Contributed by Adam E. Hoover
While some people attend high-end wine tastings and enjoy a $100 plate of pasta, others enjoy a sugary cup of Kool-Aid or a pack of Top Ramen noodles. Sometimes this is strictly due to where an individual falls on the poverty line, but often it is a taste that’s acquired through our childhood and fostered by our environment. There will always be a market for Top Ramen, and one for $100 plates of fettuccine. The key to being a successful part of either of those markets is knowing your best attributes and playing off of them.
The cannabis market in Alaska will always have several shelves of quality for product, presentation and customer service. The hard part for most is realizing what shelf they’re on. The key once you’ve done that is knowing what to do about it. Do you want to raise your quality and try to reach another corner of the market? Do you want to streamline your packaging to cut some corners? Do you embrace the shelf you’re on and make it yours? Remember none of the shelves will ever be empty, so when you transition from bottom to middle, there will be a new bottom shelf leader. You can try to spread yourself across all the shelves, but then you will never really get to claim a single shelf as your home, your base shelf. You can’t say you are a top shelf producer if 50% of your products are on the middle or bottom shelf.
So, what or who determines what shelf your product goes on? You do, and I do, but mostly it will be everyone else who’s an active, engaging part of the cannabis community. Those who are too shy to ask or too uncertain to make their own decisions, often look to those who aren’t to gauge what their course of action should be. You will always get different responses from across the board, but there are generally some things that most can agree on that separates top shelf from the shelves below it. Typically, a top shelf product needs to hit all the key marks to reach a certain standard. For example, a top shelf test result combined with a bottom shelf trim job makes for a bag of middle shelf product, aka mids. Resin production or terpene content alone will not put a bud on the top shelf. Just as packaging and test results alone don’t make for top shelf concentrates. You don’t need to hit 100/100 in every category, but you ought to be above average in them all.
For those outside the normal consumer crowd, the ones on the inside of the industry that still consume, there is an additional set of standards and rules which are used to determine shelf placement. A lot of the industry insider shelf placement is done based on friendships, animosity, growing methods, even strain names. There are people in the industry who want everyone to believe that they are on the top shelf even though they are hitting a solid majority of the mids market.
As varied as people’s taste buds are their interpretations of information. Sometimes the budtender with the big vocabulary and the people skills can be misleading. There are some general guidelines that apply to most, but much like a daily horoscope, they should be taken with a grain of salt. That being said, there are a lot of helpful and informative budtenders out there who won’t mislead you intentionally. The trick is finding them, and sometimes you have to get burned once or twice to do that.
At the end of the day, all the shelves stay busy and constantly changing. As a business, it can be hard to accept that you aren’t at the top; but as a consumer, it’s better to buy high-end mids than to be disappointed with what was supposedly top shelf. In my opinion, there are only two or three cultivators in Alaska producing top shelf cannabis and no manufacturers currently. The rest of them should focus on embracing the shelf they’re on or stepping their game up big time.
#MidsOrBust