The Cannabis Industry Has Been Chasing the Wrong Number

I've been in the cannabis industry for more than 20 years, and I've watched it change in just about every way imaginable. Some of those changes have been incredible. Cannabis went from something sold almost entirely underground to a regulated industry with sophisticated cultivation, manufacturing, testing, branding and retail.

But somewhere along the way, I think we made a mistake. We started confusing potency with quality, and I think that mistake has shaped the cannabis industry more than most people realize.

Before THC percentage became everything

There was a time when nobody asked what percentage a bag of weed tested at. You opened the bag. You looked at it. You smelled it. You wanted to know where it came from and what strain it was. Ultimately, you smoked it and decided whether you liked it.

That was how we judged quality. Some weed smelled incredible. Some tasted amazing. Some had an effect that was social and uplifting. Some made you want to take a nap. There were a lot of different ways for cannabis to be "good."

Then testing became standard and suddenly there was a number on the package: 18% THC, 24% THC, 30% THC.

For a consumer who doesn't know much about cannabis chemistry or everything that contributes to the experience, that number provides an incredibly easy way to compare two products. If one is 20% THC and another is 30%, which one is better? Thirty, obviously.

Except it's not obvious at all.

We gave consumers a number, so they started shopping by the number

I've thought about this for years. Once THC percentage became a prominent part of compliant cannabis packaging and retail, I had a feeling it was going to fundamentally change the market.

Most consumers aren't cannabis experts. They don't understand every cannabinoid, terpene or variable that affects how a particular product is going to make them feel. So when the industry gave them one simple number they could understand, naturally they started using it. Higher THC became associated with better weed.

That affected what consumers bought. Retailers responded to what consumers bought, and growers responded to what retailers wanted. Eventually, the entire market had an incentive to chase potency. I don't think that necessarily made cannabis better.

Exhibit A: Zkittlez

People love Zkittlez. It smells amazing, tastes like it smells and is an absolute pleasure to smoke. And I wasn't alone in thinking that. Zkittlez became one of the most celebrated strains of its era, winning major competitions along the way. For a while, it was some of the most desirable weed around.

But in my experience, Zkittlez was never particularly impressive on a THC test. I remember seeing batches struggle to get much beyond the mid-teens. On the traditional market, where there wasn't a THC percentage printed on the bag, great Zkittlez could command top-of-market prices. People judged it by the product itself.

Once flower moved into compliant retail and THC percentage was staring at you from the label, lower-testing strains became much harder to explain. You could have beautiful flower with incredible flavor and a great effect sitting next to something testing close to 30%. A consumer looks at 15% versus 30%, and without knowing anything else, the 30% product appears twice as good.

But cannabis doesn't work that way.

Blind taste tests

For many years I was friends with the editor-in-chief of High Times at the time, and I had the opportunity to judge a number of Cannabis Cups. He once shared an observation with me that has stuck with me ever since. Across the competitions he had overseen, the flower judges seemed to prefer most often wasn't the highest-testing flower. In his experience, the sweet spot was often somewhere around 18–24% THC.

That lined up with my own experience. When you're judging cannabis without simply choosing the biggest number on a label, you start paying attention to everything else. Flavor mattered. Aroma mattered. The character of the high mattered. There seemed to be a middle range where cannabis could deliver a strong effect while still preserving the things that made the experience enjoyable in the first place.

More wasn't automatically better. That shouldn't be surprising, but somehow the industry started behaving like it was.

Most people aren't drinking to get drunk

Think about the way most people approach alcohol. When someone orders a glass of wine, they aren't choosing between two bottles based on which one has the highest alcohol percentage. That's not how we typically define a better wine.

More importantly, a lot of people aren't drinking with the goal of getting drunk in the first place. They want a beer after work, a glass of wine with dinner or a cocktail when they're out with friends. They want to feel a little different. A little more relaxed. Maybe a little more social. But they still want to have a conversation, enjoy dinner, get home and continue with their lives.

In other words, the desired effect is often somewhere between feeling nothing and being intoxicated.

I think the same opportunity exists with cannabis. There are plenty of people who might enjoy feeling a little more relaxed or experiencing a slight shift in mood, but have absolutely no interest in getting stoned out of their minds.

For years, we've built products largely around the people who already consume cannabis. We've competed on potency because potency matters to many of those customers. But the person who doesn't want a 30% joint or a 10mg edible doesn't necessarily dislike cannabis. They may just dislike the amount of cannabis we've been offering them.

And if that's true, there's an entire group of potential consumers we've barely been designing products for.

Cannabis has an echo chamber problem

This is where I think our industry has a blind spot. A lot of people who work in cannabis really like cannabis. That's not exactly shocking. They're surrounded by the product, they understand it, they have access to it, and many have developed significant tolerance over years of consumption.

So when you show someone like that a product with a very small amount of THC, the reaction is often, "What's the point? That isn't going to get me high." I've heard some version of that countless times.

But there's an assumption hidden inside that question: the point of consuming cannabis is to get high.

For plenty of cannabis consumers, that may be true. But what about everyone else?

Maybe we've been designing cannabis for cannabis people

The cannabis industry has gotten incredibly good at serving people who already consume cannabis. I'm not sure we've spent nearly enough time thinking about the people who don't.

The person who tried an edible once and hated how they felt. The person who smoked weed in college but stopped because they got a real job. The person who would like something to help them relax at the end of the day but still wants to cook dinner, have a conversation or go out with friends. The person who is curious about cannabis but is intimidated by the potency of today's products.

Those people rarely show up in conversations about what cannabis consumers want because many of them aren't cannabis consumers. And that may be exactly the point.

The next cannabis opportunity might be about less

For most of the industry's history, cannabis innovation has moved in one direction: more. Higher THC, stronger concentrates, bigger edible doses. I believe one of the biggest opportunities ahead of us may come from going the other direction.

What happens when cannabis products are designed around how little someone needs to feel what they're looking for, rather than how much THC we can put into them? What happens when the goal isn't getting someone really high, but simply helping someone relax a little, loosen up, shift their mood or enjoy the moment they're already in?

That's a very different way of thinking about cannabis, and potentially a very different customer.

After more than 20 years in this industry, I've become increasingly convinced that we've spent too much time asking, "How strong is it?" The more interesting question might be, "How does it make you feel?"

Because those aren't the same thing. And if we start designing cannabis around the second question instead of the first, we may discover that the market is a lot bigger than we thought.

That's the idea behind Toasted, the chill drink: a low-dose cannabis relaxation beverage built around how it makes you feel, not how high the number on the label is.