Out Of Touch, Or Out Of Sync: Whitney Economics Forecasts 2026 Decline

Recently, Whitney Economics forecasted that U.S. regulated flower and concentrates markets could see a year-over-year revenue decline heading into 2026—a first in the modern era of regulated sales. The projection only compounds the uncertainty after rescheduling was announced, but is it accurate?

Room Temp

According to Whitney Economics’ latest newsletter, total U.S. regulated adult-use and medical sales for 2025 are projected to land between $29.1B and $29.6B, down from $30.1B in 2024—a 3.2% contraction, marking the first YoY decline in the history of the regulated market.

The pressure isn’t isolated. Whitney notes that roughly 23 states are expected to experience declining revenues in 2025, up from 17 states in 2024 and 10 in 2023, signaling a clear downward trend across mature and maturing markets alike

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According to Beau Whitney, the firm’s Chief Economist, the forecast is built on state-reported earnings, not public company disclosures or operator-reported financials. On paper, that sounds clean. Centralized, and official. But anyone who’s spent time inside a Dutchie back office, a BioTrack POS terminal, or a Cova traceability dashboard knows that’s where the cracks start to show.

Force Fed

Over the last few years, platforms like Cova, Dutchie, and Blaze have become the backbone of retail operations. They’re powerful, flexible, and fast—but they also allow sales to be captured at the point of sale even when those transactions technically fail. Why? Incorrect conversions, missing weights, mislabeled SKUs, failed API syncs, or outright traceability timeouts can all result in making the sale, but not telling the state about it.

In some cases if a single sku fails, the entire ticket is hung up. Multiply that across thousands of stores, millions of transactions, and a year full of rushed system updates, staffing churn, and duct-taped workflows—and suddenly “declining revenue” starts to look less like market contraction and more like data erosion.

Happenstance

Whitney Economics isn’t wrong to rely on regulator data—that’s the only standardized dataset that exists at scale. But when that dataset is fed by fragmented systems, inconsistent conversions, and under-audited sync failures, the resulting picture can be distorted. Maybe not by billions—but enough to tip a flat year into a “decline” on paper.

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So did the market shrink, or data just didn’t sync? It is hard to tell if demand actually dipped—or did the industry just spend a year ringing sales that never quite made it to the states?

Until traceability, POS, and ERP systems are forced to reconcile reality with reporting—cleanly, consistently, and without workaround culture—every forecast should carry an asterisk.