40 Under 40
For the past five years, the Marijuana Venture staff has compiled an annual list of some of the brightest young leaders and influencers in the cannabis industry. As in past years, we have narrowed the list from hundreds of worthy candidates to present 40 individuals from the vast and ever-changing business in the United States and Canada.
It is our honor to share their stories.
Bethany Gomez
Age: 34
Company: Brightfield Group
Title: Managing director
Bethany Gomez had already spent years forecasting market trends in other industries, but says the traditional methods of conducting research weren’t sufficient for the cannabis and CBD industries, because of the regulations and lack of private companies willing to share sales data.
“You can’t just take one perspective and expect that to be forward looking,” she says. “That’s just one company’s truth.”
So she and her fellow co-founders formed Brightfield Group and devised new methods to track industry trends by integrating surveys into social media. She says the company runs roughly 10,000 surveys on consumers every quarter.
“A lot of the insights for this industry aren’t out there waiting to be picked; they have to be harnessed,” she says. “There is never going to be one magical data source. … You have to be able to pull from as many sources as possible, pull those insights together and triangulate them.”
Gomez says the consumer insights and data analytics firm made its mark on the industry with its September 2018 prediction that the CBD industry would grow from $300 million annually to $22 billion by 2022. Two months later, when the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp, the company was well positioned as a leader in business intelligence for the hemp-derived CBD industry.
“That was really a pivotal moment for us as a company,” Gomez says. “A lot of the projections we made started to come into fruition.”