Flavor is making a comeback, particularly with a rising popularity in solventless extracts.
While the flavor of any edible product is crucial to its success, it’s not all about the fruitiness and the various chocolate, peanut butter and coffee sensations consumers crave. After years of trying to completely eliminate the cannabis flavor from edibles, producers are increasingly bringing back some of the cannabis essence, finding a balance between an overpowering weed flavor and a subtle burst of terpenes and flavonoids through the use of live rosins and solventless extracts.
Solventless concentrates have seen an explosion in popularity, and now they’re having their moment in the spotlight as the active ingredient in edibles.
For Naturae’s Rezinators, CEO Nicolas Guarino says the goal is to bridge the gap between flower and oil.
“Solventless does just that,” he says, “and the experience for consumers is more reminiscent of a pure flower experience when compared with other oil-based cannabis products. Even with edibles, the terpenes really shine through, and the effects are meant to be super balanced, so consumers are less likely to experience some of the less desirable effects that people often associate with pure THC edibles.”
Naturae makes its Rezinators brand of gummies at the company’s production facility in Hoosick Falls, New York, using ice-water-extracted live hash.
Shawn Magill, CEO of The CBG Gurus, says solventless extraction — using ice, water, heat and pressure to gently separate the trichome heads from the rest of the plant material — creates an extract that is “able to capture the essence of the plant to the highest degree, maintaining the integrity of the medicine throughout the process, without the need for any harmful chemical byproducts.”
The result is the desired potency, with just the right flavor.
“Using a solventless concentrate also allows for the chef to be able to more easily achieve terpene or flavor pairings between the concentrate and the edible product,” Magill says.