Current Data

U.S. Cannabis Spot Index down 0.4% to $1,391 per pound.

The simple average (non-volume weighted) price decreased $30 to $1,576 per pound, with 68% of transactions (one standard deviation) in the $929 to $2,224 per pound range. The average reported deal size was nominally unchanged at 2.1 pounds. In grams, the Spot price was $3.07 and the simple average price was $3.48.

The chart below shows the course of the Cannabis Benchmarks® U.S. Spot Index from its inception in April 2015 through the end of 2019.

The U.S. Spot Index declined by 0.4% this week to settle at $1,391 per pound. The significant Q4 price decline typically observed in prior years did not come to fruition in 2019. However, since around mid-November the national composite price has displayed a modest downward trend. Wholesale prices also trended downward a bit from the final week of 2018 through the end of January 2019, a period in which they declined by by 1.5%, from $1,175 to $1,157 per pound. Product from a prior year’s fall harvest continuing to come to market, along with generally depressed sales in the wake of the end-of-year holiday season, traditionally apply downward pressure to wholesale cannabis prices to open any given year. Based on early data from the opening weeks of 2020, it appears that such trends are holding in California, Colorado, and Oregon. 

As we noted last week, though, the new and expanding adult-use markets of Massachusetts, Michigan, and Illinois will influence national wholesale rates in a manner that they have not in prior years. Still, at the moment those markets are relatively small in terms of the volume of product being moved, despite posting some impressive gross sales figures. For example, Massachusetts adult-use retailers racked up over $445 million in sales in 2019, almost a third of Colorado’s combined adult-use and medical retail revenue in 2018. However, Massachusetts growers harvested less than a tenth of the number of plants in 2019 that Colorado cultivators did in 2018, emphasizing the significantly higher prices in the East Coast’s only regulated adult-use market.

Upward pressure on the national price for recreational product came from the new markets of Michigan and Illinois, where adult-use flower prices were assessed at $3,499 and $3,036 per pound, respectively. Additionally, the rate for adult-use product in Massachusetts was observed to settle at $3,355 per pound this week. However, downturns in the recreational sectors of the markets of California and Colorado, as well as in Oregon, outweighed the higher prices in the newer, smaller markets and resulted in the small decrease in the national rate.