In case you’ve never legally chiefed outside of your home state, you may not be aware that two primary sales laws dictate the actual “how” of how cannabis can be legally sold.
Seeing as the federal government still doesn’t have its shit together, these laws vary state-to-state, with some opting for a “deli-style” serving method. At the same time, other states require all cannabis to be pre-packaged to be sold recreationally.
Most west coast states, including the massive markets of California, Nevada, and Washington, have pre-packaged laws. Oregon is the lone hip holdout allowing for the superior form of deli-style retail operations. Yes, I believe deli is superior for many reasons, which I’ll get into below.
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No doubt there is some absolutely dazzling branded packaging out there. I’m not going to lie; I’m a sucker for flashy shiny artistic creations. I mean, you have heard of Super Dope, right?
But more than all that, I’m a true believer in the religion of deli-style dispensaries. You can call us the Disciples of DSD, and we’re here to show you the light, my friend.
1. Deli-Style Maintains Freshness Better Via Controlled Humidity Averages
When you store cannabis flower in large volumes together, the individual nugs work together like a hive mind, insulating one another from moisture loss and light damage. That’s why so many growers choose to cure trimmed flower in large 55-gallon food-grade drums.
The larger biomass will maintain a more steady constant humidity level than flower tossed in a cheap or poorly sealed jar. The issue with jars and bags isn’t that glass or mylar leaks a ton; it’s about the amount of air that is sealed in the bag relative to the amount of plant matter in the bag.
Given how so many growers in package-controlled states prefer selling in grams and eighths, that means there’s plenty of air (and not a lot of plant material to balance out the humidity) in those packages to dry that flower way out.
Sure, you could argue deli style dispensaries with their big ass jars are exposed to oxygen when they are opened to share smells with customers or to remove flower to measure for sale.
And sure, if you’re opening that constantly throughout the day for every tire-kicker that rolls through your dispensary, you’ll be drying out way faster.
Honestly, I do feel like budtenders would do well to show some self-constraint with who they offer smells. Think of it like plastic utensils and takeout; they probably shouldn’t be included unless requested, right?
I’ve had this play out time and time again, traveling to Nevada and Washington, buying an eighth that sounded super delicious, only to find the flower crumble when breaking off pieces for my Santa Cruz Shredder to shred.
There’s no way to tell how dry or wet the product is if you can’t actually smell or, even worse, see it with your own eyes.
Growers in states with deli-style dispensaries like Oregon can help to mitigate some of the inevitable moisture loss during jar opening and simply adjust their own curing methods to deliver a slightly “wetter” wholesale product to their retail partners.
Yes, you CAN put humidity control gels and packages in with jars of cannabis, but the amount of extra plastic waste that produces cancels out the benefit it provides in my “thinking about the long-term importance of the health of our planet, the only one we’re capable of inhabiting” mind.
2. Deli-Style Dispensaries Are Way Better For Earth
You don’t have to be a blissed-out hippie to realize having plastic tubes littering every sidewalk, ditch, waterway, and scenic natural spot is a pretty crappy thing.
Unfortunately, littering still isn’t taken seriously in America; in some places, it’s REALLY STARTING TO SHOW.
Deli-style dispensaries minimize waste by allowing customers to bring reusable containers like Re:stash storage jars.
Dispensaries can encourage customers to bring reusable containers with discounts or loyalty program perks. They can then save money in terms of the total packaging they have to buy and, as a bonus, can feature their eco-friendly options prominently on social media and other marketing channels.
Dispensary owners, if you’re reading this, please consider getting Re:stash in your store. No, I’m not a sales rep; I just love nature.
Trust me when I tell you there are a bunch of regular people out there that don’t necessarily hug trees and sing kumbaya but still love earth and would opt to keep it clean if given the option.
The explosion of re-fillable soap stores and bulk food vending options at grocery stores is proof that this market of container purists is a very real thing.
It’s quite obvious the states that have led the charge in the legalization of recreational use are also on the more “liberal” end of the tribalist spectrum as well. Hence, the overlap between conservation and bud is worth paying attention to.
There are various estimates of how much plastic waste the cannabis industry produces. Cannabis waste management firm GAIACA estimates the U.S. produces 150 million tons of cannabis waste each year. Tree Hugger Containers puts the figure at, on average, 70 grams of packaging waste for every gram of cannabis sold.
Both of these numbers are utterly terrifying. If you wanted to play cynical and say these are over-estimations shit, if just 50% of what’s estimated turns out to be real, that is a depressingly large amount of plastic!
3. Deli Offers Truth While Packaging Requires Gambling
From a flavor chaser’s perspective, it is paramount to be able to use one’s nose to evaluate one’s prospective cannabis purchase. One of the most friendly and reassuring things a budtender can say to a customer is to pick a strain based on how they perceive the smell because “the nose knows,” ya know?
If our brains find the complex concoction of terpenes emanating from a particular strain of cannabis to be “pleasant,” then there is an extremely high likelihood the actual sensation will be similarly pleasant.
Being able to ascertain whether or not you’ll like something via a “smell test” before dropping potentially hundreds of dollars is kind of a big deal, in my opinion. Call me old-fashioned.
When you’re buying pre-packaged weed, you’re taking a massive gamble. It’s literally like blowing a couple of days’ pay buying a whole bottle of cologne or “oh-du-toilette” at the airport without ever smelling it first. It’s dumb. It’s risky.
“YeAh bUt YoU buY bAsEd oF rEpuTaTioN dUh” some may squawk. Bro, you literally bought all your weed your whole life based on 1:1 recommendations? Bullshit.
The only REAL way to know what is good in your state is to regularly sample the entire menu from all top growers to identify which growers and which strains you really like enough to make a purchasing decision confidently.
Only with regular sampling can you make buying decisions based exclusively on the grower’s reputation and the (potentially, hopefully) stated lineage.
I suppose there are some farms in Oregon that I’d happily spend money on whatever they’ve got dropping at the moment because I trust them. But to know that I liked THESE specific farms, I first had to sample many diverse products to hone in on what is truly great and resonates with me.
Sure, smelling a whole jar full of pounds of something isn’t a guaranteed way of knowing 100% sure you will love your purchase. Still, it is objectively a more efficient way of vetting more options, especially when you’re visiting from out of state and know nothing about who is reputable on the local scene.
In packaged states, you can’t smell the actual product, and you can only make pre-packaged purchases off appearance. The appearance of the flower itself (if it’s even in a clear bag or jar) and the appearance of the “branding.”
Anyone who knows anything about marketing will tell you that there is not always alignment between how a brand is marketed or “positioned” and the actual value or “quality” of the actual product/service being sold.
4. Deli Style Preserves Beauty
If you’ve never seen a well-grown cannabis flower under magnification in high resolution, you need to open a new tab (so you can come back here, silly goose!) and go look at some magnified cannabis pictures for a while; it’s awe-inspiring.
Sure, the overall hue and structure of a nug or “cola,” as the nerds would say (used with the utmost respect, of course), can be framed easily from a distance, but so much of the true beauty of a fat juicy stanky bud is in the finer details of the thing.
From the subtle shades of color that only become more contrasted under magnification, like the contrast between dark green and/or purple leaves, to their contrasting burnt orange stigma straggling out like the long pubes you miss when self-trimming in the bathroom, there’s endless beauty to behold.
Seeing the tiny little leaves that feather in the gaps and the nubby little bracts all supporting the branching out of the utterly alien-looking THC-packed crystalline trichomes..it can’t help but leave you in awe.
As such, to be able to observe these magnificent works of mother nature, they must first arrive to you intact from the retailer who bought them from the farmer.
If the cured flower is kept in large clumps, they’ll have a higher chance of maintaining their structural integrity as compared to those that have been first broken apart (shedding some of the trichomes and plant matter) and then placed into individual-sized bags/packages (another chance to shed more plant material) and then shaken about between delivery at the dispensary, placing on shelves/cases, picked up and put back a bunch of times for customers, all of these times movement inevitably create friction and result in damaging the physical form of a delicate flower.
5. Deli-Style Is Cooler
Anyone who has bought weed out of a trunk before knows that weed has always been stored in big volumes; that’s how the industry has always been.
Portioning everything up in tiny little neat packages with all this glitz and glam is a relatively modern adaptation of the traditional methods of purveying the ganj.
So why change things up? Deli-style dispensaries can have gallon-sized jars packed to the top with a significant portion of a plant’s flower material, giving you a deconstructed and reassembled color palette of the original plant itself.
Buying weed as direct to the source as possible without a bunch of hands or machines touching it along the way into its individual little plastic vessel is just a more direct way of enjoying the plant.
At the end of the day would you prefer to buy your meat pre-packaged from the grocery store or direct from the butcher’s shop? Pre-sliced and packaged sandwich meat or meat cut from the whole part of the animal or sausage fresh before your eyes? Yes, this is how “deli-style” gets its name if that wasn’t immediately obvious to you.
This Doesn’t Mean Pre-packaged Doesn’t Have Any Benefits
The world is already far too black and white as it is, so we don’t need to be contributing to any of that. The Hallowed Gram stands for uniting tokers under a common cause, not dividing them based on their preference for packaged cannabis.
Heck, I’ve bought pre-packaged cannabis and will do so in the future; of that, I’m certain.
Yes, I’ll admit that I was probably a little overly excited the first time I got to walk out of a Cookies dispensary with a bag full of baby blue.
I admire the artistic genius of brands like Super Dope and their partnerships with Fear of Boof and Hi-Tech, both in the street-verified quality of the product as well as the undeniably genre-defying nature of their packaging and promotion.
Store Managers and Operations stooges will tell you having everything packaged can streamline the logistics of the supply chain as well as the organization and thus efficiency of a dispensary, which they say, results in cost savings which capitalism theoretically tells us ought to trickle down in the form of customer cost savings but I think that model may be outdated now, corporations usually keep the extra profit.
But objectively, buying a product, you can evaluate first via perhaps the most relevant sense (in the olfactory system) when it comes to the consumption of cannabis is hands-down a superior model of business than not having that ability at all.
Yeah, some dispensaries will try to have their cake and eat it too, with “sample nugs” put on the cross to be sacrificed by relentless light degradation and almost instant loss of most terpenes via non-airtight seals. Still, this model isn’t long for mother earth, in my opinion, as I’ve never seen it executed well.
The confidence you get when you’re able to inhale a big whiff of plant matter to help select what to buy along with the boost in positive emotion you get using a re-fillable container combine to make deli-style the style to fight for over pre-packaged, which, let’s be honest, is mostly about giving inferior brands a way to dupe customers into buying their product because it can’t stand on its two feet fairly against the truly great farms.
Again, I say this as a marketer myself, that yes, the goal of marketing in most cases, as in practice and not in theory, is to give brands a cheat code for sales because they can’t compete entirely on quality alone.
No, this isn’t always the case because great brands still need assistance in exposure in a very noisy world, but this is more PR, IMO, than marketing, but I digress.
There are groups in recently legalized states like Michigan and Oklahoma pushing (I’d be curious to see who is financing them and sponsoring the bills because it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see companies that would stand to gain massively financially investing in the propagation of such policies but that’s just conjecture) for pre-packaged to be made the only legal option, effectively outlawing deli style dispensary models and that’s absurd.
But what do you think? Are you deli-style-till-you-die, or are you held spellbound by mesmerizing packaging?
