Fans of pre-ground flowers have no time for cannabis snobs
For Toronto’s Irelyne Lavery, her reasons for switching from cannabis flower to pre-ground products were all convenience and value for money.
It’s just easier to put something in a bowl for a bong hit than to grind it up first. Plus, the prices are hard to beat, with seven-gram bags costing around $30.
She doesn’t consider herself a connoisseur, so she doesn’t notice much of a difference in quality compared to the more expensive unground nuggets on the market, nor do most of her friends.
“In the last few months, everyone in my group of friends who also smoke weed has switched,” the 22-year-old said on a recent phone call.
Pre-ground cannabis sales are growing quarter over quarter
According to the Ontario Cannabis Store’s quarterly 2021 Insights reports, retail-level ground cannabis sales increased 104% from $6,518,000 to $13,360,000 from Q1 through Q2. By the third quarter, ground flower sales were back up to $19,853,000.
Seattle-based data, analytics and intelligence firm Headset has also been tracking the progress of the category they’ve dubbed “soil flower” in Alberta, BC, Ontario and Saskatchewan. In these markets, sales of ground flowers increased from 0.7% of all dried flower sales in January 2020 to 5.8% in March 2022.
According to them, the top brands today are Shred, Pure Sunfarms and Steel City Green, and 90% of all sales are in the 7-gram sachet, the most common size of ground product.
“This is the battle of the connoisseur against the practitioner”
Mike, What’s My Pot, talks about the ground cannabis trend.
The popularity of ground flowers makes connoisseurs cringe
Owen Allerton, co-founder of the Highland Cannabis Store in Kitchener, Ontario, has also noted the huge appetite for ground flower products.
In a recent episode of The Dank Hour, a US-based Future Cannabis Project podcast, he shared how popular the category has become with shoppers at his store — as attributed to the longtime consumers and connoisseurs featured on the show were amazed.
“You blow my mind that this is a popular product, Owen,” said one guest in disbelief.
On a call from his home in Waterloo, Ontario, Mike, founder of strain recommendation website What’s My Pot, jokingly called his fondness for ground cannabis “my shame”.
Ground products traditionally consist of shakes, the loose pieces of cannabis flower that are left in containers or fall onto the floor or countertop while the real buds are processed for sale. Mike explains that this is not the case with modern milled products.
“This is the battle of the connoisseur against the practitioner,” he said. “It’s certainly not very enjoyable to smoke a ground weed mix. It’s not the strain that wins High Times contests. But at the same time, we smoke weed every day because we have to, not necessarily because we want to, right?”
Mike has type 1 diabetes and he said that consuming THC helps reduce the amount of insulin he depends on by 20-30%. He has some neuropathy and rheumatoid arthritis and also uses cannabis to treat pain.
While he also buys some premium brands and pre-rolls, milled products offer him a level of convenience — like no fuss with clunky containers and grinding with sore hands — as well as the value he depends on as a frequent medicinal consumer.
Shred’s success is a testament to improvements over time
Organigram launched its first ground blends into the medicinal market in 2017. But in 2018, it missed the mark with its Prohibition blend and the product was withdrawn, according to Alisha Fernandes, the company’s senior manager of communications.
But they took their learnings and applied them to a new set of recipes to launch Shred in 2020 with three flavors: Tropic Thunder, Gnarberry, and Flower Power. Strains are mixed based on similar flavors, and categories like indica/sativa are left behind.
Tropic Thunder’s special blend of cannabis strains, for example, has mainly citrus and fruit flavors. The THC concentration is at least 18% and each sachet comes with a moisture sachet.
“Shred tapped into the somewhat dormant, light-hearted, and rebellious side of an emerging Canadian legal market known for taking itself too seriously and big corporate brands that all looked and sounded the same,” Fernandes wrote in an email.
“It cast a wide net for weed lovers who just like to get high and don’t get overly concerned with the more progressive elements of cannabis like terpenes, bud structure, breeder history, etc.”
It’s all about the grind
While ground blends aren’t necessarily for connoisseurs, their reputation for extremely low quality doesn’t really hold up, according to Andrew MacMillan, senior vice president, commercial at Auxly, whose Back Forty brand is popular in the ground category.
“Our ground flower is selected on the basis of THC content to ensure it meets our high standards and is then assessed for moisture content to ensure the flower does not become too dry and we deliver a consistent product,” MacMillan said in an email. “Our ground flower is then sieved to remove the stems and carefully hand wrapped.”
Along with potency, hydration, and the lack of seeds and stems, grind quality is one of the most important factors to consider when evaluating quality, said Ryan Roch of Lake City Cannabis in Alberta.
“One of the biggest mistakes growers make is that they grind too fine in the beginning,” he said. “You have to grind coarsely to get the best results.”
Organigram’s Alisha Fernandes agreed. For Shred, the team tested many different types of equipment with the aim of replicating the quality of a handheld grinder on a larger scale.
“Organigram has tested many different types of milling equipment over the years, and now we have something that’s both scalable and consistent,” she said. “Everyone has experienced their grinder getting stuck due to resin buildup. At our production scale, imagine that a million times worse.”
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