Canadian Cannabis Market Analysis: Projecting Growth Through 2025 - Q1 Update

In our previous market forecast, we projected national cannabis retail sales to continue rising steadily into 2025. At the time, the forecast extended through December 2026, using data up to December 2024.

We’ve now added three months of actual sales data (January–March 2025) and evaluated our model’s performance against reality. Here’s what the new numbers show:

🧾 Newly Reported Monthly Sales (2025)

• January 2025: $447,866,000
• February 2025: $428,287,000
• March 2025: $428,378,000

📊 Forecast Accuracy Check (Jan–Mar 2025)

We compared our original estimates to the newly reported actuals for the first quarter of 2025. The results show a consistent overestimation of sales:

🔍 Conclusion: Our original model overestimated Canadian cannabis retail sales by 5–11% in early 2025. While the trend remains upward, growth appears more modest than initially forecasted.

We’ve now retrained our model with this new data to produce a more calibrated forecast going forward. The updated projection remains cautiously optimistic but accounts for the slower-than-expected Q1 performance.

📈 Updated Forecast Outlook (to Dec 2026)

The revised estimate shows a continuation of growth, though with slightly tempered expectations compared to our previous model. Our upper interval estimates monthly sales reaching $580M–$620M by late 2026, though with respect to this findings of this estimation, the real values will likely be closer to the lower interval.

The updated visualization reflects:

• Actual sales (Oct 2018 – Mar 2025)
• Original forecast
• Newly adjusted forecast starting from April 2025

🔄 Next Steps

We’ll continue tracking and validating the forecast monthly as new StatsCan data becomes available. Stay tuned for our next quarterly update.