| After spending last Thursday at a medical cannabis cultivation facility on the east side of Cleveland, I returned home to a familiar voice: “Wow, I can smell you from here.”
That was my wife, finishing her workday from our living room couch.
“I know, isn’t it amazing!” I replied. At least I thought it was amazing.
It was my third time visiting Buckeye Relief’s 65,000-square-foot indoor cultivation and processing facility that produces some of the best-known cannabis products in Ohio. Each trip has been as astonishing as the last.
For me personally, the smell never gets old. I love the up-close aromas of the plant. I love sticking my nose in a freshly opened jar. I love having the terpenes hit me in the face, setting off all sorts of sensory receptors from past memories.
Unfortunately, that experience is fading quickly for cannabis retail customers who are more and more having to guess what they’re getting in sealed packages of flower from their local dispensaries. The days of budtenders grabbing a pair of tongs and picking the biggest buds out of a jar the customer just breathed in, before weighing and bagging it, are numbered.
Only 19 states in the U.S. continue to see this “deli-style” flower transaction in licensed retail shops, CBT Digital Editor Eric Sandy recently wrote in a business feature about Oklahoma legislation that could soon require pre-packaged flower in specific amounts.
“Our job’s not done until it’s sold to the patients, and for them to not be able to really experience the flower before they purchase—it’s just a really big concern of ours,” Joe Hendrix, Chief Financial Officer of Resonant Cultivation and Mosaic+ told Sandy.
Where will this really put the market, Hendrix questioned.
Not only could the integrity of flower be diminished as it sits pre-packaged on dispensary shelves, but so too could the customer experience and the promise of what’s being sold.
-Tony Lange, Associate Editor | 