excel or more advanced statistical analysis software (Tableau, R, Python). For quick insights of your own, you can follow these three steps to replicate this exercise in Excel:
Create a PivotTable for the Excel sheet with raw CannaRadar data in order to analyze the database:
Add the license_type field to the PivotTable filters and filter to the business type of interest. In this case, we filtered out all licenses of businesses that are not dispensaries
Add the region_name field to the PivotTable rows in order to be able to aggregate the number of businesses by state
Add the business_name field to the PivotTable values in order to count the number of businesses by state. In this case, this would be the number of licensed dispensaries by state
For each row in the PivotTable (representing a state), we need to add that state’s population in order to calculate dispensary density per capita. To do this, we linked each row to Census population estimates for the state and divided each state’s population by 100,000[1]. Population data can be added through Excel through the Data tab (short tutorial).
Divide the the number of businesses in each state by the population in each state to calculate business density per capita!
This entire exercise can be done directly with the raw CannaRadar data and Excel. Ultimately, we used R for this exercise because we wanted to better visualize the output; check out the R code we used to analyze the data and create the map in our Github repository. Those looking to impress can create similar maps that make the results of your analysis easier to interpret.
To download a free CannaRadar data sample or subscribe today, click here.
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[1] If you’re looking at a different levels of granularity and geographies you may want to adjust your per capita denominator so that your results are easier to interpret (e.g. 1 delivery service per 1,000 people is easier to interpret than 0.01 delivery services per 100,000 people).
Minnesota's patient program growing 120% per year since 2015
Analysis of zip code level patient statistics
Take a real-live look at the growth of the cannabis industry over time – using zip code-level patient statistics, we’ve been able to understand how quickly Minnesota's Medical Cannabis program has developed and which areas have seen the highest demand.
Minnesota’s program grew from around just 900 patients in July 2015 to nearly 15,000 in January 2019 (the beginning of this year). That represents an impressive 120% year-over-year growth (or 7% month-over-month). The distinction of highest-demand zip code goes to Apple Valley (zip code 55124), a suburb of Minneapolis, with 168 patients located there alone. This is unsurprising: as the figure below shows, patient growth has been fastest in and around major metropolitan areas.
Growth of Minnesota Medical Patients
Ultimately, our data allows clients to answer their most important business questions in a fast-changing industry, using a detailed understanding of demand to optimize store locations and to select new markets to enter.
Looking to use data to supercharge your growth? Check out CannaRadar, our proprietary sales software, or get in touch to discuss bespoke analytics solutions for your business.
Reaching Qualified Leads with CannaRadar
Qualifying Your Leads
Effective email marketing requires narrowing down the universe of potential customers to those who are most likely to purchase your product. Spammy-sounding cold emails are unlikely to receive a lot of engagement from the busy decision makers you’re trying to reach and can threaten your marketing campaign if they are reported by recipients. Conversely, when you know the characteristics of your target customer, you can create content tailored to their business that seems more personal and genuine.
Higher Data’s cannabis license database, CannaRadar, makes it easy to figure out qualified leads is for your business and helps you find fresh qualified leads each month. CannaRadar contains ~35,000 licensed cannabis businesses, with sales intelligence about each company. Subscribers are able to search through the data and mark current customers. From this, you can start to identify characteristics of current customers that might be indicative of your target customer archetype.
For example, if you sell to dispensaries, you may see in CannaRadar that you currently supply dispensaries that are, on average, in the 50-75th percentile in terms of price, in highly competitive regions, and not stocking products from your competitors. From these characteristics you can hone your message to focus on what likely customers care about (e.g., differentiation from competitors, getting a good deal, or stocking the best products). Or, if you sell to cultivators or growers, you can find all the largest growers in terms of square footage / number of plants in just recreational states on the West Coast.
Once you have a good understanding of who your target customers are, you can use the pre-set filters in CannaRadar to generate a list of high-potential qualified leads for your company.
CannaRadar by License Type (approx.)
CannaRadar Top 10 Brands by Store Coverage
1. Stiiizy
2. Raw Garden
3. BAREWOODS
4. Select
5. Smashed
6. Pure Vape
7. Flav
8. Heavy Hitters
9. Golden Leaf Scientifics
10. Kiva Confections
Contacting Your Leads
CannaRadar goes the final mile and provides you with the tools to get in touch with your focused list of qualified leads. To start, you can use business and owner emails and phone numbers to create campaigns and schedule meetings to discuss how your product can help meet the specific needs of the identified customer type. CannaRadar also offers alternative ways to reach out to businesses like links to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook profiles so that you can easily Direct Message future customers. Finally, you also get access to business websites for further research for for you to reach out through contact forms directly.
A great product or service only leads to a great business if you’re able to make customers aware of how it will help their company. CannaRadar makes this easier so that you can focus on delivering a great experience for your customers.
To download a free CannaRadar data sample or subscribe today, click here.
Are my prices too high or too low? Using zip code level data to beat the competition
While many cannabis businesses are using data for market research, few dispensaries in competitive markets analyze local data to understand how their business stacks up against their peers.
In this first installment of our public research blog, we break down the cutthroat market for marijuana flower in Los Angeles by investigating prices at the zip code level. This post will draw on Higher Data’s proprietary retail price data that aggregates real-time prices from dispensary menus across the United States and Canada.
How can dispensaries set better prices?
The average price of a gram of cannabis in California does little to inform how a dispensary manager should set prices. Customers shopping for cannabis near the popular Venice Boardwalk in Los Angeles will expect to pay higher prices than customers on the outskirts of town. To make more informed pricing decisions, managers need more granular local data that can show market conditions in their town or even their zip code. Similarly, this data can help growing businesses decide the most profitable areas to open new dispensary branches.
Our analysis shows how powerful local data can be using the example of Los Angeles County. To analyze how prices vary across the county, one type of product is selected: one gram of marijuana flower. Cannabis extracts and edibles as well as high end flower products like moon rocks and lower end products like trim and stems are excluded to create a consistent, unbiased price index. Higher Data’s retail price data covers 1,562 dispensary storefronts in Los Angeles county. Each dispensary is given equal weight by first calculating the mean price of one gram of flower in each store and then calculating the mean price for all dispensaries in each zip code.
Average flower prices, by zip code
The above map shows that the beach communities of Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice, and Long Beach all pay relatively high prices. Similarly, dispensaries Hollywood, Burbank, and Downtown have higher prices. The lowest prices for a gram of flower can be found in Southern Los Angeles and some zip codes in the northern hills. There is still price variation within these communities, which demonstrates the need to analyze smaller geographic units than even a county or community. The range of prices between zip codes is quite broad. Dispensaries in the most expensive zip codes are charging nearly double the price those in the least expensive zip codes.
What drives price differences across a county like Los Angeles?
Local demand certainly plays a factor, but so do other price drivers like competition and operation costs. A dispensary located in a neighborhood with several other dispensaries may have to charge lower prices to attract customers. To test this hypothesis, average prices of a zip code can be compared to the number of dispensaries operating in a zip code. As shown below, there appears to be some correlation between dispensary density and retail prices. For example, zip codes in southern Los Angeles that have lower average prices also have a greater number of dispensaries. Conversely, eastern zip codes with higher average prices have fewer dispensaries per zip code.
Average flower prices vs. dispensary density, by zip code
Higher Data’s advanced analytics can also produce a quantitative answer to this question by using algorithms that factor in the impact of new dispensaries in nearby zip codes to calculate the competitive effects of each additional dispensary in a given area.
Other sources of price variation can arise from other sources of competition, such as delivery services, and operating costs that are passed onto customers. Businesses on the coastal west side of LA can expect to pay about double what their peers in Southern Los Angeles pay in rent. Downtown rents are similarly high and rents decline starting in Northern LA with the lowest costs seen in the east in the San Gabriel Valley. Taking into account all of these factors can help companies make more strategic location decisions and allow managers to set better, more competitive prices.
Interested in learning how Higher Data can break down the competitive landscape in your market?
Contact us to learn more about how our comprehensive data can help your business make more informed decisions and out-compete your peers. You can reach us at team@higher-data.com or set up a free analytics consultation here.