With cannabis and cannabis-derived products gaining popularity and acceptance in Canada, it makes sense that Canadians would want to gift them to the canna-connoisseur and canna-curious alike. What types of products were they gifting? Recently released market information from Statistics Canada can tell us.
Novelty Gifts
While topicals is the category with the fewest units sold, it often shows the largest increase in sales. In December 2020, Canadians bought 86% more topicals than the month before. With December being the season of giving, this could show that while customers are somewhat apprehensive about the new product format, they are also curious about it.
Extracts experienced the same trend. While sales of this category didn’t see as dramatic an uptick, total units sold increased 24%.
Gifting novelty items or even purchasing them with money received over the holidays means that topicals are still a novelty, but quality customer education could help bring them into the regular rotation.
Stocking Stuffers
The holiday season is typically associated with sweet treats, so it’s no surprise that stocking-stuffer-sized edibles were popular. In December, 43.9% more edibles were purchased than the month before, bringing total units sold from over 1.5 million to 2.2 million.
As usual, dried cannabis remains the most popular format among Canadians, the category growing 15% over December, a higher increase than it’s seen in months.
Whether gift-giving or not, Canadians purchased over 10.7 million packaged units of cannabis in December, 21.7% more than the month before. With Cannabis 2.0 products showing a strong increase, customers are showing that they are interested in new products, but want to dip their toes in before committing.
Packaged Units Sold December 2020
Total: 10,719,699
Dried Cannabis: 6,925,810
Edible Cannabis: 2,219,885
Cannabis Extracts: 1,556,731
Cannabis Topicals: 17,273
Seeds: 2,589
Plants: 6