Tim Blake, Skunk Magazine.
The 18th annual Emerald Cup competition (www.theemeraldcup.com) is currently underway, with 90+ expert judges from all corners of California spending weeks sampling and analyzing nearly 1000 entries spanning over 50 different cannabis consumption and associated categories.
For the past 13 years, the reputation for authenticity and fairness that the Emerald Cup has earned has been strengthened by a working partnership with Santa Cruz-based SC Labs (www.sclabs.com), itself a stalwart of trust in California’s cannabis culture and industry, to provide Certificates of Analysis verifying both the potency and the purity of products entered into the competition.
SC Labs has been testing and gathering data on terpenes for more than a decade, and in 2021 licensed Napro Research LLC’s proprietary data visualization tool, PhytoFacts®.
Our partnership with Emerald Cup is about much more than just giving out awards…We’ve been working together each year to help move the industry forward in how we define quality cannabis and all the nuances of the plant; thanks to the high visibility of these awards and the new classifications, brands are starting to take notice of the role terpenes play in marketing to consumers.
– Jeff Gray, Co-Founder and CEO, SC Labs
This technology provides a visual profile of the chemical makeup for a specific cultivar and provides much-needed standardization for defining and determining terpenes in a language that anyone from consumers to budtenders, to contest judges, to cultivators themselves can find familiar and useful.
It also provides the foundation for the…