Is cannabis consumption affecting your beer sales?

Twenty-seven percent of beer drinkers said that they already have substituted cannabis for beer, or would substitute their retail beer purchases with cannabis in the future if cannabis was legalised.

The Cannabiz Consumer Group (C2G) research claims to show that where recreational marijuana has been legalised in the US, revenue from the existing retail beer industry has dropped 7.1%. C2G predicts that if cannabis were legalised across the whole of the United States, the beer industry would lose more than $2 billion in retail sales. Beer is not the only affected segment of the alcohol industry as legalised cannabis is also putting the screws on wine, spirits and on premise sales.

In the US in 2016, there were 24.6 million legal cannabis consumers. Legalisation has since extended to additional states, either through medicinal or recreational legislation or both. C2G projects that legal cannabis penetration will settle at a level comparable to that of beer and wine and that a fully mature market would create a new $50 billion industry.

Usually when a new product type appears on the market place initial uptake figures are not sustained as some try the product simply for the experience but do not become regular consumers. However, C2G predicts this will not be the case with legalised marijuana as consumers are more invested in the products that they are buying, understanding the potency, strains and formats available and its uses for pain management, holistic health and relaxation.

Cannabiz Consumer Group investigates marijuana legalisation and its impact on consumer spending throughout the economy. The forecasts were generated using C2G’s CannaUse study on the cannabis mindset and behaviours of more than 50,000 individual participants, the company’s warehouse of over 55 million cannabis purchase transactions, and CPG consumer panel and point-of-sale data sourced from IRI through an exclusive data and analytic share arrangement.