Hi there, and welcome to The Dealers Diary - my musings on the cannabis industry, California, and building Halara.
If you missed past emails, I recommend checking out the Dealers page where you can see the past emails I sent.
In today's entry: Mystery Hint #3 | Why Carts Clog (And What We Did) | Quick Hits
The Dealers Desk
The $1,000 is still on the table.
We've been running this thing for almost two months now and nobody has cracked it. Nick has reviewed every guess that's come in. Some of you are getting close, some of you are not even on the same continent, and Nick is enjoying this far too much.
This week he agreed to give up another piece. Here it is:
▎ One of the strains in the Mystery Strain is something we used to have in our Live Diamond Sauce product line.
If you've been buying Halara for a while, you've probably had a cart with this strain's parent in it. That cart isn't on shelves under that name anymore. Live Diamond Sauce is what eventually became our current Resin Sauce Live and Cured line, but a few of the original strains didn't make the cut into the new lineup. Nick kept a few of them in his pocket for projects exactly like this one. One of those favorites is half of what you're tasting right now.
So the rules haven't changed. The strain is on shelves. Pick one up, smoke it, reply to this email with your best guess. First correct answer wins $1,000. Nick is the judge. The QR code on the bag is still how you enter.
One of our readers texted me, which was the most flattering version of "I have no idea what this is" I've ever received:
That's the kind of feedback that keeps the lights on around here. No guess attached. Just a thank-you. We'll take it.
Onwards and upwards,
-Malcolm
What We're Seeing
The Mystery contest accidentally became a B2B conversation piece. Seven buyers asked Nick what it was this week. We built the contest for consumers, and the trade picked it up on their own. There's a thing in cannabis where the line between operator and connoisseur is way blurrier than most brand strategies assume. The people stocking the shelves are often the same people on r/THCcarts at 11pm.
Quick Hits
Why most vape cartridges clog (and what we did about ours). We wrote up the actual engineering of cart clogging this week. The mechanics, what the rest of the industry is doing wrong, what we changed in our hardware, and a voicemail from a customer named Dan who called out of nowhere to tell us our carts don't clog. Read it on the blog.
The DEA rescheduling hearing has its lineup now. NORML and Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the prohibition crowd, have both filed to participate in the June 29 hearing, which will decide how broad federal rescheduling actually gets. This is the mechanism that could unlock banking and interstate commerce, so the next few weeks matter. Marijuana Moment has the rundown.
Minnesota just built a hemp-to-cannabis off-ramp. A federal hemp ban kicks in this November. Minnesota's response was to pass a bill that lets hemp businesses legally transition into the licensed cannabis market, which no other state has cleanly done yet. Worth watching as a template. MJBizDaily.
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Halara · Emerald Triangle, CA
P.S - My Weekly Bops
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