I n the six years since cannabis prohibition ended in California, there’s been a race to the top in the industry for diversification, innovation, and education. For fifty years, the Back-to-the-Landers and Green Rushers of Humboldt County focused on avoiding law enforcement and growing guerilla crops without the benefit of widespread scholarly research to reach the plant’s full potential. Now that the industry has moved out of the shadows, a boom of new products and methods of consumption are available to cannabis consumers, highlighting newly discovered cannabinoids and the benefits of other parts of the plant – like terps.
Enter The Ganjery. The brainchild of local entrepreneurs Steve Gieder and Ken Hamik, The Ganjery is a dispensary set apart from a sea of competition in the cannabis country of Humboldt County, known worldwide as the Mecca of weed. With so much competition, Gieder and Hamik decided to focus on niche offerings with a hefty dose of education at the forefront. With the industry shifting away from a primary focus on THC – the most well-known cannabinoid that consumers crave – terpenes are making their debut as a sought-after psychoactive component of the plant that won’t leave you feeling high.
For the cannabis-curious who don’t want to dive into the deep end, The Ganjery offers the first-of-its-kind terpene oxygen bar where you can get a direct hit of oxygen infused with the full terpene profile from featured strains. This allows patrons to experience the essence of a cannabis strain while staying sober, but still benefiting from the terpenes’ interaction with their endocannabinoid receptors.
The Ganjery’s terp-oxygen bar is just the beginning of their innovative vision; in a glut of unverified cannabis available at competing dispensaries, Gieder has created another first-of-its-kind line of products – Fresh Strain – focused on verifying genetics and appellation of origin (with strain collector cards, to boot). Years of unregulated farming practices and strain sharing, coupled with the traditional market’s affinity for secrecy, have led to an undercurrent of illegitimacy. And even when strains are accurate, variation in growing methodology and terroir can create a drastically different product. Certified genetic verification gives consumers a certain confidence in what they’re consuming; for many of us, that’s a game-changer.
But Gieder and Hamik aren’t stopping there; their consulting division, 1 Degree Consulting, developed partnerships with California university researchers, LeafWorks, and a network of farmers to create yet another first-of-its-kind project that is, as Gieder describes, revolutionary: a cannabis herbarium, a repository of studied and verified genetics legitimized by scholarly research. A growing library of open source information for participants is stationed in Sebastopol, California, where actual leaf and bud pressings are part of a blossoming cannabis genome project that prohibition simply never allowed. As Gieder says, “In an industry that thrived on secrecy, bringing this information into an aggregate herbarium is revolutionary. Battling counterfeit genetics is the name of the game in a market that historically struggled with truthfulness. We’re bringing genetic accuracy and knowledge to the community so they know what they’re ingesting, all while building a connection to the farmer. We want to know what’s in our product, where it comes from, and how it was grown.” With all this in mind, it’s only a matter of time before the minds behind The Ganjery come out with the next first to propel cannabis into meeting its long overdue potential.
