Best Cannabis Industry Analysts

If you’ve been alive at any point in the last five years, you’ve at least heard the phrase “business analytics.”

Upgraded capabilities with artificial intelligence and machine learning allow for number crunching and other analysis that may have taken huge teams of people and weeks to finish to be completed in just a few minutes.

 Big data and big cannabis are going to continue to grow side by side, and with a lot of opportunity in both, you can certainly expect more cannabis industry analyst companies or branches to form.

Below the list of cannabis industry analysis companies are some definitions related to data analytics and some ways home growers and consumers can also benefit from these analytics. 

Best Cannabis Industry Analysts

In 2021, the U.S. data industry was worth more than $162 billion, and that’s expected to continue growing rapidly. Some industry experts believe that number could double by as soon as 2026. 

Here are six companies that got ahead of the curve and are acting as trailblazers in the cannabis analytics industry:

BDSA

BDSA aims to “provide the complete view of the global cannabinoid market of today and tomorrow” and offers many products and analytic solutions, all catered to the global cannabis market. The company provides services to retailers, manufacturers, brands, wholesalers and investors, with a heavy focus on finance. 

These are the primary services they offer:

• Pricing strategy
• Portfolio management
• Market performance
• Innovation
• Mergers (data sharing)
• Market expansion predictions
• Consumer insights
• Wholesale analytics
• Consulting 

Headset

With a bit more of a marketing focus than BDSA, Headset was founded with the changing cannabis industry in mind. Consumer trends are a major part of their analytic approach, and they also provide insight as to how to market best to those consumers making the trends happen. 

They can also help your team create unique sales and distribution plans based on trends in different locations. Their product is the tools they create, all of which are made to order and can include market analytics, real-time sales and inventory data, consumer insights and more. 

Cannabis Big Data

Cannabis Big Data not only has a very matter-of-fact name, but it also hosts the largest integration library of any cannabis company, allowing for well-informed analytics across all of their service areas. In addition to their analytic tools, Cannabis Big Data also offers data coaching to help your team better understand the analytics they are looking at. 

Fortune Business Insights

This India-based company has a new cannabis industry branch that focuses on the global market. As global trading of cannabis is still a big question mark on most of the planet, Fortune’s data tools are created with change in mind. In addition to the cannabis space, Fortune provides market insights and consultation in healthcare, IT, aerospace, food & beverage industries and more. 

Here are some of the services they offer to these companies as well as with their cannabis industry analysis tools and expertise:

• Consulting
• Market research
• Market insights (including those relative to changes caused by laws)
• Competitive intelligence
• Emerging technology analysis 
• Customer market research
• Industry development

Brightfield Group

Medical marijuana was legalized in Illinois in 2015, and recreational became available on shelves in 2020… and the Chicago-based Brightfield Group has been along for the ride. They offer their analytic services nationwide and their major focus is market entry for new cannabis businesses, as well as expansion into different cannabis markets (flower, CBD, wax, etc.). 

They have a noticeable company focus on wellness and almost all of their customer and client reviews mention feeling like Brightfield was very passionate about their work. 

Armanino

 Armanino is a large tax firm based in St. Louis, but using its analytic software and tools has branched out into other areas of data analysis, including market research in the cannabis industry. They do still focus on tax-related issues, but many of the tools they use to track information related to taxes can also be used with market research and other areas. 

Taxes are also such a niche aspect of running a cannabis business that utilizing a company like this strictly in the tax space of your company is something to consider. 

What Can a Cannabis Analyst Tell You?

In addition to being fun to say, cannabis analysts also do some pretty fun stuff. With much thanks to technology and advancements in artificial intelligence, teams of just a few people can collect global data to inform their decisions in towns of a few thousand people. 

With cannabis being produced, distributed and sold all across the country, being able to quickly collect and analyze the trials and errors of similar companies taking on similar (often novel) challenges is an invaluable tool offered by cannabis analyst teams. Here are some of their services better defined:

Market Access Research

As legalization is expected to continue happening in more and more states, market access is extra important in the cannabis space. Unfortunately, it’s also difficult to analyze things that don’t exist, such as competitors in a state that only just legalized the plant. 

One of the many things data analysis allows for in the cloud and web-sharing age is almost-immediate collection of relevant insights from other parts of the globe without having to speak to a single person about their experiences. 

Consumer Trends

These cannabis industry analysts also know how to turn consumer knowledge into money and most offer custom tools to help cannabis businesses inform their own decision-making. Consumer trend information serves several purposes, but in a novel industry like legal cannabis, buying trends are more volatile than in industries that have been around a while. 

Thus, having a good data team with some innovative thinking can help make sure you’re putting the right things on the shelves. 

Expansion Prediction

Consumer trend analysis can inform business owners on many things, and often one of them is “offering more products will net you higher profits” or something along those lines. For this reason, or any other that a cannabis entrepreneur deems worthy, expansion becomes a discussion worth having. 

With data analysis relative to expansion, your team can make informed decisions on how much of a new product or service to have, what products to place close to the new products in hopes of buyers adding to their shopping cart (or offering “similar products” in the online setting), and even where to build if the expansion is large-scale.  

Pricing Strategies

Pricing strategies come from some very deep data sets, and working with an analytics team whose tools take them all into account can help you maximize your data analysis investment. Utilizing big data pools, a medical dispensary in Pennsylvania may know sooner than competition that production issues are going to cause a rise in supply pricing that allows them to gradually raise their prices to match, rather than being forced to make a large increase or suffer losses associated with keeping the prices lower. 

How to Maximize Cannabis Analyst Information

The businesses above are more for analytics on the financial side of cannabis, but analytics are also used in production facilities to help inform the perfect growing conditions, ultimately to maximize profits just the same as using analytics to inform market decisions.

Consumers and home growers can also benefit from cannabis analyst tools simply by making a few measurements and keeping a spreadsheet about conditions related to a grow. Here is what you can track easily so you can evaluate your grow and maximize your yield:

• CO2 levels
• Light intensity
• Relative humidity
• Temperature
• Water levels

Several “intelligent farming” programs and tools exist to help you maximize the information collected for cannabis analysis. 

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