Format Share: Flower, Pre-Roll, Blunt and Concentrate

Product-format share depends on what the regulator calls the product. In Massachusetts’ adult-use sales file, cannabis sold as loose flower appears under “Buds.” Pre-rolls are divided into “Raw Pre-Rolls” and “Infused Pre-Rolls.” Concentrates appear in three categories: “Concentrate,” “Concentrate (Each),” and “Concentrate (Bulk).” There is no separate “Blunt” category.

That taxonomy determines what can honestly be measured.

THC Gazette downloaded the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission’s daily adult-use facility sales file and filtered sale dates from January 1 through December 31, 2025. The gross-sales field summed to $1,651,850,578.77, consistent with the Commission’s separate release reporting more than $1.65 billion in 2025 adult-use sales. Category shares below are THC Gazette calculations using that file total as the denominator.

Buds produced $661,313,647.36 in reported gross sales, equal to 40.03 percent of the annual total. Raw pre-rolls produced $228,435,461.95, or 13.83 percent. Infused pre-rolls produced $94,689,253.72, or 5.73 percent. The three concentrate categories together produced $85,346,394.54, or 5.17 percent.

Those four chart bars account for 64.76 percent of the market. They are deliberately not forced to 100 percent. Vape products, edibles, beverages, trim, non-edible infusions, kief, plants, seeds, and other reported categories make up the rest. Most notably, vape products represented more gross sales than any category except buds, but they are outside the four-format comparison in the headline.

Flower remains the anchor. The 40.03 percent share for buds means loose flower alone generated roughly two of every five adult-use retail dollars reported in Massachusetts during 2025. That is a leading position, not a majority. A shelf strategy built only around flower would ignore most consumer spending captured in the state’s data.

Pre-rolls are more important when their two reported forms are viewed together. Raw and infused pre-rolls generated $323,124,715.67, equal to 19.56 percent of the market. The split matters: raw pre-rolls alone were more than twice the sales of infused pre-rolls. Combining them is useful for measuring rolled products broadly, but separating them shows that the input and manufacturing format are economically distinct.

The word “blunt” creates the largest measurement problem. A blunt may be understood commercially through its wrapper, dimensions, fill, or infusion, but the Massachusetts file does not assign a blunt category. Some products marketed as blunts may be recorded as raw pre-rolls and others as infused pre-rolls. The public data do not reveal which ones. It would therefore be wrong to label the entire 5.73 percent infused pre-roll share as “blunt share,” or to claim that a known fraction of the raw category consists of blunts.

The chart uses “Infused pre-rolls; blunts not separately reported” as its label. That preserves the regulator’s category while making the missing blunt measurement visible. The correct blunt-share number from this dataset is not zero. It is unavailable.

Concentrates require a different kind of consolidation. Massachusetts reports concentrate sales in bulk, per-item, and a generic concentrate category. Adding those three fields produces the 5.17 percent share. Vape products are not added to that total because the regulator reports them separately. Although a vape product may contain a cannabis extract, merging vapes into concentrates would erase the retail format distinction present in the source file.

New Jersey’s regulator offers a useful comparison and another example of category design. Its review of 2025 said flower accounted for just over 42 percent of that state’s market, vape cartridges 26.4 percent, edibles 11 percent, and raw pre-rolls 10.7 percent. The remaining 10 percent included concentrates alongside shake and trim, capsules, pills, lotions, creams, and tinctures. Because concentrates are bundled into that residual group, New Jersey’s public summary cannot supply a stand-alone concentrate share.

The two states line up on the broad point that flower is still the largest named format while also showing why cross-state category comparisons need caution. Massachusetts calculated buds at 40.03 percent from a detailed daily file. New Jersey described flower as just over 42 percent in an agency summary. Their pre-roll figures differ, but their regulators also publish different breakdowns and may not assign every product in the same way.

Minnesota’s new Cannabis Market Monitor adds a third taxonomy. In a January 2026 release, the Office of Cannabis Management said flower was the most popular format over the prior 12 months, followed by concentrates used for vaping, then pre-roll cannabis cigarettes and edibles. The agency warned that limited availability of non-flower products early in the state’s launch could shape that order. It supplied no percentage in the release, so none is added to the chart.

For retailers and manufacturers, format-share data are best used as a category map rather than a universal consumer-preference score. A state’s rules, product availability, launch stage, prices, and reporting categories all influence the result. A term used on a package may not exist as a field in the regulator’s database.

The defensible conclusion is narrow but useful. Flower led Massachusetts in 2025. Raw and infused pre-rolls together approached one-fifth of adult-use gross sales. Stand-alone concentrates accounted for just over 5 percent when the regulator’s three concentrate categories were combined. Blunts were present only inside broader reporting categories, if at all, and no exact public share could be verified. The missing number is itself a finding about the limits of state market data.