Alec Dixon, Terpenes and Testing Magazine.
Indica, sativa, and hybrid are the colloquialisms that have dominated cannabis culture and the corresponding marketplace since the beginning. While recent literature has proven that this archaic vernacular has little validity, the continued use of this vocabulary has only hindered the education and progress of the cannabis industry at large. Contrarily, there is a novel way to sort and categorize cannabis products that can be used to educate consumers, pave the way for meaningful cannabis competitions, and create language that can survive, evolve, and thrive through the test of time.
SC Labs and Napro Research have been partners for a decade now in trying to dive deeper into the compounds of cannabis and the nuances of each cultivar. Over time, we’ve realized just how off base the industry is in defining cannabis classes.
The supply chain and lack of continuous controls over ambient temperatures and humidity under which cannabis is stored and transported has significantly weakened our quality standards…by the time the average consumer purchases a top shelf eighth from a retail dispensary, 60-90% of terpene content is lost, leaving the consumer with a flavorless, aroma-less product without the nuanced entourage effect.
The reality of cannabis classes
Since the launch of SC Labs’ terpene analysis back in 2013, we’ve conducted over a quarter million terpene tests on cannabis and hemp across California and Oregon. When we dive deeper into this data, it’s become clear that with all the thousands of individual names given to cultivars, most everything we’ve ever tested can be sorted based on…