Cannabiz Media Blog

Cannabiz Media’s Chief Data Officer, Ed Keating, does a recap of the 2023 Licensing Leaderboards and shows you what we've seen in looking back at all the licenses that were issued.

2023 was a unique year for cannabis licensing. The industry contraction continued with license counts dropping, fewer new licenses being issued, and Oklahoma’s moratorium finally taking effect. In this post, we compare key figures of 2023 with past years.

In the last of our 2023 license recaps, we turn to manufacturing, the least volatile of the three we cover. At the end of 2023, there were 744 new manufacturing licenses issued in 2023, and as we see with other activities, most new licenses were issued by a handful of states.

Following up on our recent review of dispensaries and retailers, we now delve into cultivation licenses. These “census” snapshots are derived from our Cannabiz Business Intelligence platform where we track new license issuance and where the balance of power is from market to market. Over the last ten years, customers have used this information for go-to-market strategies, competitive assessments, and TAM analyses.

If your sending volumes are low (under 5,000 in a day) then these new standards won’t apply to you. However these are considered best practices, so it is recommended that any commercial email sender adopts these new standards regardless of volume.

Now that 2023 has wrapped up we want to share our annual license round-up of which states issued the most dispensary/retailer licenses as well as trends that affect various parts of the value chain. In 2023 1,695 new dispensary and retailer licenses were issued and 4 states accounted for 60% of these licenses. This is well down from 2,750 in 2022 and 2,602 in 2021.

Cannabiz Media spoke with Cannabis Marketing Association CEO Lisa Buffo to learn how CMA leverages the email marketing tool within the Cannabis Market Intelligence Platform to promote its events.

We are now two weeks into the beginning of 2024, and incorporating strategic marketing initiatives is vital, so we put together a list of 5 five strategies to drive revenue in the initial months of the year.

On this Cannacurio episode, Ed and Lou Rinaldi, a cannabis patient advocate, discuss how he got his start in this very public advocacy role, the truth about cannabis testing and the expose that blew the lid off of testing lab standards, the state of movement in Connecticut, and so much more!

Organized labor is gaining traction within the cannabis space as some prominent union-friendly states also have high-value cannabis markets. We researched state and federal filings and press releases to compile the information on the 828 facilities that have either a union in place or a labor peace agreement.

Cannabiz Media won The Emjays - International Cannabis Award for Market Research/Data Firm of the Year! This prestigious honor was awarded during The Emjay's inaugural celebration. The award ceremony, held on November 30th at the iconic Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, acknowledged Cannabiz Media's outstanding contribution to market research and data solutions in the cannabis industry.

On this Cannacurio episode, Ed and Jacques Santucci of Opus Consulting discuss his years of leadership experience that eventually led him into the cannabis space, his success in working with Indigenous American tribes, the current state of the market, and what trends we should be looking out for, and so much more!