Sales are up and revenue growth is expected to continue, but the U.S. cannabis industry saw its first ever drop in jobs in 2022, according to the 2023 Jobs Report from cannabis jobs platform Vangst.
While revenues reached a high of $26.1 billion in 2022, an increase of 3% from the prior year, the number of people employed within the industry dropped by 2% to 417,493, a surprising find for an industry that has seen double-digit jobs growth for nearly a decade, according to the report.
“Call it the great cannabis reset,” reads the report, written by former Leafly editor Bruce Barcott and economist Beau Whitney, with David Downs.
According to the company’s research, 321,361 are employed in the industry in 19 adult-use states with an additional 96,132 employed in 21 medical-only states.
Missouri and Michigan added the most cannabis jobs in 2022 with 6,958 and 4,253, respectively. New Jersey gained 4,220 jobs in 2022, bringing the total number of cannabis jobs in the state to 7,367. California, however, which recorded a $500 million drop in sales in 2022, saw its number of cannabis employees fall 13%, bringing its total down to 83,593, still by far the most of any state (Michigan comes in second with 35,405 cannabis jobs).
Of those jobs, 31% work in cultivation, 23% in retail, 20% in ancillary jobs, 17% in processing/manufacturing, 7% in wholesale, 2% in distribution and less than 1% in testing labs.
The report attributes the drop in jobs to what it calls a “confluence of factors,” including global inflation,
rising interest rates, cooling investor enthusiasm, depressed wholesale cannabis prices and a drop in consumer demand following the highs of the pandemic.
The final report also includes more detailed looks at the California and New York industries and includes a forecast from Whitney that predicts 11.8% growth in 2023 and 20% growth in 2024, “assuming new markets begin to convert more consumers into the legal space.” Whitney sees industry revenues climbing to $79.5 million by 2030.
— Brian Beckley