The cannabis industry spent years predicting flower’s decline. Grown Rogue CEO and co-founder Obie Strickler argues that the prediction said more about industry executives than it did about consumers.
When we started Grown Rogue more than a decade ago, I kept hearing about how new form factors were going to make flower extinct. Edibles, concentrates, vapes, and capsules were all going to replace flower as the primary way people consumed cannabis.
That prediction came mostly from new professionals entering the industry, bringing experience in consumer packaged goods, real estate development, finance, and investing. They often believed a new, improved consumer was going to take over the market. Think affluent newcomers with disposable income who had never rolled a joint in their lives. Many of these “experts” were not regular cannabis consumers, and they completely missed the reality of who was actually buying.
I saw this play out in real time. In 2017, I took a family member to a dispensary for the first time. She was exactly the new consumer everyone was hunting for: disposable income, no prior history with cannabis, and curious about the whole thing. She spent the visit talking about how amazing the lamp near the entrance was while I was in the back inspecting the quality of the flower on the shelves.
When we left, I asked her what her preferred form factor was. Vapes, she said. Great, I said. How many vapes do you go through in a month? She laughed. Oh, maybe one or two a year.
That was the aha moment. Here was the consumer so many in the industry had bet on, and she was buying one or two vapes a year. The volume assumptions built around that new consumer were simply wrong. The people buying flower week in and week out, …
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Author: Obie Strickler / High Times
