What Was The Top Selling Marijuana Strain In Colorado And Washington In 2015?

A lot of marijuana was sold in 2015 in Colorado and Washington. Unlike 2014 when Colorado started rolling out legal recreational marijuana sales prior to Washington, and both states doing so in a limited capacity, 2015 saw both states selling recreational marijuana from the start of the year through the end of the year. More and more stores opened up during 2015, so that’s worth mentioning, but 2015 is the first full year of both states doing recreational sales.

A natural question that people have asked since the end of 2015 is ‘which marijuana strain was the top seller during 2015?’ According to a company that tracks marijuana strain sales in both states, both Colorado and Washington sold more Blue Dream than any other marijuana strain. Per Civilized:

Last year’s #1-selling strain in both Colorado and Washington was Blue Dream, a sativa-dominant hybrid of Blueberry indica and Haze, according to new data released by BDS Analytics.

(image via Civilized.Life)

The firm, founded nearly a year ago, gathers info about recreational and medical cannabis sales in both states, via participating dispensaries, and has a total of over 20 million transactions in its database. Founder and CEO Roy Bingham tells Civilized the popularity of Blue Dream can be attributed, in part, to savvy marketing.

“We have literally thousands of strains in our database, and Blue Dream is #1 in both Washington and Colorado,” he says. “There’s clearly marketing around individual strains, and budtenders point consumers in the direction of a particular product. I imagine that soon there will be less opinion, and more science, around that.”

I have talked about my ‘Blue Dream theory’ from time to time on this blog, and barring a more compelling theory, I’ll stick with it. I have smoked a lot of Blue Dream over the years, as have most marijuana veterans. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. It’s ‘generic chronic’ as my friend always says. If you hand me a bowl of it, I’ll gladly consume it. But if I get my choice, I pass it up because as one prominent marijuana activist recently said on Facebook, Blue Dream is really ‘bland.’

So if Blue Dream isn’t the best marijuana strain out there, or even close, why does it sell at such a higher volume compared to all other marijuana strains in Colorado and Washington? I don’t think it has to do with popularity. My theory is that it has much more to do with the fact that Blue Dream is EVERYWHERE. Cherry OG is common, but it’s certainly not everywhere in Washington. Also, Durban Poison is common in Colorado, but it’s not on virtually every shelf in Colorado like Blue Dream is.

Blue Dream is a very hearty marijuana strain, and has very consistent yields compared to other strains. That makes it very popular with growers since they can fairly easily gauge how much, and what quality, of yield to expect from their harvests. So it’s not that Blue Dream is the best strain, or is the most popular with consumers necessarily, as much as there’s just so many growers that grow it, and flood every outlet where they are allowed. That then leads to a higher volume of sales, and gives the illusion that Blue Dream is the most popular marijuana strain in Washington and Colorado, and likely other states that follow in Colorado and Washington’s footsteps. Because there’s so much Blue Dream around, it’s almost always one of the cheapest ‘good strains’ at any outlet, and is often used for promotions from what I see, which convinces people to purchase it instead of more expensive, better strains.

I don’t want to take away from the Blue Dream strain, because like I said, it’s good. But it’s not great. It reminds me a lot of marijuana that was prevalent in the Pacific Northwest in the 2000’s that a lot of people called ‘work’ or ‘beast.’ It was technically good marijuana in that it had good crystal coverage, little to no seeds, wasn’t compact, etc. But it still left a lot to be desired, and when you got the authentic high caliber cannabis, you instantly realized what you were missing out on. That’s how I feel about Blue Dream. I wouldn’t kick it to the curb, but when given the chance, I would choose a different strain to consume more often than not. What do readers think? Is Blue Dream all over your area? Do you think that Blue Dream is truly the most popular marijuana strain out there, or are the statistics reflecting something else?