New California Cannabis Dashboards Shed Light on Harvest Trends, Retail Prices, Sales

Until now, California cannabis industry stakeholders have relied on third-party data for trends related to harvests, retail prices and monthly sales, but state regulators have decided to change the game.

The California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) launched a set of interactive data dashboards for the public on Feb. 21, allowing users to retrieve aggregated licensing data, view supply chain data, and dive into monthly and yearly sales and harvest data.

DCC Chief Information Officer Sean O’Connor and Policy Analyst Devin Gray, with the department’s Policy and Research Division, explained the dashboards to a small group of cannabis industry reporters Feb. 20.

O’Connor described the motivation behind launching the dashboards this way: “Being transparent and trying to provide these sort of tools to stakeholders, put them on our website, share the mountains of data that we are sitting on in a useful, appropriate manner that protects folks’ privacy, but also allows individuals who are interested in this policy arena to take a look at things like price per unit, take a look at things of different trends in sales.”

And the dashboards are comprehensive. For example, under the harvest report, users can search by county, license category and facility type, including by month, quarter or year. The report includes plant counts, waste weight, moisture loss, wet weight, package weight and package count, and provides a glossary page to define all the terms.

This is an invaluable tool for industry participants regarding their business and scalability plans in a market that has faced recent struggles, as well as for potential entrepreneurs considering their entrances into the space.

“Devin and I have been steeped in this for months, and we’ll be looking at it, and it's like peeling back an onion,” O’Connor said. “While we really think we’ve uncovered every area of interest that this could be used for, ... somebody internally will be like, 'Well, it would be useful to know how an analysis of different harvest metrics at one point in the year to see if that maybe has an impact on price per unit or volume of things down towards the other end of it.'”

For instance, while the DCC previously provided a licensing database—one that showed a mass exit of cultivation permits during the past two years, from roughly 8,500 active cultivation licenses in the beginning for 2022 to fewer than 5,500 active cultivation licenses today—there was speculation about what this meant for statewide supply. Were growers simply consolidating their license types but still growing the same number of plants? Were canopy capacities not at full scale? Was the market becoming less saturated? Were prices rebounding?

The new dashboards reveal that California’s plant counts in harvest batches surged from 25.2 million in 2020 to 40.6 million in 2021, and then decreased to 34 million 2022. Meanwhile, plant counts for the first half of 2023 were nearly identical to the first half of 2022. However, the packaged weight created directly from these harvests was down 38%, from 11.5 million pounds in the first half of 2022 to 7 million pounds in the first half of 2023.

With the harvest report relying on data from track-and-trace provider Metrc, data for the latter half of 2023 has yet to be published on the dashboard.

“We have multiple views on this harvest report, kind of breaking down those stats in some different ways, just different ways to visualize the data,” Gray said. “I think one of the most interesting is our county level harvest report. This is one of my favorite views.”

Outside the harvest report, the dashboard includes extensive metrics on sales and prices per unit.

California’s average retail price for an eighth ounce of flower, for example, was trending upward through the majority of 2020—peaking at $35.23 in the third quarter—before the price for that unit began to fall, decreasing more than 32% to $23.80 per eighth in the second quarter of 2023 (roughly $6.70 per gram).

Similarly, the average retail price for a half-ounce package of flower decreased nearly 37% from $82.65 in the first quarter of 2020 to $52.18 in the second quarter of 2023.

The dashboards also offer these metrics for other item categories, from vape cartridges to edibles, prerolls, extracts and other concentrates, as well as monthly sales for all product categories.

In addition, the dashboards provide a total statewide sales summary report filterable by customer types and product groups for years, quarters and months. In the first half of 2023, for example, adult-use customers spent nearly $2.3 billion at licensed dispensaries, while medical cannabis patients spent $143.3 million.

These reports come directly from cannabis sales that California retailers enter into the track-and-trace system, Gray said.

Previously, only adult-use sales figures were available through the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) website on a quarterly basis, with amended returns each quarter continuously altering figures from previous months.

With CDTFA basing its numbers on tax returns, total sales figures between that government agency and the DCC’s dashboards will vary slightly, O’Connor said. One difference is that the DCC doesn’t plan on amending sales data from previous reporting periods once that data is posted on the dashboards, he said. If the department does amend previously released data, it’ll be transparent in doing so, he said.

“We went through and validated [the data] at an extremely detailed level to make sure that we had the highest degree of confidence in what we were displaying out there,” O’Connor said. “Also, [we] vetted it with other folks internally as well as our data partners at Metrc.”

The underlying intent of launching the dashboards is to provide a transparent tool for industry stakeholders, from licensees to researchers, reporters and anyone interested in the cannabis industry, O’Connor and Gray said.

“We really think that it’s incumbent upon us to be sharing this sort of data,” O’Connor said. “We don’t need to be keeping it internally. It has a lot of value out there … for folks who are interested in the policy arena, for even licensees themselves, to see what metrics, like average price per units, are and things of that nature to inform their business decisions.”