The first cannabinoid scientists ever isolated from the cannabis plant wasn’t THC, and it wasn’t CBD. It was a molecule called cannabinol, or CBN, pulled from a “red oil” extract in 1896, decades before anyone had worked out what made the plant intoxicating. For a while, researchers even assumed CBN was the thing doing it. It wasn’t. Once THC was identified, CBN got filed away as a footnote: the weak, sleepy stuff that forms when THC breaks down with age, light, and heat.
A hundred and thirty years later, that footnote is a roughly billion-dollar business. Most of the people buying it every month barely know what it is.
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On its own, CBN is mostly a good trivia answer. The reason it’s worth paying attention to is the pattern underneath it: the cannabinoids beyond THC and CBD, the “minor” ones the industry hardly used to acknowledge, are becoming the most interesting part of the market. CBN is just the first to cross a billion dollars.
People stopped buying cannabis just to get high
A forgotten molecule doesn’t turn into a billion-dollar business on its own. What changed is the person doing the buying.
The line between “recreational” and “wellness” has basically dissolved. In a primary-care study of more than 175,000 cannabis users published in JAMA Network Open, 76 percent said they use cannabis to manage a health symptom (sleep, pain, anxiety, stress) even when they called themselves recreational users. For most of them, the high isn’t the whole point anymore; they’re buying a result.
Sleep is the clearest example. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that 22 million American adults already use a cannabis product to fall asleep, and another 60 million say they’d try it. That’s a lot of people reaching for the dispensary shelf, or the hemp shelf, to fix something they used to take melatonin or Ambien for.
Once the question becomes “what will this do for me” instead of “how high will this get me,” a molecule like CBN has an obvious job.
What the numbers say
Cannabinoid ingredient maker FloraWorks just finished a market analysis based on five years of Headset Analytics point-of-sale data, pulled straight from dispensary registers across 15 legal states, plus modeled estimates for markets and hemp channels that nobody measures directly. Some of the numbers surprised even those of us who’ve been doing this since the start.
Start with the topline. The U.S. CBN market in 2025 sits somewhere between $800 million and just over $1 billion. Inside regulated dispensaries, CBN now accounts for nearly 19 percent of every dollar spent on edibles, up from about 5 percent in 2021. Cumulative CBN edible sales over the five years crossed $1.6 billion.
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The number that cannot be ignored is the floor: in five years, quarterly CBN edible sales never once dropped below $116 million. Fads don’t hold a floor like that.
It shows up in the brands, too. CBN is the single best-selling ingredient in the country’s top-selling edible, and it’s the number-one product for 12 of the 29 largest edible brands. The companies that built deliberate CBN portfolios are, by and large, the same companies leading the category.
The part that matters most for anyone selling this stuff: people will pay a premium for it. CBN edibles run about 44 percent higher at wholesale than comparable products without it. THC potency has turned into a race to the bottom on price. Function hasn’t. Buyers still pay up for a product that does a specific thing.
It’s not only CBN
CBN got there first because its perceived benefit, sleep, is the easiest one for a person to feel and to shop for. It isn’t the only cannabinoid on the move, though.
CBG is being formulated for focus and daytime calm. THCV is turning up in energy and appetite products. CBC is moving from research curiosity toward something you can put on a shelf. Almost all of the growth in edibles right now is in products that pair THC with one of these minors, and the brands still betting on THC-only formulas are watching their growth flatten with the rest of the category.
There are more than 120 known cannabinoids, and plenty of them will turn out to be interchangeable or commercially beside the point. A handful won’t. CBN looks like one of those: it has real mechanistic activity of its own, which makes it a candidate for a specific outcome instead of one more claim on a label.
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The research is early, and there’s plenty left to do. But it’s clear where it’s going. The next generation of cannabis products won’t be built on THC alone.
What’s different from the first “CBN = sleepy” marketing wave a few years back is the evidence. There’s now real clinical research behind some of this, including a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of more than 1,000 people published in 2024.
Claims the industry used to make on instinct are starting to get tested. The more that happens, the harder these ingredients are to wave off as novelties.
Where this goes next
The most interesting frontier for CBN may not be the dispensary at all. Its biggest opportunity is the mainstream supplement aisle, the shelf where melatonin and magnesium live, where tens of millions of wellness shoppers who’d never walk into a dispensary go looking for a better night’s sleep.
That audience dwarfs the cannabis-and-hemp market that built CBN to a billion dollars in the first place. Getting onto that shelf takes the right safety data and regulatory groundwork, but the path is open in a way it isn’t for most of the plant.
Meanwhile, the dispensary side keeps adding runway. Minnesota and Delaware opened adult-use sales in 2025, and Virginia is pending. Each new market opens with the same conditions that built CBN’s first billion: not much competition, premium pricing, and customers already shopping for sleep and stress relief.
The oldest cannabinoid we know is teaching the industry its newest lesson. People don’t buy a sleep gummy to get high; they buy it to sleep. The molecule that proved that at scale is one most shoppers still can’t name. That won’t be true much longer.
*This article was submitted by an unpaid guest contributor. The opinions or statements within do not necessarily reflect those of GreenState or HNP. The author is solely responsible for the content.