$10.6 billion: That was the value of the North American legal cannabis market in 2021. According to a recent report from Grand View Research, the cannabis market is expected to enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.7% from 2022 to 2030. The takeaway? There is big money to be made in cannabis, and a multi-billion-dollar supply chain lends itself to an extensive threat landscape.

Matt Johnson is Vice President of Risk Services at QuadScore Insurance Services, which specializes in insuring cannabis businesses. He sees the cannabis supply chain as having four distinct links. “Cultivation is your first link in the chain; that can be indoor, greenhouse or outdoor,” Johnson says. “Then you’ve got processing and manufacturing as the next step. That’s turning your plant biomass into usable products like edibles, packaged cannabis flowers, pre-rolls, tinctures, topicals and transdermals. [Then,] it is the distribution phase, which is how you get all of the processed goods from that facility over to a retail or medical dispensary, which is the fourth and final link in the supply chain.”