We have the data to prove it — and a roadmap to fix it.
HashDash Industry Insights
We’re going to start with one number, because it’s the one that made us build this report. Sixty percent of cannabis consumers are afraid that cannabis will make their anxiety worse. Not nervous about it. Genuinely afraid. And this isn’t a fringe group of occasional users who don’t know what they’re doing; these are experienced consumers, 80% of whom don’t consider themselves beginners, who are turning to cannabis specifically to manage stress and anxiety. Half of them are scared of the thing they’re relying on.
That tells you something is broken. Not with the consumer. With what we’ve been handing
them.
We surveyed 500 cannabis consumers earlier this year. We wanted to understand the real gap, not the one the industry talks about at conferences, but the one that shows up in bad experiences, lost customers, and dispensary churn that nobody can quite explain. What we found was a consumer base that is clear about what they want, largely unable to find it, and shopping with tools that were never designed to help them get there.
This report is about that gap. More importantly, it’s about what’s sitting on the other side of it — because for operators who are ready to close it, the opportunity is significant and largely unclaimed.
Who We’re Actually Talking About
Let’s get specific about who answered this survey, because it matters. These aren’t new customers. Eighty percent don’t consider themselves beginners. Nearly a third call themselves experts. These are repeat buyers, people who have been in the category long enough to form real opinions, notice when products don’t work for them, and make decisions based on experience.
And when we asked them why they use cannabis, the answers were striking in how consistent they were. Seventy-one percent are using it to manage stress. Fifty-five percent for anxiety. Forty-four percent for depression. The top things they want to feel when they consume are happy, relaxed, and focused. That’s not a recreational profile. That’s a wellness profile. These people aren’t chasing a high; they’re chasing relief.
That distinction matters enormously for how you run a dispensary, develop a product, or build a brand. The person walking through your door on a Tuesday evening isn’t looking to get as high as possible. They’re looking for something to turn the volume down on a week that hasn’t let up. They have a specific goal. And right now, the cannabis industry is doing a mediocre job of helping them achieve it.
“They’re not chasing a high. They’re chasing relief. Those are different customers, and they need a different kind of help.”
The Contradiction We Can’t Ignore
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. We know 55% of consumers are using cannabis to manage anxiety. We know 60% are afraid cannabis will make that anxiety worse. And we know that the most popular THC preference in our dataset is still high-THC, at 39.6%.
Think about what that means in practice. A customer comes in managing anxiety. They’ve heard that high-THC is what the good stuff looks like, because that’s the signal your store has been sending, and the one the industry has been sending for years. They buy it. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe it sends their anxiety through the roof, and they spend two hours on their couch, convinced something is wrong with them. Either way, they don’t come back and tell you what happened. They just quietly stop coming back.
That’s not a marketing problem. That’s not a product problem. That’s an information problem, and it’s been compounding across every dispensary in every legal market since the doors opened.
The Revenue Reality
Online cannabis shoppers spend 30% more than in-store shoppers. The difference isn’t convenience, it’s intent. A customer who knows what they want before they buy converts faster, spends more, and comes back. When you give consumers the tools to shop with intent, that 30% premium follows. That’s what’s sitting on the other side of this education gap.
The Thing We Didn’t Expect to Find
We expected the terpene data to be a problem. And it is, 48.8% of our respondents couldn’t tell us which terpenes they prefer. In a category where terpene profile is one of the most reliable predictors of how a product will actually make you feel, nearly half of experienced consumers are navigating blind. That’s a failure of education the industry has been slow to reckon with.
But then we asked about flavor preferences, and something unexpected happened.
The top five flavors our respondents chose were pineapple, strawberry, berry, citrus, and lemon. Each one came in around 30–34%. That level of convergence across 500 people isn’t noise; it’s a pattern. And when you look at what those five flavors have in common, the pattern becomes something more interesting: all five are primary flavor signatures of Limonene.
Limonene is one of the most well-researched terpenes in cannabis. It’s associated with stress and anxiety reduction, mood elevation, improved focus, and mental clarity. Which is to say: the terpene our consumers are gravitating toward in their flavor choices is the one that most directly aligns with the outcomes they told us they want.
They can’t name it. They can’t find it on the label. But they’re reaching for it anyway, through taste, through something that just works for them, through years of trial and error that nobody
ever helped them make sense of.
The consumer has been doing the work. We just haven’t built the infrastructure to meet them.
What This Tells Us
Your customers are closer to the right product than you think. They’re navigating by instinct and landing near the right answer. The job of the industry, brands, dispensaries, and platforms is to make that navigation explicit. Name it. Explain it. Make it repeatable.
Intent Is the Variable That Changes Everything
This is why the 30% spending premium for online cannabis shoppers matters so much. Online shoppers aren’t spending more because they’re wealthier or more committed. They’re spending more because they arrive with intent. They’ve already done some version of research. They know what they’re looking for. That clarity converts.
When a customer understands why a Limonene-forward product is likely to help them feel calm and focused, when someone has connected the flavor they’re drawn to, the terpene it contains, and the outcome they’ve been chasing, they don’t browse. They buy. They come back. They tell people. That’s what intent-driven purchasing looks like, and right now the industry is largely leaving it on the table.
So What Do You Actually Do With This
If You Run a Dispensary
The single most valuable thing you can do right now costs almost nothing: change the first question your staff asks. Not “how strong do you want it?” or “are you looking for indica or sativa?”, ask “how do you want to feel?” That’s it. That one shift moves the entire conversation from a metric that doesn’t predict experience to the thing the customer actually came in for.
From there, terpene literacy becomes a staff training investment with a clear return. A budtender who can explain, in plain English, no lab report required, why a moderate-THC, Limonene-rich product is likely to be better for someone managing anxiety than the highest-THC option on the shelf is providing genuine value. Not upselling. Not educating for the sake of it. Actually solving the problem the customer walked in with.
Customers who leave with a product that works for them come back. Customers who leave with a bad experience disappear quietly, without complaint, and often with a story they tell their friends. The math on fixing this is straightforward. The will to change the floor is what’s usually missing.
If You’re Building a Brand
If your product is Limonene-dominant, you’re sitting on a story that your consumer is already primed to hear. They’re drawn to the flavor. They want the outcomes. The only thing missing is someone connecting those two facts in plain language, not in a CoA buried in your packaging, but in the words you use to talk about your product.
You don’t need health claims to do this. You need clarity. “This product is high in Limonene, the terpene behind citrus and fruit flavors, and one associated with stress relief and focus. It’s why people reach for it at the end of a hard day.” That’s a sentence. It doesn’t require a lawyer. And it’s the difference between a customer who buys once and a customer who starts asking for you by name.
In a market where most brands are still leading with a THC number and a strain name they chose because it sounded cool, that kind of clarity stands out. Not because it’s sophisticated, but because it’s useful. And useful is what earns loyalty.
If You’re Looking at the Bigger Picture
Nearly half of experienced cannabis consumers can’t identify a terpene preference. That’s not a demographic quirk; it’s a structural gap in how this industry has communicated with the people buying its products. For a decade, we competed on potency, got good at growing and extracting and complying, and quietly deferred the harder work of actually teaching consumers how to use what we make.
That gap is now a market. The brands building terpene literacy into their customer journey, the dispensaries restructuring around effect-based selling, the platforms connecting consumer intent to product chemistry, they’re not doing charity work. They’re acquiring customers more efficiently, retaining them longer, and generating the kind of word-of-mouth that no media budget can manufacture.
The window to build this infrastructure is open. It won’t be open forever.
Here’s the Honest Version
We built HashDash because we kept watching this problem play out. Consumers who wanted something specific, couldn’t find it, and gave up, or worse, had a bad experience and blamed themselves. Good products that couldn’t get matched to the right customers because nobody had built the bridge.
This survey is us putting numbers on what we’ve been seeing every day on our platform. The data isn’t meant to be discouraging; it’s meant to be clarifying. The consumer isn’t lost. They’re closer than you think to the product that will actually work for them. They just need someone to show them the way.
That’s what this industry is capable of. It’s also what’s currently missing. The operators who fill that gap don’t just win customers, they build something durable in a market that’s still figuring out what durability looks like.
We’re publishing this through Beard Bros Media Network because their audience, the people running stores, building brands, making buying decisions, are the ones who can actually act on it. The findings are ours. What happens next is yours.
“The consumer is not the problem. They never were. We just forgot to give them something better
to work with.”
Anya is a Certified Ganjier, brand strategist, and serial entrepreneur driving $100M+ in revenue across cannabis, wellness, beauty, biotech, and tech. Co-Founder and CSO at HashDash.
