Retail Cannabis Product Development: The Beginning of an Era

For the past eight years, I’ve served as editor of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery, a publication that dates its origin story back to the early 1900s when the American snack food industry expansion was just getting its start. Equipment innovations drove wider-scale mass production, business staked claims, and new retail channels brought the products to the delighted masses. It was a heady time, full of dreams and enterprising paths forward. Legends—and fortunes—were made.

As part of my work on the publication, I have the privilege of traveling the country, visiting with some of these legacy companies—producing snacks and baked goods—and telling their stories, entrusting their legends to historical record via our timeless virtual pages.

If the early 1900s in America’s snack industry sound strangely familiar, it’s because we’re living through that era once again. Just replace “snack foods” with “cannabis.”

Yes, we have seen many overly anxious green-rush capital investments into cannabis. The palpable excitement of today’s cannabis industry can sometimes get ahead of business strategies.

But retail cannabis product development—and particularly in the infused food and beverage market that we cover here at Cannabis Products—continues to grow more sophisticated, streamlining production in retail CPG categories that will see tremendous growth over the coming years as new markets continue to open across America and beyond. We are standing at ground zero of the cannabis food and beverage industry. These are heady days, full of dreams and enterprising paths forward. It’s time to stake your claim.

Cannabis Products exists to help make that dream a reality. And our editorial content, including presentations at events, is at its core.

This fall, we will reach thousands of global companies at the 2022 International Baking Industry Exposition (IBIE), taking place September 18 to 21 in Las Vegas. At the event, cannabis and the snack/bakery market—two of my editorial pillars here at BNP Media—will wonderfully merge in the Cannabis Central pavilion, powered by Cannabis Products, with cannabis-focused exhibitors, multimedia features, and a dedicated education track. Hope to see you there.

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Douglas J. Peckenpaugh is Group Editorial Director of Snack, Bakery, Cannabis, Meat, Candy and Food Safety for BNP Media. He has over two decades of publishing experience following the food industry from farm to fork, covering agriculture, ingredient processing, CPG and foodservice R&D, retail and restaurant menu trends, and retail grocery branding. He is a member of the Research Chefs Association and the International Foodservice Editorial Council. Doug studied Professional and Creative Writing at Purdue University.