There is a running joke here at Lifted Spirits that anytime a new hype strain starts blowing up on Instagram someone asks what is in it and inevitably someone shouts back…”Fucking Cookies!” While in the past I have been quite vocal about my disdain for the Cookies brand…the Cookies genetics themselves are pretty fucking good. It’s a great & balanced hybrid that brings a lot to the table including frost and taste. Our problem isn’t with the Cookies genetics per se…it’s more that every new cultivar coming out has Cookies in it. So why is Cookies in pretty much every new cultivar and why is that such a bad thing?
I think we have to tackle the first question right off the bat…why exactly is Cookies in every new cultivar? To answer this question we needed someone who is well versed in cannabis genetics and current cannabis trends so we tapped into none other than our good friend Robbie, owner of Nerds Genetics to weigh in on the topic.
What Robbie made clear from the beginning of the interview was that if you want to know why Cookies is in everything, you have to understand what Cookies brings to the table and what purpose it serves in the modern market.
#1…It brings frost….and lots of it! Cookies is perhaps some of the frostiest flower that you can find on the market and whatever it is bred to, it just dumps trichomes all over it. It is consistent as fuck and breeders know exactly what it will bring to the table every time. Robbie explained that because Cookies brings such dominant traits to whatever it is bred to, its easy for breeders to get the looks that the market wants and they can be pretty sure of what the offspring will look like in a breeding project. Because 99% of cannabis marketing is done through social media, taste and smell don’t translate at all, but picture perfect iced out flower is what gets people’s attention.
Because the cannabis industry has been hijacked by celebrities hawking iced out pictures of flower in their attempt to create an industry of cool, people were brainwashed into thinking iced out flower is the best so that is what the market currently wants. That is what made Berner, the unquestioned front man of the Cookies empire, such a visionary in 2012 when he decided to intertwine his hip hop career/connections with this amazing new strain of weed, eventually branded as Girl Scout Cookies.
Once Cookies became the strain that rappers were rapping about and pictures of iced out flower started showing up on celebrity IG accounts, it was mission accomplished and Cookies became the next big thing in cannabis. After a few years, Cookies started showing up in every cross because it had that name attached to it and the bag appeal to quickly bring notoriety to any new breeder who wanted to make a name for themselves on IG. Then because it was cool, people demanded cannabis companies to supply it, which put pressure on cultivators and breeders to grow it, insert vicious cycle here.
But this is where the insatiable thirst for picture perfect cultivars has led the market down a narrow genetics path because Cookies basically dominates whatever it is bred to. In a recent Breeders Syndicate 3.0 episode, Matt Riot and Co. explored the history of Cookies and Thousandfold did a long term breeding project with Cookies hybrids to see what kind of variation he could find in the genetics. After several months and trials, it was abundantly clear that the only thing they were able to find was more of the same… Cookies on Cookies on Cookies on Cookies. It didn’t matter what they did to it, Cookies dominated everything with trichromes and raw Cookie dough terps. So whatever traits that were in the non-Cookies cultivar disappeared and everything was replaced by Cookies. To me that is like The Borg in Star Trek taking over whatever it touches and replacing it with a copy of itself.
While I may be over-reacting with the Borg commentary, this is the very bottleneck that breeders and commercial cultivators have gotten us into. Yes we have a ton of great looking flower out there, but the majority of the menu is dominated by a single powerful genetic leaving consumers with limited range of cannabinoids/terpenes and psychotropic effects. While some may argue that this is just something for weed nerds and breeders to complain about, I would argue the opposite. It is the consumer that should care about this the most.
Why? Because the majority of the positive cannabinoids, terpenes, esters, etc. are in the cultivars that are either getting dominated by Cookies or just aren’t grown or bred to at all because it doesn’t bring the frost and bag appeal that IG wants right now. Medical patients get a narrow range of medicinal properties in their cannabis right now and the terpenes and cannabinoids that they do need aren’t available because they aren’t commercially viable. Why people should also care is the simple fact that legal premium weed is fucking expensive and if you keep getting enticed with the newest cultivar that is in, only to find out it’s just a redux of the previous hype Cookies cultivar, then you wasted your money on more of the same when it could have been spent on something new and actually different.
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So what the hell can save us from this bottleneck?
One of the nice surprises that we have seen over the past year has been an increasing amount of demand for older cultivars that have not been seen on the market for 20 or more years. While trying to find older genetics that are actually what people say they are can be a challenge, more and more legacy breeders have begun to open up their own libraries and start their own seed companies to provide the market with quality and genuine older genetics.
For example, we have seen a huge trend towards people incorporating original Sour Diesels, Chem D, Chem 91, Headband, Shoreline, Deathstar, G-13…just to name a few. This is a huge development because as anyone who was alive and smoking weed in the late 90s/early 2000s is well aware, the cannabis back then had much higher terpene percentages and completely different cannabinoid/terpene profiles. Because everything retro is modern again, there has been a shift in consumer demand and we are beginning to see Cookies hybrids taking up less shelf space and less Instagram posts then in recent memory.
This is a great start but we need to keep pushing further. Breeders like Mass Medical Strains has been advocating for the incorporating of more legacy/landrace genetics from different regions in the world however the current market doesn’t have a taste for longer growing fluffier flower so we have some work to do as growers and breeders to shift the consumer market in a new direction. But that roadmap has been laid out for us by craft beer and bourbon. 10 years ago people would laugh at you if you asked them to drink a sour beer or a beer that tastes like chocolate milk, but here we are in a market where these kind of products flourish.
What we are most excited for is with each state relaxing more and more of their cannabis laws, legacy growers have become to come out of the shadows and opening up to their libraries to select growers and even getting into the business for themselves. Whether it be Skunk VA from Luckydog Cannabis Company or Pbud Mike with Sunburn Cannabis, more and more legacy breeders are starting to get into the legal markets and putting out quality products that are throw backs to the 90s and early 2000s cultivars. We ourselves have been lucky enough to get access to some amazing old school genetics such as Dumpster, Deathstar, Lemon G, White Widow, etc. from our good friends in the community and are treating these genetics with the respect and care that they deserve. Giving credit where credit is due to encourage more legacy growers to open up long held cultivars that are surely only in the hands of a few.
But trying to find real legacy genetics is where a whole new set of problems get brought up. Just ask anyone who has been growing for a long period of time how hard it is to find real Sour Diesel, Blueberry, OG Kush, etc. Our industry is full of people who say they have some 30 year-old cultivar that has been kept in their family, but the truth is most of these people are totally lying or what they have pales in comparison to the real thing. Remember what happens when you make a copy of a copy…the quality consistently goes down with every copy that is made. You make enough…and all you have left is a faded copy that only resembles the original. Interesting enough, our friend Chemma Diesel of Chemma Lab said it best: the reason why we are stuck in the Cookies bottleneck to begin with is because of the poor practices of the legacy breeders.
Just like most of the problems in our industry, the responsibility for fixing these issues rests in the hands of many people. While we don’t have control over what everyone is doing, consumers surely have the power to control what the market breeds, grows, and sells based on what they buy and who they follow on instagram.
In a time long before social media, cannabis wasn’t bought solely based on looks but rather how it smelled, tasted, looked, and most importantly how it made you feel. We need to get back to those metrics because most people will tell you the best weed they smoked probably didn’t look the prettiest, but it smelled/tasted amazing and got you high as fuck. We don’t buy weed because it looks good…we buy weed to get our spirits lifted so we need to step out of our comfort zones when we purchase cannabis and focus less on looks/hype and more how it makes you feel.
If you find something that you really like at your local dispensary that isn’t a hype strain, be sure to let your budtender know how much you like it and buy it again. Share it on IG with your friends and create some chatter in your friend groups. Better yet…smoke your friends out with some different kinds of smoke that they typically wouldn’t smoke and turn them into believers and have them go into their local dispensary and tell them to carry that in stock. If the impossible happens and a breeder/cannabis company decides to experiment with some exotic cultivars, get out there and support their decisions by purchasing and sharing it with friends. Mass Medical Strains went even further and suggested that cannabis companies and breeders looking to convert people to different types of smoke should give away free samples of these lesser purchased cannabis cultivars to convert people over. These are just a few of our suggestions, what do you guys think we can do to change the market ourselves?