The ongoing battle between legal and illegal cannabis sales in Ontario

The CCSI was assessed at C$5.09 per gram this week, down from last week’s C$5.14 per gram. This week’s price equates to US$1,807 per pound at the current exchange rate.

Each week, Business of Cannabis delivers a series of insights from our partners at Cannabis Benchmark s®.

This week we continue to examine data published in the Ontario Cannabis Store’s (OCS) quarterly Cannabis Insights report, which covers the period from October through December 2021. This report focuses on the proportion of sales dedicated to cannabis 1.0 and 2.0 products in Ontario. As a reminder, cannabis 1.0 refers to the legalization of combustible cannabis flower, cannabis oils, and cannabis seeds in October 2018. A year later cannabis 2.0 began, making available to consumers derivative products such as vapes, edibles, beverages, concentrates, and topicals. The data aggregated in today’s CCSI report reviews a series of OCS quarterly reports to compile a complete view of trends following the introduction of cannabis 2.0 products.

Now that we have over two years of data, we can see cannabis 2.0 products starting to make up a notable share of sales. Total cannabis sales in Ontario have been accelerating with the rapid build-out of brick-and-mortar stores. From December 2020 to December 2021, cannabis 2.0 product sales have jumped from making up 26% of total sales to over 30%.

Diving deeper into the cannabis sales mix, we see that most consumers prefer the traditional smokeable or inhalable products (dry flower or vapes, respectively), with all other derivative products making up very small proportions of total sales. That said, modest increases in spending on edibles and concentrates can be seen in the chart below, which compares the sales mix from the end of 2020 and 2021.

Source: Canada Cannabis Spot Index , Cannabis Benchmarks

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