Who’s Making Utah’s Medical Cannabis Products?

HANNAH MAE POPPER WRITER

The Green Family Tree

Many Utah medical cannabis patients visit local pharmacies and purchase cannabis cartridges, tinctures, edibles, and flower, only to have no idea which brand is producing them.

In Utah, every bit of cannabis, from seed to sale, is tracked by multiple online databases for the state, but that information tends to be more hidden from the average patient’s point of view. The packaging doesn’t always piece together the whole picture either. When it comes to who processes it, or who white-labels it, that information can be sticky to find.

White-labeling means rebranding the already-made products to proliferate the market. This benefits the processors because processors cannot legally advertise here in Utah, but their white-label brands can.

There are multiple sectors in this system. First, the cannabis is grown by licensed cultivators, then it is transferred to either a Tier 1 or Tier 2 processor. Next, there is the option for the finished product to be white-labled and rebranded for another licensed company. Lastly, the final product is dropped off at the local pharmacies and sold to eager patients.

Where do these babies come from?

Tier 1 processors are the ones who are able to dry, cure, extract, refine, formulate, package, and label the cannabis flower or extracts into other products. They are the ones who turn the flower into a concentrate, and then turn that concentrate into vapes, edibles, creams, or tinctures. For Tier 2 processors, they can only process, formulate, package, and label the products. A prime example of a Tier 1 processor is Boojum Group, which has products using cannabis flower or trim from Tryke, Dragonfly and others out of the eight possible licensed cultivators in the state.

The current list of licensed Utah Tier 1 Processing companies are as follows:

Boojum Group Curaleaf Dragonfly Processing Life Elevated Processing Pure Plan, Riverside Farms Standard Wellness True North Organics Tryke Wasatch Extractions Zion

Dragonfly Wellness is a completely vertically-integrated company, meaning that they have the ability to grow, process, formulate, and package their own products under their own label. They are able to create Dragonbite edibles and coconut oil-based ratioed tinctures provided with flower from their own grow.

Standard Wellness not only has a license to grow their own cannabis flower, but also a processing license, which allows them to create their Hawaiian Haze and Lifter 1:1 Delta 8 and Delta 9 cartridges and Pax pods for Utah patients. Standard Wellness uses The Solid brand to white-label their Dose Capsules and Dose Muscle Gel.

Most other local cannabis producers do not have a grow of their own cannabis flower. They instead have to rely on the eight growers in the state to provide them with enough trim to process into that precious oil that all cannabis products other than flower are made from.

Life Elevated and Wasatch Extractions both have the ability to produce concentrates which are extracted using CO2, a method which is said to yield higher cannabinoid content, while all other processors tend to stick with the oh-so-common distillate or the preferred method for OG concentrate connoisseurs, solventless options of extracting the highly sought after concentrates. Steve from Wasatch Extractions explained that he has been hard at work trying to maximize the small amounts of trim they get from the growers.

Boojum is most known for their Cannabis Tincture Oral Sprays, Terpene Enhanced Tinctures and Edibles and their High and Low Dose Capsules. Boojum Group has also worked directly with a Tier 2 processor, Mother Liquor, to bring us high quality solventless rosin which

was originally grown by Tryke and Dragonfly.

During the past year of legal medical cannabis here in the Beehive State, there has been a growing number of these processing brands beginning to white label products.

The purpose of white-labeling products is that it brings in more revenue for processors, which means more products for patients. It’s a strange, but mutually beneficial system that has begun to take place in Utah.

Some of the white label-brands seen this year so far have been Sugar House Selects (grown by Zion), ReLeaf Society (grown by Tryke), Jilu (products produced by Life Elevated Processing) and Fruit of Life (products produced by Wasatch Extraction).

Select brand sells products which are produced by Curaleaf. Curaleaf does not have a grow, so they must acquire their flower from the eight growers in the state. Elude, Kolibri and Utah Cannabis Company all use products grown or produced by other processors and label them as their own.

It’s hard to go wrong though, because Utah has strict quality control and testing measures to ensure that cannabis products on the market will always be safe, appropriately labeled, and consumable.

SBC