THC Potency Isn't Everything: Here Are Some Strategies To Deal With Industry Challenges

The widespread myth of Indica, Sativa, and hybrid designation, as well as the focus on high THC, is still prevalent, according to Stella Morrison, founder and content strategist at CannaContent, who kicked off the discussion at the recent Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference in Chicago. She explained that the lack of education among consumers presents challenges for cultivators and brands who want to introduce more nuanced or tailored products into the market.

Morisson hosted a panel discussion whether cultivation trends define retail demand or vice versa. Panelists sharing their expertise on the matter included Jordan Ascanio, creative director of CLS Holdings USA Inc.; Gary Santo, CEO of Rx Green Technologies; Will Bowden, founder & CEO of Grasshopper Farms; and Brett Novey, CEO of PharmaCann.

Santo highlighted that while price and potency are still selling in the newer markets, people in more mature markets are starting to seek for the fuller experience. "If you go to any of the markets where you can have sort of that deli style, smell the nose of the flower, you start to find that some of the best smelling flower doesn’t have the highest THC percentage," he said. Santo added that this directly influences growers and brands in their decisions on what they'll plant.

Morisson followed up, saying it’s all about "understanding the purpose of the flower that you’re growing in the first place." There's a difference between growing flower for extraction and growing because you want to sell whole flower.

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No Cut-And-Paste Formula

PharmaCann's Novey talked about having to understand what the consumers want, highlighting that's the difficult part as it takes at least a year. "The cultivation facility is sort of always chasing the consumer a little bit," he said.

He further stressed how that preference changes and today not only potency and price matter, there are also terpenes. "Dry cure is a very important part of a high quality flower, you know, and you could spend six, 12 weeks growing a great plant and ruin it in a day if you have a horrible dry cure. So all these things matter."

Novey reafirmed that this is hard work that it requires a lot of time. "It's not like what consumers prefer in Colorado is identical to what consumers prefer in New York. So you’re sort of have like these micro environments that you’re trying to understand in real time, the feedback from the budtenders at the stores so that we could adopt to it, but the risk is that it changes in the next 12 months." When you reprogram the grow there is risk that you've misread the market, and that you have to do it all over again.

Morisson pointed out that there's no such thing "as cut-and-paste formula."

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Listing Top Three Terepens

CLS Holdings USA's Ascanio shared her expertise in marketing, stressing the importance of going directly to your budtender, when it comes to the retail side. On the brand side, it is important to have proper educational materials that would help you sell the product. "I never gear it to towards the Indica – Sativa aspect. I gear it towards – this is something fresh. This is something you're going to want to try and it might work for you and it might not, but if it’s good quality flower, nine times out of 10, that customer is going to come back to pay for it, especially if you’re marketing it correctly."

Ascaion is educating people by keeping the terpenes up on TVs consistently. She lists top three terepens, and highlight the effect they may have on consumers. According to her, that's pretty much everything you need to communicate to the consumer – "this is the effect it's going to bring you, and these are the terepens and the reasons why."

Understanding Your Identity

Grasshopper Farms's Bowden followed up highlighting the importance of understanding your identity – what are you trying to accomplish in this industry. It is really important to have competent budtenders who are able to guide the discussions with customers an help them choose the right products, he said. And as more mature markets influence the new market it's important to have a balance in different strains and effects.

"Let’s also remember that the consumers who come into the dispensaries right now is not our largest consumer potential population," Bowden continued. "The cannabis curious who haven’t walked into a dispensary yet is our largest, largest audience out there. And we really need to seek to understand what it is that they need to know more of and what are they trying to accomplish."

Novey noted that the most important feedback is from budtenders, and that they need to understand what the customers are saying back and share that with the general managers. From general managers that feedback needs to go though regional managers, the head of the commercial team, the head of the chief manufacturing officer, the head of cultivation and then to the analytics team. There so many parts, but you have to make a concerted effort to make sure you not missing something.

Convenience, Quality And Consistency

Bowden focused on convenience, paired with quality and consistency. According to him, "quality and consistency are the two things that are going to trump everything when it comes to the evolution of the products that are made available to people so that they can buy them in a convenient way."

He also discussed the importance of transparency and inclusive experiences as ways to reduce stigma."So that’s what we do at Grasshopper Farms. People come out, take tours every day of the year, if they want to, and sign up online and we do open houses once a year." Bowden encouraged other companies to that to get education more to the forefront and help people to really have a great experience with this product.

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Photo by Wendy Davis