8 ms·

The cannabis boom seems to have been predicated largely on the assumption that it would resemble the high-end wine market, with expensive vintages, "budtenders"

The cannabis boom seems to have been predicated largely on the assumption that it would resemble the high-end wine market, with expensive vintages, "budtenders", etc that can support lots of boutique farms and retailers. But it looks more like the future will resemble the tobacco industry, with slim profit margins and a handful of conglomerates controlling production. And in reality, for wine as well, LVMH owns many of the most famous upmarket brands and and most wine drinkers stick to the bottom-shelf industrially produced bulk stuff that wholesales for $1/litre.

yieldcrv 4y ago
> The cannabis boom seems to have been predicated largely on the assumption that it would resemble the high-end wine market, with expensive vintages, "budtenders", etc that can support lots of boutique farms and retailers. I don't feel like founders, employers, consumers or anybody standing nearby ever believed that. But founders had to convince investors.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
There are high-end weed products out there. High quality wax, concentrates, and edibles for discerning customers exists. Certain dispensaries also specialize in higher quality product. I enjoy many of these myself as legal weed in my area is still much cheaper than alcohol and I prefer the product. Wine has had a stable market for centuries with products aimed at many customer segments, high and low quality segments included. Weed is just beginning, and the biggest customer segment by aggregate demand will be the undiscerning customer. Thinking otherwise is silly IMO.
- asdff 4y ago
  >discerning I have serious gripes with the high end market in the dispensary. For example, Stiizy will sell you a gram of distillate in a cartridge for $60. It's the exact same product as the one being sold in that same dispensary for $20 from a brand with less instagram presence. Distillate is pretty much commoditized. Also the entire $60 1/8th market is absurd to me, it seemingly exists for people who assume price means quality because at the end of the day, its not significantly different than the stuff being sold for less than half as much, but it might come in a nice glass jar with a sexy lid instead of an opaque plastic bag. Then if you start growing yourself its like seeing the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, with how much excellent weed you can produce in a few months with little investment or effort beyond what you'd do for a tomato plant. It will honestly look better too being hand trimmed and cured versus trimmed by a trim bag facing whatever the commercial growers do to cure it into a tiny, dry rock hard nug (probably good for scaling the process but its ugly to me). I guess you can say this is true for just about any luxury product though. There are people that say wild turky or knob creek is a lot better than much more expensive whisky some people chase after.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Hah yeah these complaints are pretty similar to other luxury markets. I've always found Stiizy products to be more brand than actual substance. I'm also into coffee and roast my own beans and the same things apply to the coffee market. My home coffee roasts are similar quality to 3-4x more expensive bags of coffee at specialty roasters. I can even buy cups of coffee there which is still 2-3x more expensive than a cup of coffee I can brew at home with the specialty beans I bought already roasted. It's just how luxury works, it's some mix of quality, branding, and finding a customer segment willing to pay the markup to not do it themselves.
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    I am not sure what state you live in but $60 for an 1/8 is way above what one could expect to pay for "top shelf" bud here in Washington. But then again we currently have a "weed surplus" and it seems every store has a 30% sale off twice per week.
    - asdff 4y ago
      I am in Socal. Sure theres a wide range, something like is typical at just about every dispensary here but this is from just one dispensary: $73 3.5g testing at 22% https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/1176112 https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/1176... $20 3.5 testing at 32% https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/883497 https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/8834... MedMen is even worse with their top shelf prices, you probably won't find any $20 1/8th there and I keep a wide berth of those places myself.
  - har_ry 4y ago
    Massive fraud as well even from legit actors, stiizy for example is being sued for faking lab results https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2022/12/08/698377.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2022/12/08/698377... This brings questions up about contaminants for me Raw garden too has been sued in a class action suit over terpenes misrep. I agree be the wizard and make your own potions.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  High-end tobacco exists as well, and you can also pay hundreds for a Cohiba cigar or a carton of Chunghwa cigarettes, but for the vast majority of smokers out there Marlboro is about as fancy as it gets.
asdff 4y ago
The difference between pretty good weed and the best weed is irrelevent when you throw the bud into your grinder, unless you are buying moonrocks (kind of like battering fried chicken, the bud is dipped in high thc% oil then kief). It's not like a whisky where you get this whole tasting experience and can taste the wood of the barrel it sat in; to my tongue at least smoke is smoke unless its the terrible brick weed that I have not seen in 15 years. Even then with so much excess product being produced by growers, moonrocks would not be expensive to produce.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Smoke is smoke, but vapor is not vapor. You can taste a lot more when you stop burning the plant and I think that's where the industry needs to go if it wants to develop that way
  - asdff 4y ago
    There's not a great vaporizer product for dry herb unfortunately that doesn't cost hundreds, plus they are mostly "session style" vaporizers where you preheat an oven and are expected to vape it all or else a lot is wasted. There's the vapecap and copies that are more "on demand" like a normal pipe, where you use a butane torch to heat up the device each hit, but they don't work well for people with a higher tolerance and take quite a bit of technique from what I've read. With my experience with a pax too, these things are picky about being perfectly clean or the taste will change, the airflow will be poor, and the switch for it will be gunked to the point the device can't even turn on if its not stored standing straight up at all times. I was also disappointed with reddit's favorite the mflb which has a few inherent flaws (batteries degrade fast and its just not nearly as strong as smoking for whatever reason). It seems like a market ripe for disruption to be honest, the undisputed king among non portable vaporizers at least is still the volcano vaporizer which came out over 25 years ago. I think that's why distillate cartridges are so popular, because they avoid all these issues dry herb vapes seem unable to work around. They don't smell very much at all compared to a dry herb vape, they are cheap, they have no maintenance issues or learning curve, and they are on and off with a click of a button.
extr 4y ago
Great observation. I think people without a ton of experience with weed fail to appreciate just how different it is compared to alcohol. Back when weed was illegal I used to have a joke I would make with dealers. I would ask them what the strain of the weed I was buying, and usually they would tell me it was some Sour Diesel Purple Hurple Haze Hybrid or whatever (they were making it up on the spot most of the time, I'm sure). And I would then ask "Will it get me high?" and everyone would laugh. The joke being that these days it's all the same stuff. It's either complete shit weed (which is rare) or high potency modern bud that is all basically interchangeable. I personally have never even been able to detect a real difference between sativa and indica, let alone individual strains. Does some of it taste kind of different...sure? But smoking something or even vaping it is just fundamentally a different experience. It's not food, it's clearly a drug. It's in your mouth for like a second max. Tolerance works differently too, unless you are a daily, habitual user you're not sitting there puffing on a 90% THC weed pen for hours. One puff and you're fucked up. But you can have a glass or two of wine and feel mostly normal, even for someone who doesn't drink often. You can sip on it. So IMO all of this had led me to the same conclusion as you. The market is headed for complete commoditization in no time. I have a friend who works for Altria and she was saying even 10 years ago they were planning for complete legalization and to dominate the market once it happened. The growing fields were already purchased back then.
- draw_down 4y ago
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- shlant 4y ago
  > I personally have never even been able to detect a real difference between sativa and indica, let alone individual strains This is interesting to hear because I have the opposite experience. I used to have really bad anxiety and weed was (and still can be) a trigger for it. I took a few years off weed and only starting trying it again since legalization in Canada (and now Thailand). I have definitely noticed that I feel best on something that is under 20% THC, with at least 1% CBD. I also am doing more experimenting with different terpenes and am pretty sure that also has an effect on how it makes me feel - limonene for example seems to be the best for getting the "euphoric" high. This makes sense as there is some research to indicate that terpenes from other plants (such as lavender) can have a positive impact on anxiety. In terms of indica vs sativa however, I do think the distinction is largely overblown (from what I have read) and those are usually just proxies for the cannabinoid ratios (with sativa usually being higher THC etc and indica higher CBD etc.) So from my experience and from what we have seen with coffee and beer I can agree that we will see commercialization first (like the Starbucks and Molson/Coors era) but I think that as weed becomes more normalized and more people get a feel for the differences in strains, preparations etc. we will see a shift back towards more "craft"/small farm interests like we have seen with beer and coffee in the last few years.
ehnto 4y ago
That's what the venture capital involved seemed to expect anyway. There was a VC bubble for the industry, and some really crazy brands were showing up. Brands where you could buy your weed along side an order for a $15,000 dollar leather horse saddle, golden glassware, crystal ash trays or other expensive trinkets. Farm tours and taste testings emulated the wine industry to a tee. They were 100% banking on a premium clientelle. Does such a clientelle actually exist in enough quantity to support that industry though I wonder? Surely there was market research showing it might?
- automatic6131 4y ago
  >Surely there was market research showing it might? Yeah of course, it was done along side the crypto due-diligence
loldk 4y ago
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yieldcrv 4y ago

> The cannabis boom seems to have been predicated largely on the assumption that it would resemble the high-end wine market, with expensive vintages, "budtenders", etc that can support lots of boutique farms and retailers. I don't feel like founders, employers, consumers or anybody standing nearby ever believed that. But founders had to convince investors.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

There are high-end weed products out there. High quality wax, concentrates, and edibles for discerning customers exists. Certain dispensaries also specialize in higher quality product. I enjoy many of these myself as legal weed in my area is still much cheaper than alcohol and I prefer the product. Wine has had a stable market for centuries with products aimed at many customer segments, high and low quality segments included. Weed is just beginning, and the biggest customer segment by aggregate demand will be the undiscerning customer. Thinking otherwise is silly IMO.

asdff 4y ago
>discerning I have serious gripes with the high end market in the dispensary. For example, Stiizy will sell you a gram of distillate in a cartridge for $60. It's the exact same product as the one being sold in that same dispensary for $20 from a brand with less instagram presence. Distillate is pretty much commoditized. Also the entire $60 1/8th market is absurd to me, it seemingly exists for people who assume price means quality because at the end of the day, its not significantly different than the stuff being sold for less than half as much, but it might come in a nice glass jar with a sexy lid instead of an opaque plastic bag. Then if you start growing yourself its like seeing the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, with how much excellent weed you can produce in a few months with little investment or effort beyond what you'd do for a tomato plant. It will honestly look better too being hand trimmed and cured versus trimmed by a trim bag facing whatever the commercial growers do to cure it into a tiny, dry rock hard nug (probably good for scaling the process but its ugly to me). I guess you can say this is true for just about any luxury product though. There are people that say wild turky or knob creek is a lot better than much more expensive whisky some people chase after.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Hah yeah these complaints are pretty similar to other luxury markets. I've always found Stiizy products to be more brand than actual substance. I'm also into coffee and roast my own beans and the same things apply to the coffee market. My home coffee roasts are similar quality to 3-4x more expensive bags of coffee at specialty roasters. I can even buy cups of coffee there which is still 2-3x more expensive than a cup of coffee I can brew at home with the specialty beans I bought already roasted. It's just how luxury works, it's some mix of quality, branding, and finding a customer segment willing to pay the markup to not do it themselves.
- galleywest200 4y ago
  I am not sure what state you live in but $60 for an 1/8 is way above what one could expect to pay for "top shelf" bud here in Washington. But then again we currently have a "weed surplus" and it seems every store has a 30% sale off twice per week.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I am in Socal. Sure theres a wide range, something like is typical at just about every dispensary here but this is from just one dispensary: $73 3.5g testing at 22% https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/1176112 https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/1176... $20 3.5 testing at 32% https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/883497 https://embed.getmeadow.com/organizations/1328/products/8834... MedMen is even worse with their top shelf prices, you probably won't find any $20 1/8th there and I keep a wide berth of those places myself.
- har_ry 4y ago
  Massive fraud as well even from legit actors, stiizy for example is being sued for faking lab results https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2022/12/08/698377.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2022/12/08/698377... This brings questions up about contaminants for me Raw garden too has been sued in a class action suit over terpenes misrep. I agree be the wizard and make your own potions.
rippercushions 4y ago
High-end tobacco exists as well, and you can also pay hundreds for a Cohiba cigar or a carton of Chunghwa cigarettes, but for the vast majority of smokers out there Marlboro is about as fancy as it gets.

asdff 4y ago

The difference between pretty good weed and the best weed is irrelevent when you throw the bud into your grinder, unless you are buying moonrocks (kind of like battering fried chicken, the bud is dipped in high thc% oil then kief). It's not like a whisky where you get this whole tasting experience and can taste the wood of the barrel it sat in; to my tongue at least smoke is smoke unless its the terrible brick weed that I have not seen in 15 years. Even then with so much excess product being produced by growers, moonrocks would not be expensive to produce.

malermeister 4y ago
Smoke is smoke, but vapor is not vapor. You can taste a lot more when you stop burning the plant and I think that's where the industry needs to go if it wants to develop that way
- asdff 4y ago
  There's not a great vaporizer product for dry herb unfortunately that doesn't cost hundreds, plus they are mostly "session style" vaporizers where you preheat an oven and are expected to vape it all or else a lot is wasted. There's the vapecap and copies that are more "on demand" like a normal pipe, where you use a butane torch to heat up the device each hit, but they don't work well for people with a higher tolerance and take quite a bit of technique from what I've read. With my experience with a pax too, these things are picky about being perfectly clean or the taste will change, the airflow will be poor, and the switch for it will be gunked to the point the device can't even turn on if its not stored standing straight up at all times. I was also disappointed with reddit's favorite the mflb which has a few inherent flaws (batteries degrade fast and its just not nearly as strong as smoking for whatever reason). It seems like a market ripe for disruption to be honest, the undisputed king among non portable vaporizers at least is still the volcano vaporizer which came out over 25 years ago. I think that's why distillate cartridges are so popular, because they avoid all these issues dry herb vapes seem unable to work around. They don't smell very much at all compared to a dry herb vape, they are cheap, they have no maintenance issues or learning curve, and they are on and off with a click of a button.

extr 4y ago

Great observation. I think people without a ton of experience with weed fail to appreciate just how different it is compared to alcohol. Back when weed was illegal I used to have a joke I would make with dealers. I would ask them what the strain of the weed I was buying, and usually they would tell me it was some Sour Diesel Purple Hurple Haze Hybrid or whatever (they were making it up on the spot most of the time, I'm sure). And I would then ask "Will it get me high?" and everyone would laugh. The joke being that these days it's all the same stuff. It's either complete shit weed (which is rare) or high potency modern bud that is all basically interchangeable. I personally have never even been able to detect a real difference between sativa and indica, let alone individual strains. Does some of it taste kind of different...sure? But smoking something or even vaping it is just fundamentally a different experience. It's not food, it's clearly a drug. It's in your mouth for like a second max. Tolerance works differently too, unless you are a daily, habitual user you're not sitting there puffing on a 90% THC weed pen for hours. One puff and you're fucked up. But you can have a glass or two of wine and feel mostly normal, even for someone who doesn't drink often. You can sip on it. So IMO all of this had led me to the same conclusion as you. The market is headed for complete commoditization in no time. I have a friend who works for Altria and she was saying even 10 years ago they were planning for complete legalization and to dominate the market once it happened. The growing fields were already purchased back then.

draw_down 4y ago
[dead]
shlant 4y ago
> I personally have never even been able to detect a real difference between sativa and indica, let alone individual strains This is interesting to hear because I have the opposite experience. I used to have really bad anxiety and weed was (and still can be) a trigger for it. I took a few years off weed and only starting trying it again since legalization in Canada (and now Thailand). I have definitely noticed that I feel best on something that is under 20% THC, with at least 1% CBD. I also am doing more experimenting with different terpenes and am pretty sure that also has an effect on how it makes me feel - limonene for example seems to be the best for getting the "euphoric" high. This makes sense as there is some research to indicate that terpenes from other plants (such as lavender) can have a positive impact on anxiety. In terms of indica vs sativa however, I do think the distinction is largely overblown (from what I have read) and those are usually just proxies for the cannabinoid ratios (with sativa usually being higher THC etc and indica higher CBD etc.) So from my experience and from what we have seen with coffee and beer I can agree that we will see commercialization first (like the Starbucks and Molson/Coors era) but I think that as weed becomes more normalized and more people get a feel for the differences in strains, preparations etc. we will see a shift back towards more "craft"/small farm interests like we have seen with beer and coffee in the last few years.

ehnto 4y ago

That's what the venture capital involved seemed to expect anyway. There was a VC bubble for the industry, and some really crazy brands were showing up. Brands where you could buy your weed along side an order for a $15,000 dollar leather horse saddle, golden glassware, crystal ash trays or other expensive trinkets. Farm tours and taste testings emulated the wine industry to a tee. They were 100% banking on a premium clientelle. Does such a clientelle actually exist in enough quantity to support that industry though I wonder? Surely there was market research showing it might?

automatic6131 4y ago
>Surely there was market research showing it might? Yeah of course, it was done along side the crypto due-diligence

loldk 4y ago

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