If you play video games like myself, you surely have played games where you get to create your own character and select which attributes you want them to have. The trick is that you have limited points so if you put all your points into weapons then you have no points left for speed and you are left with a character with amazing weapons but gets run down from behind every single time. What most cannabis consumers don’t realize is that growing out cannabis plants and making selections for production is basically the same thing and also the reason for why most of the cultivars you will find in your dispensary smell like cardboard.
How so you ask? Easy…we operate in a cannabis market that is driven by Instagram posts and celebrity endorsements. This means that most people are being influenced by visual images and videos rather than what their head, nose, and mouth are telling them they like. Cannabis breeders, cultivators, and retailers know this all too well and in-turn have made their selections based not on how they make you feel or how they smell/taste but rather how they look and how much of it they can grow. And how the market wants cannabis flower to look is iced out, trichrome laden dense flowers that photograph extremely well. I mean…who doesn’t like iced out flowers to smoke?
The problem with this however is that just like in our video game example, selecting one trait that is way over dominant will result in other attributes in other areas being far below average. If you had to take one guess what attribute would be far below average when cultivators are prioritizing trichome coverage, THC%, and yield? You guessed it…terpene profile and percentage. That is the main reason why so much cannabis smells like cardboard in most recreational/medical states…because the market is enamored with flashy pictures and high yielding plants we devalue terpenes and as a result we get great looking weed that smells like cardboard. If that wasn’t bad enough, what terpenes are there evaporate away when they cut the plants down 2 weeks early to save money and speed dry the flower to get it to market faster.
These are important things for consumers to understand because corporate cannabis does not respect the consumer and believes that they can get away with supplying inferior products because they make more money off of high yielding pretty plants and the consumer doesn’t put any pressure on cannabis companies to supple anything different.
Call To Action:
This is an important CTA because there are plenty of blogs out there complaining about the commercial industry but don’t really offer up any advice aside from a “Screw Corporate Cannabis” mentality. If we are to change this dynamic we can really do 2 things that stand a chance of working.
First, since the major issue is commercial cannabis needing yield and looks over anything else, breeders could start to develop more commercial specialized lines of genetics that attempt to take the frost and yield and marry it to the more home grower profiles of frost and terps. That would allow at least a possibility of a facility doing a large enough pheno hunt to find something that can pack a punch flavor wise that people aren’t used to seeing in mids and from cultivars that normally wouldn’t be grown in a commercial facility.
The second thing that we can do is smoke people out with the cultivars that normally you would just keep to yourself and your friends. Why do you ask? Because unless you were smoking pre 2000, there is a good chance that unless your friend is a grower, you probably haven’t smoked REALLY GOOD weed. It’s not being an elitist and a homer for my generation, it’s just the weed was way terpier back then because smell was what sold weed back then.
What this means is that most of the consumer market, especially the converted 18-25 demographic, doesn’t know what really good weed is. Hell, most of the owners I have spoken too don’t understand what really good weed is (i.e. they show me their THC test results). So if we start to get regular folks to try some of the private stock we have been holding into for the past 30 years, they will finally realize how good weed can be and will demand that quality from the industry.
Don’t believe me? That is exactly how the bourbon industry took off because people started trying good bourbons and realized it’s not some oldtimey alcohol their dad drank but something that was so much better than anything that was out there. Soon people demanded brands like Blanton’s, E H. Taylor, Buffalo Trace, etc. And soon their prices went up and now you can’t find those on the shelves in liquor stores unless you are there when the delivery is made. The beer, wine, and bourbon market trends of the last 30 years are the guide to how to shift the cannabis industry.
So who are you smoking out today?