From Plant to Pouch: Our Processes Carry Weight, From Cultivation to Post-Harvest Care
From nitrogen-flushed packaging to preserving trichomes with Boveda Terpene Shields™, learn more about our approach to growing, preserving and protecting our favourite flowers
Black Sugar Rose with a 62% Boveda humidity pack
Since the launch of our beloved brands Color Cannabis, Saturday Cannabis, and Starseed Medicinal, we’ve taken improvement cues from our most important advisors, our consumers and patients, whose perceptions of our cannabis matter most of all. Balancing highly regulated protocols on product moisture levels, weight thresholds, packaging requirements, and more, we continually incorporate valuable feedback into our post-harvest processes to deliver flower that keeps getting better.
We know that moisture loss can impact the integrity of your flower and can also impact the final weight of the product. In addition to recalibrating our scales multiple times a day, we are now shipping products out with a 62% Boveda Terpene Shield inside every pouch of Color Cannabis and Saturday Cannabis dried flower. It’s been our experience that pouches of cannabis (especially larger ones) are frequently opened and closed by consumers and patients. This can create a lot of added airflow in flower pouches, and we want to ensure that the moisture of your bud stays right where it belongs.
It’s a process that starts from the beginning with plant care.
Hands trimming flower
The Sum of All Parts
Bringing a great flower product to market takes care, commitment and rigour. Great genetics are only the start. Curating genetic environments, precise harvest planning, rigorous quality testing, careful hang-drying and hand-trimming: they all come before flower is packaged and shipped to patients, provinces and retailers.
Tending to young genetics
Here’s what we’ve done lately:
Improving Repeatability and Predictability
The cannabis plant produces many different, unique compounds during each growth cycle, including cannabinoids and terpenes. It’s one of the beautiful things about the plant – each one is different and special in its own way. While cultivars (or strains) may present quite differently from one another, both in growth and in final product, consistency of unique strains can also vary from harvest-to-harvest.
Cannabis is a highly sensitive plant, strongly influenced by environmental conditions and inputs through the growth stages. Sunlight, airflow, temperature, humidity, water, nutrients: all play an important role in plant development. Even slight variations in any variable from the previous crop of a genetic can influence a change on the final product, including cannabinoids and terpenes.
Our teams work diligently to control environmental conditions and inputs to be predictive and ensure results are repeatable harvest-over-harvest. We routinely test new methods to improve repeatability, including watering, nutrients and correction (or de-leafing).
Keeping it Fresh (and green!)
Consumers had a LOT to say about flower offerings in market in the first months after legalization. Many said that cannabis packaging should not only keep flower protected and preserved, but reduce waste, too. So, we listened. In September, we began transitioning all Color Cannabis flower from plastic jars to nitrogen-flushed pouch packaging.
Nitrogen Flushed Pouch Packaging
Why? Nitrogen reduces the degrading effects of the oxidation process – the primary factor in cannabis dryness. These pouches help preserve aromatic terpenes and maintain the integrity of freshly packaged flower products. Additionally, this transition from plastic jars and cartons helped reduce the total weight of packaging waste by over 80 per cent.
Keeping It Fresh(er)
In the months since the debut of our nitrogen-flushed packaging, we’ve explored ways we can keep your flower even fresher still. Our drying and curing teams have conducted in-house trials on optimal moisture content, refined our packaging processes and found new solutions to ensure your flower stays fresh.
The addition of Terpene Shields to Color Cannabis and Saturday Cannabis flower began in mid-March and will be stocked at retail as existing lots of flower are depleted. Our Starseed patients will also see these delivered with their medicine in the coming weeks. Every Starseed order of dried flower will contain a Boveda Terpene Shield in the shipping crate.
Boveda humidity pack and sorting machine
Saving the Terps
Terpene Shields by Boveda, filled with a simple salt & purified water solution, helps regulate the relative humidity inside a pouch of dried flower, creating a protective ‘shield’ around trichomes. The pack consistently releases purified water into the pouch, protecting the terpenes from evaporation that can occur in the curing process. You can expect your Boveda pack to last about six months.
When your cannabis is stored with Boveda, the terpenes are protected with a monolayer shield of purified water, the aroma you love is kept safe until grinding. Once the cannabis is ground, it releases the aroma with great potency.
Or in more detail, the aroma of your cannabis comes from the terpenes, or essential oils of your flower. When you get a nice “nose hit” from your cannabis, you are actually smelling the terpenes evaporating off of your flower. Although people judge the quality of cannabis by the smell, strong aromas emanating from your cannabis is actually a sign of terpene degradation. Rather than these precious terpenes evaporating into the air, Boveda shields these terpenes inside of the trichomes where they belong until the moment of consumption.
Keeping in Touch:
Where would we be without our consumers and budtenders, the cannabis experts that help us get better by the day? Thank you to each of you, who are invested in your cannabis experience and honouring our flowers enough to share your thoughts and suggestions with us. How can we continue to improve? Tell us.