What Real Consumers Actually Want From THC Dosing

What the Data Tells the Industry

There's a question that has quietly shaped the infused beverage category since its earliest days, and almost no one has answered it with real data: what THC dose do consumers actually prefer?

Not what regulators have approved. Not what brands have decided to produce. Not what sounds responsible in a press release. What do real people, using real products in their real lives, actually want from a single serving of an infused beverage?

The MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study set out to answer that question — and the answer has implications that extend well beyond any single brand. With more than 5,400 participants, 38 products, and two full cohorts of post-study reviews now combined into a single data set, the industry finally has a consumer-level signal on THC dose preference that can hold up to scrutiny.

What it shows is both clarifying and commercially significant. And as a federal regulatory update widely expected to compress the operating range for hemp-derived beverages approaches on the horizon, it arrives at exactly the right moment.

Here's what the data says — and what it means for consumers, brands, and anyone paying attention to where this category is heading.

The Setup: Why This Question Matters Right Now

The infused beverage market largely converged on a 2–5mg per serving standard. That wasn't a regulatory requirement — state caps vary considerably, and many products already ship at 10mg or higher. It was a market choice, driven by a combination of consumer research, regulatory caution, and what brands believed would feel approachable to new users.

That choice is about to face pressure from two directions simultaneously.

On the consumer side, the study data now offers something that has never existed before: a large-scale, real-world look at how dose tier actually affects consumer satisfaction, recommendation intent, and product loyalty — across dozens of products and thousands of verified participants.

On the regulatory side, a federal threshold update expected in November is widely anticipated to push the ceiling lower for hemp-derived beverages. Senior FDA advisors have noted directly that consumer dose patterns — and the industry's pace at addressing them — are factors in that timeline. Whatever the final number lands at, the operational window for many brands is expected to compress.

The questions this creates are practical and urgent: what does the data actually say about consumer dose preference at the serving level? And what are consumers doing with multi-serving formats — where the container itself can enable total THC intake far beyond what a single-serve can allows?

The MoreBetter study pulled consumer signal from two cohorts to answer both.

What the Data Says About Serving-Level Dose Preference

The combined data set covers 3,738 verbatim post-study reviews across 38 products and 5,446 participants, with THC serving sizes ranging from 1mg to 20mg. Researchers divided products into three dose tiers — low (≤3mg), mid (4–7mg), and high (≥10mg) — and tracked satisfaction signals across all of them.

Three findings stand out.

Underdosing Complaints Are Real — And They Scale

The most persistent consumer frustration in the infused beverage category isn't getting too high. It's not feeling anything at all.

The data makes this concrete. "Didn't feel it / wasn't enough" complaints appeared in 8.2% of reviews at the low-dose tier (≤3mg), dropped to 6.0% in the mid tier (4–7mg), and fell further to 3.6% at 10mg and above. "Wished it were stronger" followed the same clean gradient: 5.2% of reviews at ≤3mg, 3.6% at 4–7mg, 2.6% at ≥10mg. Even the rate at which consumers reported drinking two or more cans just to feel an effect scaled downward with dose — from 3.6% at low dose to 1.8% at high.

That last number deserves attention. A consumer who drinks two cans to feel the effect of one isn't consuming less — they're consuming more, at a higher cost, with less predictability. The behavior regulators and brands most want to prevent is the one most likely to emerge when the dose-per-serving is insufficient to meet consumer need.

Overdose Complaints Don't Scale With Dose

Here's the finding that tends to surprise people when they first see it: "too strong / too potent" complaints are essentially flat across all three dose tiers — hovering between approximately 2.4% and 2.7% of reviews regardless of whether the product was a low-dose seltzer or a high-dose offering.

There's a caveat worth naming honestly: this is a free-product study where participants self-selected into the dose tier they enrolled in. The absence of "too strong" feedback at 10mg and above partly reflects that the consumers who chose those products believed they could handle them. It's useful data, not a randomized trial.

But it's useful data that directly challenges the assumption embedded in much of the category's early positioning — that lower doses are inherently safer because they're less likely to produce negative reactions. What the data suggests instead is that consumers are capable of self-selecting into appropriate dose tiers, and that when they do, discomfort complaints are consistent and low across the board.

Recommendation Intent Climbs With Dose

Perhaps the most commercially significant finding in the serving-level data is this: recommendation intent scales upward with dose, not against it.

Among structured "I will recommend this product" survey responses, 73% of low-dose reviewers agreed or strongly agreed. At mid dose, that number climbed to 79%. At high dose, it reached 83%.

That is a measurable, ten-point gap between the consumers who got the dose they needed and the consumers who didn't — and it shows up directly in the reorder and referral funnel. The brands operating at 2–3mg aren't just leaving consumer satisfaction on the table. They're leaving word-of-mouth growth on the table. And if the regulatory floor drops, compressing dose further downward, that gap widens.

The Multi-Serving Format Problem Is Different — And More Complex

Single-serve cans are, in a sense, self-regulating. If a product is 5mg per can, consuming 50mg requires purchasing and drinking ten cans. The format creates friction. It makes high-volume consumption visible and logistically inconvenient in a way that limits the tail of use.

Multi-serving formats don't work that way. A spirit-style bottle labeled "5mg per shot" with 100mg total in the container. A squeeze enhancer at "5mg per squeeze" with 150mg in the bottle. These formats remove the friction that single-serve cans provide automatically — and the MoreBetter data on four multi-serve products across three format types shows exactly what that means in practice.

Spirit Bottles: A Cumulative Tail

The modal consumption pattern for spirit-bottle formats is one shot per day. Most users, most of the time, are doing what the label suggests. But a measurable share of consumption days extend to three, four, or more shots — and the bottle format structurally enables what canned formats structurally limit. The total THC intake at the top of the consumption tail in spirit-bottle data reaches levels that simply don't appear in single-serve can consumption. The tail is small in percentage terms. But in absolute dose, it's a different category of experience than anything the canned format produces.

Tinctures: Lower Structural Risk

Tinctures tell a different story. Modal use stays near the labeled serving, and per-dropper doses are small enough that even aggressive multi-dropper days don't compound into genuinely high absolute mg totals. The extreme-dose risk that lives in the spirit-bottle format doesn't appear in the tincture data at meaningful levels. This format's design characteristics — small incremental doses, manual dispensing, visible volume changes — do real harm-reduction work even without a consumer's conscious intention.

Squeeze Enhancers: Per-Event Overdosing

The squeeze enhancer finding is the one regulators will find most notable — and the mechanism is different from what appears in spirit bottles. The problem isn't accumulation across a day. It's exceeding the labeled serving in a single dispensing event.

Approximately 17% of dosing events with squeeze enhancer formats exceeded the labeled serving size. Not across a day of cumulative use — at the point of a single squeeze. Stack two of those in a day and a product labeled as a single-serving-per-use format can deliver well above its label without the consumer perceiving that they've exceeded anything. The label said one serving. They dispensed what felt like one serving. The mechanism simply makes accurate single-serving dispensing harder than the label implies.

The honest summary the study offers: the modal consumer in every multi-serve format is not aggressively over-titrating. Most spirit-bottle days are one-shot days. Roughly half of squeeze events land at the labeled serving. But multi-serve formats produce a real, measurable tail of self-titrated consumption that single-serve cans cannot produce — and when regulators look at the November ceiling, that tail is where their attention will focus first.

What This Means for the Category — and for You as a Consumer

The infused beverage market is at an inflection point. The regulatory environment is tightening, the consumer data is maturing, and the brands that built their positioning on assertion rather than evidence are running out of runway.

What the MoreBetter dose data establishes clearly is that the relationship between dose and consumer experience is real, measurable, and consequential. Underdosing doesn't make a product safer — it makes consumers less satisfied, less likely to recommend the product, and more likely to consume multiple servings to compensate. Overdosing complaints, by contrast, don't spike with dose when consumers self-select appropriately. And format matters as much as formulation — because a product's container shapes consumption behavior in ways that have nothing to do with what's printed on the label.

For consumers navigating this category, that's actually useful and actionable information. A single-serve, precisely dosed product — one where the format and the label tell the same story, where one serving is what the container delivers — is a fundamentally different kind of product than a multi-serve format where individual intake depends heavily on how the consumer uses it on any given day.

Why Dose Consistency Is at the Core of What We Make at 23rd State

At 23rd State, the study data on dose and format reflects commitments that have been part of how we build products since day one.

FRESH PRESS, our THC+CBG pear cider, is a single-serve format. One can, one experience, one consistent dose — no guesswork, no accumulating across servings, no mechanism for the consumer to accidentally exceed what they intended to consume. SHAKE, our THC+CBG edible glitter drops, is designed the same way: precision over ambiguity, consistency over variability. Blush Crush Infused Bubbly brings that same philosophy to a sparkling wine format, available in cans that keep every serving accountable.

This isn't incidental. It's a product philosophy rooted in the belief that consumers are better served by predictability than by flexibility — that knowing exactly what you're getting, every time, is more valuable than a format that gives you the option to use more than you meant to.

The MoreBetter data validates that philosophy. The single-serve can is the format that does harm-reduction work automatically. It's the format that makes the labeled dose the actual dose. It's the format where the gap between intention and consumption is smallest — and where a consumer who wants one serving gets one serving, without having to think carefully about how much they're pouring.

That's not a small thing. In a category where format and dose are about to face serious regulatory scrutiny, it's the foundation.

The Bottom Line

The MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study has given the infused beverage industry something it has needed since its earliest days: rigorous, large-scale, real-world data on what consumers actually want and what they actually do with the products they're given.

On dose, the signal is clear. Low-dose products produce meaningfully higher rates of "didn't feel it" feedback and measurably lower recommendation intent. High-dose products, used by consumers who self-select into them, produce the highest satisfaction and the lowest overdose complaint rates. The relationship is consistent across 38 products and two cohorts.

On format, the signal is equally clear. Single-serve cans do harm-reduction work that multi-serve formats cannot replicate automatically. The tail of high-consumption days that appears in spirit-bottle and squeeze-enhancer data simply doesn't exist in canned formats — because the format itself is the mechanism.

As the regulatory environment tightens and the November threshold update approaches, these findings will shape which brands are positioned to adapt and which are scrambling. The categories that will come through strongest are the ones already operating where the data points: consistent dose, transparent format, and a product experience that delivers exactly what it promises.

At 23rd State, we think that's exactly what cannabis beverages should be. The data, increasingly, agrees.

Data referenced in this post is sourced from the MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study (combined Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 data, N=5,446 participants, 38 products, 3,738 post-study reviews). Individual results may vary. Must be 21+ to purchase. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute regulatory or legal advice.

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