Alexandre Voyer The founder of Weed Crawler and Best Bang For Your Bud

I came in through the data, as well as the plant. I’ve spent 15-plus years as a database and data engineer, and I’m a regular consumer, so when legalization landed I did what I do with anything I’m curious about: I looked for the numbers.

In Quebec there weren’t any. No official sales feed, no market reports, nothing a producer or a shopper could actually use. What the SQDC did publish was branch-level inventory, updated constantly. So I started collecting it every day, and Weed Crawler was born from that: daily observation of every shelf in the province, turned into reports producers could act on.

That was my first market. Best Bang For Your Bud came later, for consumers outside Quebec, because I wanted the same clarity when I shopped: what’s near me, what’s new, and where my whole list costs the least. Nobody paid me to build either one. I built them because I needed them.

Getting people to trust a number more than a rep. This industry runs on anecdotes: the sales rep says the SKU is moving, the buyer says it isn’t, and nobody checks the shelf. When I show a producer that their product has been frozen at the same inventory level in 40 stores for three weeks, the first reaction is often to argue with the data.

The second challenge is the flip side: cannabis data is easy to collect and very hard to keep honest. Sources freeze, banners duplicate stores, menus go stale. The hardest part of my job isn’t gathering the information, it’s knowing when it’s wrong before a client sees it.

A number I can’t defend doesn’t ship. That discipline is the actual product. The dashboards are just how you look at it.

I’d carve out factual information from the definition of promotion. Under the Cannabis Act, telling an adult where a product is in stock, what it costs, and how it’s selling relative to its category gets treated with the same suspicion as a lifestyle ad. That’s backwards. Price, availability and sell-through aren’t hype, they’re the opposite of hype. The result is a market where consumers can’t easily get verified information about legal products while the illicit market advertises freely.

I’d let producers and retailers share factual, verifiable product data with age-verified adults without legal anxiety, and I’d go one step further: every provincial board should publish standardized inventory and sales data as open data. Quebec already publishes inventory, which is why Weed Crawler exists. Imagine what the whole industry could do if every province did the same.

Distribution is marketing. When I look at sell-through across roughly 1,300 brands with measurable activity outside Quebec, the pattern is boring and consistent: the brands that win are the ones consumers can actually find, at a price that makes sense, with a menu listing that’s accurate the day they show up. Everything else is downstream of that. After distribution, three things stand out.

1. First
   BudtendersThey’re the only salesforce that talks to the consumer at the moment of decision, and the brands that educate them honestly get recommended.
2. Second
   New arrivalsCanadian consumers are novelty-driven, and a steady cadence of genuinely new SKUs in-store beats one big launch.
3. Third
   Community signalOur Weekly Matchup and People’s Choice votes drive more engagement than anything we’ve ever written about a product, because consumers trust each other more than they trust anyone with a logo.

The least effective channel is the one most brands spend on: adjectives.

Hubert Marceau at PhytoChemia, for doing the unglamorous work of testing what’s actually in the product and publishing it. The team at StratCann, who cover the regulatory and business side of this industry with more rigour than outlets ten times their size. The Ounce, for taking Western Canadian craft seriously. And the independent retailers and craft producers who publish their real numbers instead of press releases, because they’re the reason I can do what I do. I also pay attention to what the Association québécoise de l’industrie du cannabis is pushing on the policy side in Quebec, because whatever the strictest province does tends to become the conversation everywhere else.

Learn the shelf before you learn the story.

Most marketers arrive with brand playbooks from beer or CPG and discover they can’t use 80 percent of them. The ones who succeed spend their first months understanding retail reality: what’s actually stocked, what’s sitting, what’s moving, and why. That knowledge is legal to acquire, nobody can shadow-ban it, and it makes every dollar you eventually spend smarter. Also, be a consumer, or spend serious time with the people who are. You can’t fake knowing this market.