A question we get asked a lot from our readers is "how many CBD companies are there currently operating in the UK?".
It's a really good question because it can feel like there is a new CBD brand popping up every day, and to be honest we have always suspected that this might actually be the case! But we thought it would be a good idea to actually dig into the data and try to figure out how many CBD companies there are currently operating in the UK. Let's get into it:
How many CBD companies do CBD-Intel estimate are operating in the UK (2021)?
How many CBD companies are members of the UK CBD trade associations (2021)?
What does our own research show?
How many CBD companies do CBD-Intel estimate are operating in the UK?
CBD-Intel is an organisation that provides market and regulatory analysis and data for the CBD industry, and is a great resource to check out. We reached out to the team to see what they had to say about how many CBD brands there are in the UK, and this is what they had to say:
How many CBD companies have joined the different UK CBD trade associations?
The biggest CBD trade associations in the UK at the moment are the Cannabis Trades Association (CTA), The Association for the Cannabinoid Industry (ACI) and Cannabis Professionals (CannaPro). Each of these associations has a membership scheme and the majority of CBD companies currently operating in the UK have joined one of these associations, however it is not mandatory. Here are the number of members within each association:
CTA - 187 businesses
The ACI - 27 businesses
CannaPro - 83 businesses
So collectively, the 3 biggest trade associations in the UK have 297 CBD businesses currently registered with them.
What does our own research show?
As we mentioned in the previous section, it is not a requirement for a CBD business to join one of these associations if they want to operate within the UK. So although taking a look at their membership numbers is a good estimate, it won't tell the whole picture.
We decided to head to Google and use a few searches to try and fish out a more accurate estimate of all the CBD businesses currently operating within the UK. To do this we simply searched for CBD businesses in the biggest locations across the UK and counted the results that we found within the local results, the assumption being that if a company has an address here then they are likely to still be operating. It took a whole but here are our results:
CBD companies in Manchester- 56
CBD companies in London - 162
CBD companies in Liverpool - 16
CBD companies in Glasgow - 29
CBD companies in Belfast - 16
Very interesting! So although this might have been a little bit of a blunt approach, we think it gives us a pretty good overall estimate. And funnily enough this approach gave us a total of 279 businesses, very close to the estimate we pulled from looking at the trade associations. We think it's pretty safe to say that there are around 300 CBD businesses currently operating in the UK, but this doesn't account for other businesses that might be selling CBD as part of their offering.
In Conclusion
CBD is definitely a craze that has taken the UK by storm, and it's not surprising to see that roughly 300 CBD companies have jumped on the bandwagon in the UK. Check out the best of the bunch here.
This guide was published by the CBD Bible team. We publish hundreds of guides every month, feel free to explore our website for more reviews and CBD guides.
