When his home state of Illinois began the transition from a medical-only market to allowing adult-use sales, Vib Gupta saw cannabis as a natural fit for his background in software engineering.
In 2019, Gupta co-founded CannMenus, a data and analytics company focused on real-time market data. The company set out to provide answers to questions such as how quickly products were selling and what effect pricing strategies had on sell-through, among other vital pieces of information for businesses.
It gives Gupta deep insight into product trends — concentrates are moving more toward rosin; vapes are moving more toward disposables; pre-rolls are moving more toward infused joints — as well as opportunities in individual state markets.
“It’s really cool to be able to actually predict things and see them come alive,” Gupta says.
For example, in 2023, Gupta recognized the booming infused pre-roll trend and saw a gap in the Massachusetts market, where infused pre-rolls only accounted for about 5% of all pre-roll sales. He posted a comment on social media calling it the biggest potential market opportunity in the Bay State. Now, just two years later, infused pre-roll sales represent more than 40% of all pre-rolls sold in the commonwealth and more than 10% of all dispensary revenue.
“We were looking at the data, and we noticed that Jeeter, in particular, and a couple of other pre-roll brands were making a lot of noise in states like Arizona and Michigan when they launched,” he says. “They basically transformed the market from very few infused pre-rolls being sold to infused pre-rolls being the dominant product that was being sold. We did some research internally and identified Massachusetts as a market that was still dominated by non-infused pre-rolls. And lo and behold, over the next year, that’s exactly what happened.”