Introducing Retailer Report Cards: Segment-Level Dispensary Scoring

If you manage retail accounts for a cannabis brand, you've probably built your own mental ranking of your dispensaries. Store A is great - competitive pricing on flower, solid vape selection, clean listings. Store B is a headache - they carry half the edible brands their competitors do, and their product images are all stock photos. But that ranking lives in your head, or maybe in a messy spreadsheet. You can't share it with your sales team in a way that's actionable. You can't show a dispensary buyer concrete data about where their store stands relative to the market. And you can't track whether a store is getting better or worse over time without manually checking multiple dashboards. We built Retailer Report Cards to fix that. But we didn't want to just produce a single number that averages everything together - a dispensary can be excellent at flower and terrible at edibles, and a flat score hides that. So we built a segment-aware scoring system that evaluates each product segment independently, then rolls up to an overall grade.

Most scoring systems treat every product the same. A dispensary with 50 SKUs of rolling papers and 5 SKUs of flower gets the same assortment credit as one with 50 flower SKUs and 5 rolling paper SKUs. That's obviously wrong - flower and rolling papers serve different roles in a dispensary's business. Retailer Report Cards solve this with category tiering. Every product category falls into one of three tiers: **Core Cannabis (70% of overall score)** - Flower, Pre-Rolls, Vapes, Concentrates, and Edibles. These are the categories that drive most dispensary traffic and revenue. Performance here matters most. **Specialty (20%)** - Beverages, Tinctures, Capsules, and Topicals. Important for differentiation and serving specific customer needs, but not the core business for most stores. **Non-Cannabis (10%)** - Accessories and other items. Nice to have, but a weak accessories selection shouldn't tank an otherwise strong dispensary's grade. Within each tier, individual categories are weighted by their market share among nearby stores. In a market where vapes outsell concentrates 3:1, the vape score carries proportionally more weight. This adapts automatically - a Colorado mountain town where flower dominates will weight differently than a Los Angeles market where vapes and edibles compete for the top spot.

Each product segment is scored across four dimensions. The scores roll up using tier weights to produce the overall grade (A through F, on a 0-100 scale). **Assortment (30%)** - Does the dispensary carry enough products in each segment compared to nearby stores? We compare your SKU count against the market median, capped at 150% to prevent one bloated category from inflating the grade. If your flower selection has 42 SKUs and the state median is 38, that's strong. If you carry 8 edible SKUs and the median is 20, that's a clear gap. For categories where strain type matters - Flower, Pre-Rolls, Vapes, Concentrates - we blend in a strain coverage component: 70% of the assortment score comes from your SKU ratio, and 30% from how well you cover Indica, Sativa, and Hybrid variants. If every nearby competitor carries balanced strain options and your store is 80% Hybrid, the score reflects that. **Pricing (25%)** - How does the dispensary's pricing compare to the market median in each category? We measure the percentage delta between your average price and the state median, then apply a graduated scale. Within 10% of median? You score 80-100. Between 10-20% off? You score 60-80. More than 20% off in either direction starts to penalize more heavily, with a floor at 20 - because even a significantly overpriced store shouldn't get zeroed out on pricing alone. This isn't about being the cheapest. A store priced 5% above median scores a 90. A store priced 35% above market scores around 30. The data comes from the same source that powers our Menu Pricing Insights analysis. **Stock Health (25%)** - What percentage of the dispensary's listed products are actually in stock? This catches a common problem: dispensaries that list products on their menu but let them go out of stock without removing the listing. We apply a generous curve - 83% in-stock earns a perfect score, because some level of stock churn is normal. Below that, the score drops proportionally. There's also a critical stockout penalty: if any Core Cannabis category (Flower, Pre-Rolls, Vapes, Concentrates, or Edibles) drops below 25% in-stock, the overall stock health score takes a flat 10-point hit. That's a "your core shelf is basically empty" signal that should trigger immediate attention. **Brand Diversity (20%)** - Does the dispensary carry a healthy range of brands in each category? We compare your brand count against the market median, capped at 150%. A flower section dominated by a single brand is a risk - for the dispensary (supplier dependency) and for the customer (limited choice). If the median dispensary carries 10 flower brands and you carry 4, this score will flag it. Like assortment, this is evaluated per-category and weighted by tier and market share, so brand gaps in Flower matter more than brand gaps in Accessories.

One of the trickiest parts of building this system was handling strain type. In early versions, we applied strain breakdowns to everything - which produced absurd results like "Sativa Rolling Papers" and "Indica Accessories." The current system uses dynamic strain relevance. For each category across nearby stores, we look at how strain types are actually distributed. If the dominant strain type holds more than 70% of SKUs in a category, strain type isn't a meaningful differentiator there - so we evaluate at the category level only. In practice, this means Flower, Pre-Rolls, Vapes, and Concentrates almost always get strain-level evaluation (because their strain distributions are diverse). Edibles, Beverages, Tinctures, and Accessories almost never do (because they're overwhelmingly labeled Hybrid or unspecified). But the system adapts - if a market genuinely develops strain-specific edibles, the scoring will reflect that automatically. When strain type is relevant, we group into three buckets: Indica/Dominant Hybrid, Sativa/Dominant Hybrid, and Hybrid/Unspecified. This avoids over-splitting while still capturing the meaningful differences that dispensary buyers and consumers care about.

When you pull up a Retailer Report Card, you see the overall letter grade front and center - A through F, with a numerical score (0-100) and the number of nearby stores used for benchmarking. Below that, four score bars show the dimension-level performance: Assortment, Pricing, Stock Health, and Brand Diversity. Each has its own letter grade. The real depth is in the tier breakdown. Three collapsible panels - Core Cannabis, Specialty, Non-Cannabis - each show their tier-level grade and how much weight they carry. Expand a tier and you see individual category cards. Each category card shows the category grade, a percentile rank ("Your Flower ranks top 27% in Illinois"), and mini score bars for all four dimensions. The percentile is a composite that blends SKU count, in-stock rate, and brand count rankings - so it captures overall competitive position, not just one metric. For strain-relevant categories, you'll see strain breakdown chips showing your Indica, Sativa, and Hybrid SKU counts versus market medians. Click into a category to see subcategory details - your Live Resin count versus market median, your Pre-Roll Singles in-stock percentage, your Gummy brand count. The gap analysis is the most actionable part. For every segment where you're below median, you see exactly how many SKUs or brands to add: "Flower - Sativa/Dom Hybrid: add 4 SKUs to reach median" or "Edibles: add 3 brands to reach median." These aren't vague suggestions - they're specific, benchmarked targets. Everything links back to the underlying data. If you want to dig into a low stock health score, one click takes you to the product-level stock status. If you want to explore the pricing comparison in detail, one click takes you to the pricing dashboard. The report card is a starting point, not a dead end.

For brand operators, the most immediate use case is account prioritization. If you have 200 retail accounts and three field reps, you need to know where to focus. Report cards give you a data-driven way to do that - and the segment-level detail means you can focus on the categories that matter to your brand. If you sell concentrates, sort accounts by their Concentrate segment score. A dispensary with an overall B grade but a D in Concentrates is a better target for your rep than a C-grade store that's already strong in your category. The gap analysis tells you exactly what's missing: "This store carries 4 concentrate SKUs versus a state median of 12 - add 8 SKUs to reach median." You can also use report cards to track the impact of your own efforts. Helped a dispensary expand their strain coverage in your category? The assortment score will reflect it. Worked with them to restock after a supply gap? Watch the stock health dimension. The grades update as the underlying data changes, so you're measuring real outcomes. For brands working with distributors, the segment-level data eliminates vague conversations. Instead of "Store X isn't performing well" (subjective), you can say "Store X scores in the 23rd percentile for Pre-Rolls in Illinois, with only 6 SKUs versus a state median of 15 - and their pricing is 25% above market." That's a conversation with a specific outcome. Browse dispensaries in your state to start exploring report card data for your accounts.

If you run a dispensary, your report card is a segment-by-segment audit of your competitive position. Start with the tier breakdown. If your Core Cannabis tier scores an A but your Specialty tier scores a D, that tells you where the opportunity is - and since Core Cannabis carries 70% of the weight, it also tells you that your overall grade is probably fine. You might decide the Specialty gap isn't worth fixing. Or you might see it as an easy win: adding a few tincture and topical brands could move your overall score significantly. The pricing dimension is especially useful at the category level. You might discover that your flower pricing is competitive (within 5% of median) but your edible prices are 30% above market - something that's hard to notice when you're setting prices one SKU at a time but obvious when the graduated scoring flags it. The stock health dimension is an honest mirror of your inventory management. If your Flower category shows 65% in-stock, that means a third of your listed flower products aren't actually available - customers see them on your menu, click through, and find nothing. Below 83% in-stock and your score starts dropping. Below 25% in any core category and you take a critical penalty. These are fixable problems once you can see them. The brand diversity dimension highlights concentration risk. If your vape section is dominated by two brands while competitors carry eight, that's a vulnerability - both for customer choice and for your negotiating position with suppliers. Compare your store against nearby competitors using our head-to-head comparison tool for the full picture. The percentile rankings give you honest context. "Your Flower ranks in the 73rd percentile" means you're outperforming nearly three-quarters of nearby stores in that category. "Your Edibles rank in the 18th percentile" means most of your competitors have a stronger edible selection. Both are useful - one tells you what's working, the other tells you where to invest.

Being transparent about limitations is important, so here's what report cards intentionally leave out: **Actual sales volume.** Report cards are catalog-centric - they measure what you stock and how you present it, not how much you sell. A boutique dispensary with a perfectly curated menu can score higher than a high-volume store with sloppy listings. That's by design. **Customer experience.** We can't measure budtender knowledge, store layout, wait times, or the dozen other factors that affect in-store shopping. Menu data captures the digital shelf, not the physical one. **Intentional strategy.** A dispensary that deliberately carries a narrow, curated assortment will score lower on assortment depth. That might be exactly the right strategy for their market. A low score in one dimension isn't automatically a problem - it's a data point for you to evaluate. **Cross-state comparisons.** Benchmarks are computed within each state because cannabis markets vary dramatically. An A-grade dispensary in Illinois isn't directly comparable to an A-grade in California - they're excellent relative to their respective markets. **Small segments.** We require at least 3 retailers in a product segment to compute a valid benchmark. If a segment is too niche (say, CBD Capsules in a state where only 2 stores carry them), we exclude it rather than score against unreliable benchmarks. We'll continue refining the scoring model as we get feedback. If a dimension doesn't feel right for your use case, let us know - we'd rather adjust the model than have people ignore the tool.

Retailer Report Cards are live for all CannMenus Pro subscribers - both brand and retailer tiers. You'll find them on individual dispensary profiles and as a sortable column in account list views. If you're on the free tier, you can see overall letter grades on dispensary profiles. Full segment breakdowns, percentile rankings, and gap analysis require a Pro subscription. For brands using our E-Commerce Listing Audit add-on, report card data is automatically integrated - you'll see grades alongside your existing audit metrics. A few things to keep in mind: grades are benchmarked against the current state of the market, so they reflect your relative position today. Scores update daily as menu data changes. The grade thresholds are A (80+), B (65-79), C (50-64), D (35-49), F (below 35) - and yes, you can absolutely get an A. About 15% of dispensaries in our most-covered states do. Explore report cards now at cannmenus.com/dispensaries, or reach out to support@cannmenus.com if you have questions about the methodology.