What Is Weighted ACV Distribution?

Hoodie Analytics · Market Intelligence

If you’ve ever pulled a distribution report and felt like the number on the page didn’t match what your sales team was feeling in the field, weighted ACV distribution is probably the reason. It’s one of the most useful numbers in cannabis retail analytics, and one of the most commonly misunderstood.

Numeric distribution: the simple count

Numeric distribution is the number you already know. It’s the percentage of stores in a given market or territory that carry your product. If there are 100 dispensaries in a territory and your brand is on the shelf in 40 of them, your numeric distribution is 40 percent. It’s a headcount. It treats every store the same, whether that store rings up a few hundred dollars a month in your category or moves tens of thousands.

That’s exactly where it falls short. A store count tells you how many doors you’re in. It doesn’t tell you how much business is actually happening behind those doors.

Weighted ACV distribution: the number that accounts for volume

Weighted ACV (All Commodity Volume) distribution answers a different question: of all the category sales happening across a market, what share is happening in stores that carry your product? Instead of counting stores equally, it weights each store by its sales volume in the category. Being in a high-volume store counts for more than being in a low-volume one, because it should: that’s where the actual dollars are moving.

An illustrative example (not real data):

Say Brand A and Brand B are each carried in the same 40 stores in a territory.

• Those 40 stores, together, do $200,000 a month in category sales for Brand A’s product type.
• Brand B is in a different set of 40 stores that only do $60,000 a month combined in that same category.

Same numeric distribution: 40 stores for each brand. Very different weighted ACV distribution. Brand A’s presence sits inside a much bigger share of where the actual category dollars are changing hands. Brand B has the same door count on paper, but a much smaller share of category sales flowing through its shelf space.

If both brands only ever looked at numeric distribution, they’d conclude they were in an identical competitive position. They are not.

Why this matters when you’re deciding where to go next

For a brand or category manager, the gap between these two numbers is a prioritization tool, not just a reporting quirk.

• It tells you whether your distribution is actually working for you. A brand can look strong on paper (wide numeric distribution) while quietly sitting in a lot of low-volume stores that don’t move much product. Weighted ACV distribution surfaces that gap early.
• It sharpens where you send your sales team next. Two open stores might look equally attractive from a numeric standpoint. Once you weight them by category sales volume, one is clearly the better use of a rep’s time this week.
• It reveals competitor exposure you’d otherwise miss. A competitor with lower numeric distribution than you, but higher weighted ACV distribution, is quietly capturing more of the category’s real dollars than the store count suggests, and is worth watching closely.
• It keeps expansion decisions honest. Chasing numeric distribution alone can mean adding doors that don’t move the needle. Chasing weighted ACV distribution means chasing where the category’s money already is.

The two numbers are meant to be read together. Numeric distribution tells you how wide your footprint is. Weighted ACV distribution tells you how much that footprint is actually worth. Hoodie cannabis market intelligence tracks both, daily, across all 42 legal U.S. cannabis markets and several Canadian provinces, so you’re never deciding based on the count alone.