Ganjier’s cannabis sommelier certification program trains students in the art of evaluation
Expertise in an industry emerging from nearly a century of prohibition is easier to claim than prove. While numerous industries have their certified experts such as cigar catadores, coffee cuppers and sommeliers in everything from water to wine, the cannabis industry has largely gone without an equivalent title, until Ganjier officially launched in 2020.
“Ganjier is effectively a cannabis sommelier school,” says managing director Derek Gilman. “The program aims to raise the bar of professionalism in cannabis, effectively to that same level as other gustatory and Epicurean industries.”
The program has become a resounding success story and has brought in students across the country and around the world, from Austria to New Zealand, seeking the Ganjier certification.
“You will never feel more confident speaking the language of cannabis than once you become a Ganjier, because you really can speak to any part of the whole supply chain with a deep level of knowledge,” says CEO Max Simon.
Building a Curriculum
Ganjier has seen tremendous growth since its launch, but the program was hardly an overnight success.
It took roughly three years to develop the certification course before it was ready to launch.
Knowing that if the program was going to truly live up to the same well-established standards of its counterparts, it would need a similar framework, Gilman “did a deep dive,” on sommelier schools and organizations including the Wine Spirit Education Trust, the Court of Master Sommeliers and the Cicerone beer program, among many others, to see their varying levels and what they were including in terms of knowledge and skill sets.
In addition to studying the structure and intensity of longstanding sommelier programs, the founders also needed to build a metric that was unique to the cannabis industry.
“One of the reasons why the program took three years to develop is that we had to build a whole level of assessment criteria that would standardize the process of understanding cannabis quality,” Simon says. “That yielded what we now call the ‘SAP,’ which is the Systematic Assessment Protocol [see sidebar].”
The founders recruited 18 of the leading minds in cannabis including social ethnobotanist Amanda Reiman, the iconic cultivator Swami Chaitanya and the famed hashmaker Frenchy Cannoli, before his death in 2021, to help deepen the knowledge pool needed to develop the coursework.
“They all saw the value of what we were trying to build and the need for it in this industry,” Gilman says.
“We developed the content and curriculum and did multiple committees,” Simon adds. “We actually calculated that from the time of conception until launch, we put 8,000 hours of contributions into building this program. It was pretty cool and wild because everybody just got behind the vision.”
SAP – An evaluation tool for cannabis
The Systematic Assessment Protocol, or SAP, was developed to evaluate cannabis flower and concentrates based on four categories that represent the senses used to interact with the plant: appearance, aroma, flavor and experience. During evaluation, each sense-based category is broken down into subcategories (aroma, for example, includes its intensity, complexity and uniqueness) that need to be properly analyzed before its parent category is graded on a scale of 0-10.
As each category is graded, it is entered into Ganjier’s SAP app, which will deliver a final score on a 100-point scale and a printable, shelf-ready, report card that details the final score and the scores for each category.
Individual category scores are as follows:
9-10 Supreme
8-8.9 Outstanding
7-7.9 Very good
6-6.9 Good
5-5.9 Mediocre
0-4.9 Not recommended
Final scores are as follows:
95-100 Supreme
90-94 Outstanding
85-89 Very good
80-84 Good
75-79 Mediocre
50-74 Not recommended
In-depth, Online and In Person
After the research and throughout the meetings and deliberations, the Ganjier certification was developed into a three-step course. The first step is the more traditional academic coursework, about 35 hours of reading, writing and knowledge checks, covering 10 topics covering the history, business, culture, cultivation, processing and science of cannabis.
“We have multiple experts, each offering their knowledge specific to their area of expertise within that specific topic,” Gilman says. “For example, in our history course, Frenchy’s lesson is about the genetic origins of cannabis, from the plains of Asia. Swami discusses the spiritual and mythological uses of cannabis throughout the past millennia. And then Dr. Amanda Reiman takes us from prohibition to today.”
The second step is the in-person education at the Ganjier campus in Humboldt County, California. Over the course of two days, students will develop their palates and learn to apply the SAP, Ganjier’s evaluation metric that measures the flavor, aroma, appearance and experience, to assess the quality of cannabis flower and concentrates with the supervision of the instructors.
At the campus, students will also learn customer service skills and spend time at an operating cultivation facility to see the processes firsthand. The in-person portion of the course is limited to 20 students and is staffed by at least four instructors.
“That’s what so much of the live training is about, people going through assessing and consuming cannabis with the instructors right there,” Simon says. “It really does make you much more sophisticated in understanding how to look at something, smell something, taste something and understand something, so that when you are advising other people, you actually have a real scientific, credible process to go through to give those recommendations and that understanding.”
Broad Application
When the founders of Ganjier were putting the program together, they speculated that retail professionals were going to account for the majority of the student body, but to their surprise they only accounted for roughly 20% of the students. Alongside the anticipated retail managers and budtenders were doctors and nurses who were never trained in the endocannabinoid system, newly licensed business owners just entering the industry, chefs looking to better understand how to infuse foods, professionals from traditional corporations interested in expanding into cannabis, consumers who simply wanted to deepen their relationship with cannabis and longtime operators who wanted to validate and organize pre-existing knowledge, Gilman says.
“Then there’s this tremendous networking community that comes from participating in the program and getting to associate with all these other professionals,” Gilman says.
“The diversity has been super surprising, but now that we’ve been up and running the program and seeing how people use it, it rationally makes sense,” Simon adds. “It’s been exciting to see how it has penetrated every single level of the cannabis industry from people that are longtime lovers of cannabis to CEOs of big companies who are using it to shape their strategy, their employee development and their product offerings.”