Cannacurio #112: Dispensary and Retailer Q1 2025 Quarterly Round-Up

Key Findings

• 337 new store licenses were issued in Q1 2025, way down from 566 (-40%) in Q1 2024
• 27 states issued new store licenses in the quarter
• There are 13,184 total active licenses at 12,539 stores

Trends

The industry competes with substitutes and complements as it tries to survive. Some companies are pivoting to less regulated offerings like hemp, while others are looking for solutions to mitigate the oversupply:

• Hemp – Curaleaf took one of their Florida dispensaries and configure it to sell hemp products joining the other 11,148 hemp retailers already licensed in the Sunshine State.  
• Illicit Market – Connecticut just announced a $4.93 million judgement against a smoke shop for selling cannabis. These headlines are common in Connecticut
• Moratorium - Michigan’s largest lobbying organization for the state’s MJ industry is asking lawmakers to stop issuing new cannabis business licenses. Oregon and Oklahoma have been under moratoria for years.

Here’s a look at the top ten states that issued new licenses in the first quarter. New York accounted for the majority of these licenses.

In looking back over the last 12 months, the average number of new store licenses has been about 158. The outlier months can be attributed to one or two states dropping a large number of new licenses. The brackets show the impact and jurisdictions of these actions.

Conclusion

The number of stores and facilities has continued to increase as shown in the graph below:

The lines are drawing together ever so slightly as more states merge adult and medical licenses. Currently there are 1.05 licenses per facility. A year ago that figure was 1.063. As we look ahead, most industry watchers turn to Minnesota which has received thousands of applications for licenses in the state. 854 of them are for stores.

Author

Ed Keating is a co-founder of Cannabiz Media and oversees the company’s data research and government relations efforts. He has spent his career working with and advising information companies in the compliance space. Ed has managed product, marketing, and sales while overseeing complex multi-jurisdictional product lines in the securities, corporate, UCC, safety, environmental, and human resource markets.  

‍Cannacurio is a column from Cannabiz Media featuring insights from the most comprehensive license data platform. Catch up on Cannacurio posts and podcasts for the latest updates and intel.