Earlier this week, we looked at the dramatic shifts in the UK medical cannabis flower market over the last three years.
According to the latest and most detailed sales data ever published in the UK market, Adven’s EMT-2 T20 (Cairo strain) accounted for roughly one-third of all dispensed flower across the cleaned data set, selling approximately 6.1 tonnes, peaking in 2023 at over 3.3 tonnes alone.
In 2024, Curaleaf’s Lavender Cake LCE T20, which was barely registering in 2023 with just 4 kilograms, then exploded to more than 3.5 tonnes in 2024.
It’s worth digging deeper into the implications of these statistics and exploring how the market has rapidly consolidated into a ‘winner-takes-most’ framework.
Within this dynamic, we see the few most popular strains inhabit a huge proportion of the national prescribing volumes, while the rest of the market fragments into smaller niches.
Despite the hundreds of available flower products available for patients, the data shows that the top five products between 2022-2025 make up around 60% of total volume.
In 2022, EMT-2 T20 accounted for 55% of total flower volume, rising to 64% in 2023, with second most popular strains represented just 12% and 7% respectively.
Using total matched grams across 2022–2025:
Rank | Product | Total Volume (g) | Share of Matched Market |
1 | Adven EMT-2 T20 (Cairo) | 6,123,451 g | 32.5% |
2 | Curaleaf LCE T20 (Lavender Cake) | 3,746,468 g | 19.9% |
3 | Adven EMT-1 T20 | ~1,050,000 g (approx.) | ~5.5% |
4 | 4C Labs T24 (Cold Creek Kush) | ~900,000 g | ~4.8% |
5 | BC Green CAP T25 | ~800,000 g | ~4.2% |
By 2024, EMT-2 T20 had collapsed to just 12%, while Lavender Cake LCE-T20 surged to 36%. Only four other strains had above 5% of the total volume.
While the 2o25 data remains minimal, only covering January and February, with a heavy caveat of reporting delays inherent in the UK market, Lavender Cake appears to remain dominant, while Releaf’s T7:C10 balanced strain unexpectedly took the second spot.
Despite being entirely private, the flower market in the UK is by no means a typical consumer market, and continues to be shaped by a number of key dynamics it’s important to understand.
While patients can pick their strains once they reach the clinic (a contentious issue for many prescribers), importers effectively control what is available, meaning that an oursized significance is placed on the consistency of availability, and the individual relationships between suppliers, importers, and clinics.
Portugal and Canada remain key pillars of UK supply
The UK’s private medical cannabis flower market is overwhelmingly import-driven; this ‘winner takes all’ dynamic persists when it comes the the countries of origin and individual importers.
In 2024, Portugal alone accounts for around 58% of flower volume, with Canada contributing a further 25%, according to the listed countries of origin from our matched data.
While not all high-volume UK strains are grown in Portugal, a substantial proportion are processed, packaged, or EU-GMP-certified there. This includes Canadian biomass imported for EU-GMP finishing, Portuguese-grown cultivars, and several strains redistributed through Portuguese exporters.
Canada remains the single most important external supplier of medical cannabis to the UK, with products from Canada as their listed origin accounting for a disproportionately large share.
This is especially true for higher-THC strains. As detailed in our previous analysis piece, UK patients have swung dramatically towards higher THC products in recent years.
High-performing strains such as Gorilla Glue #4 variants, Black Jelly (Pedanios BLY), and several Tilray and Northern Green products are all Canadian in origin.
Domestic UK production only makes up around 4% of matched volumes in the cleaned data.
At the importer level, two players dominate: Curaleaf Laboratories handled more than half of all matched flower volume in 2024 (~54%), with IPS Pharma taking a further ~19.5%.
Together, these two companies control more than 70% of the matched supply, once again demonstrating the incredibly limited number of channels patients in Europe’s second-largest medical cannabis market are reliant on.
