From hospitality to air travel to retail, businesses have been using secret shoppers for nearly 100 years to fine-tune their operations and ensure consistency throughout the organizations.
Recognizing the opportunity to bring the long-established business practice to cannabis, Sara Gluck in 2025 founded Above Board to provide mystery shopper audits for both retailers and brands.
“Essentially, me and my team pretend that we are regular customers, but we are more like secret auditors, and we have a number of things we’re looking for depending on who is hiring us,” Gluck says. “And we are able to give our clients an amazing snapshot of the reality the consumer is seeing in the store.”
Marijuana Venture: What led you to start this secret shopper program?
Sara Gluck: Everyone that has a consumer-facing brand uses mystery shopping, and it’s really great in highly regulated industries such as cannabis, in which your frontline workers are unbelievably important. So, in cannabis, the budtender is your frontline worker, and they are the most important thing we need to track and realize how they are interacting with the customer.
When you check in at a Marriott hotel, they use mystery shopping to make sure that you are getting the same consistency at a Marriott in New York as you are in LA or Puerto Rico.
With cannabis, brands want to know that their brand is being told to the consumer accurately, reflecting the brand values they’ve spent a lot of time and effort creating.
At the end of the day, we really want to help the industry, whether it is brands or these operators, make more money, follow compliance regulations, and help the industry in the baby steps that we can.
MV: Where is the business operating right now?
Gluck: We’re just focused on New York right now, but aiming to be in three states by the end of the year, including New Jersey and Massachusetts.
I’m also eyeing states like Minnesota, which is kind of like the wild, wild west and perfect for a company like mine to go in there and to tell operators what is happening on the consumer level.
MV: Is there a particular industry that closely mirrors how cannabis works in terms of what you see as a secret shopper?
Gluck: I would say it’s a hodgepodge of a few industries, but off the top of my head, I would say the restaurant industry and the hospitality industry. When you go to your bartender or your server, you’re asking them, “What should I get?”
With hospitality, sometimes you use technology to check in and we can compare that to the screens that we see in a store. But oftentimes you’ll speak to a person and interact with them, and that is your first impression of the business.
Cannabis is such a weird industry, because we’ve taken a lot of things from other industries and completely flipped them on their head. For me, I try to learn as much as I can from other industries, to learn more about the consumer experience in general.
MV: You conduct audits for both brands and retailers. Let’s talk about the brand side. What are some of the things you’re looking for when you’re doing a secret shopper audit for a brand?
Gluck: We have a different scorecard for brands and dispensaries. For brands, we start with a visual look. How does it visually look? Is the display up? There’s so many times where this display won’t even be up. Is the price clear? How does it visually look against the competition?
Then we also go into the first question: Do you have any flower? Or do you have any gummies? What are the first three or four or five brands that are being said?
When I shop for a brand, I am specifically leaving with that brand, but to get there, sometimes I need to say a few extra things, like “My friend told me about this brand. Would you recommend it?”
The important thing is that we go in as the consumer and ask the budtender what they recommend. And we’ll tell the brand verbatim what is being recommended.
All these brands have sales data and they know how many units they’re selling. But to hear they’re being compared to this brand or that brand, and you’re right next to them or you’re not there, that’s very important.
And then we’re trying to see how that brand story translates from brand to budtender to the consumer. “Could you tell me a little bit about this brand?” Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t.
More often than not, the budtenders are selling based off of THC or what’s hot these days and forgetting about what the brand even means.
That’s probably the thing I would tell brand operators that they’re missing: you really need to reinforce your brand constantly to the people that are selling your brand — in this case, the budtenders. It’s not your marketing staff, it’s not LinkedIn, it’s not your investors; it’s the budtenders.
MV: What does your audit look like for retailers?
Gluck: On the dispensary side, we’re looking at compliance, we’re making sure that we’re being ID’d, we’re making sure the point of sale works, we’re getting a receipt, we’re asking engaging questions about the products.
We’re just shopping to make sure the store is doing a good job. We’ll look at budtender education, engagement, store flow, we’ll look at how easily we could steal something.
And with both brands and dispensaries, we wrap it up with an executive summary along with a scorecard, what we call a case file.
MV: Are there things you see that are recurring red flags? Any issues you see regularly that could help operators improve their operations?
Gluck: A lot of store operators forget that they have a number of tools to help with their revenue. Like upselling at the point of sale, asking if people need a lighter or papers or if they’re part of your loyalty program. You spent $30,000 setting up a loyalty program. Why aren’t you promoting it?
On the brand side, I would say your brand story probably isn’t translating as well as you think it is to the budtenders.
I know there are a lot of budtender events, especially here in New York, so I’d be keen on tracking who goes to those events and how well they retain that information. So far, I haven’t seen it translate, but I’m willing to look at more data.
And as the New York program grows and matures, I think operators who look for these red flags will survive and not just that, they’ll thrive and grow and take over operators that maybe never really cared about loyalty programs or the brands that looked at that top front-line growth and said that’s all that matters.
MV: Can you explain your scoring system? It is a standard scoring that you use for every brand and every retailer?
Gluck: Exactly. So every retailer is compared to every other retailer, and every brand is compared to every other brand. We use the same category questions on and same ranking system on each scorecard.
And we try to make it really easy for whoever is reading the report, whether that is the sales manager, the ops manager, the CEO, whoever.
MV: With you experience in the Colorado industry, prior to moving to New York, can you compare and contrast the two markets from your perspective?
Gluck: I miss Colorado, especially from the consumer perspective, with the fresh, beautiful flower and great prices. New York City is expensive, but I see New York as having a lot more freedom, actually, with the stores that we have and how we present them.
We have a lot of beautiful storefronts or customized stores that are really location-based, like a neighborhood location or one that is going after tourists, whereas I found that most dispensaries in Colorado are very generalized.
MV: Do you feel like New York has been able to learn from other markets that have been operating longer?
Gluck: I think we’ve taken some of the good things from other states, and we’ve tried our own spin.
I’ve been all over New York state and I see overall improvement. A lot of illicit stores that have gone away. There are 500-plus open dispensaries and many more have been licensed.
When I look at Colorado, with about 6 million people and maybe 500 dispensaries, if they can handle 500 dispensaries, I think New York can handle 1,500 or so.
And from the consumer aspect, the product has absolutely improved over the years. I was in line on day one, shopping at Housing Works. We stood in line for four hours, and let me tell you, that weed was so bad. But I’m happy to say it’s improved across the board.
At the end of the day, I think consumers are very happy that New York has a program, and I think that’s what matters the most.
It doesn’t really matter if the governor’s happy or if the CEO of a particular company is happy. It matters that consumers have access to this plant. That’s what we’ve been fighting for this whole time, supposedly. That’s what most voters voted for when they approved the program.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.