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: 300 carts by hand at Pride | why a down quarter is good news | Nick on Blueberry Muffin | a $1,000 hint hidden in a song
The Dealers Desk
Hey Dealers,
One of our creators brought Halara to Sacramento Pride this past weekend and handed out samples by hand. No booth, no big production, just a few lucky people getting to try it for the first time. It was a small thing and honestly one of the more meaningful ones we've done all month, which is lovely to see.
You might remember Lychee Goji Berry Tea from last week, the strain whose initials spell LGBT, with 10% of profits going to LYRIC, the SF center that's looked after queer youth since 1988. That strain is the part of Pride you can see online. Sacramento was the other half: actually showing up.
Anyone can flip their logo rainbow for thirty days. Doing it in person, putting product in someone's hand, is the part that actually costs you something, and it's the only part that means anything.
And we're just getting started. Jackie and Xochitl are taking 100 carts to SF Pride on June 27 and 28, and that same weekend another 100 units are headed to a private SoCal event Nick committed us to. I'll be straight with you about my level of understanding there 😂😂
I am just as confused as you are by the looks of it.
So keep an eye out the next couple of weeks. If you'll be at any of these, come find us, say you read the Diary, and a cart is yours.
Onwards and upwards,
-Malcolm
What We're Seeing
A soft quarter doesn't kill good products, it kills undifferentiated ones: California cannabis sales slipped again in Q1 2026, part of the third straight year of falling sales in the country's biggest market, and June tends to be a seasonally quiet month for the industry on top of that (MJBizDaily has the numbers).
The easy move in a quarter like this is to blame the weather, blame the illicit market, blame the consumer. The non-obvious read is that down markets are clarifying. When the tide goes out, the brands that quietly hold or grow are the ones obsessing over the boring stuff while everyone else points at the chart: the menu photography, the anti-clog hardware so the thing actually hits on cart number two, the founder's phone number printed on the bag.
None of that is glamorous, and all of it is what's left standing when the budget for the glamorous stuff dries up.
Strain Spotlight
Here's Nick on it:
Blueberry Muffin is one of the three we brought to Country Summer last weekend (June 12 to 14), and it was the one people kept circling back to the table for. It's an indica, 84% THC, live resin sauce, so the tagline holds: Taste the Flower. What I love about it is that it smells like exactly what it's named after, a tray straight out of the oven. You get ripe blueberry and baked vanilla cake up front, then this creamy butter note with a little earthiness underneath it, and a sugary finish that lingers like warm crumble. Juicy berry on the inhale, pastry undertones behind it, silky on the exhale. Because it's fresh-frozen sauce rather than distillate, the flavor is the whole point, it's carrying the strain instead of a flavoring. Comes as a cartridge and an all-in-one."
Blueberry Muffin, live resin sauce, 84% THC.
If a dessert-forward indica is your lane, this is the one to ask for by name. Find a shop carrying it.
Quick Hits
The 2026 California Cannabis Awards wrap up next month at the State Fair, and the new wrinkle this year is a Home Grow Competition, which puts hobbyist growers on a genuinely mainstream public stage for the first time. (Ties straight into our own State Fair plans for July.) GreenState has the details.
California cannabis sales fell again in Q1, the soft-market backdrop for the take up top, with legal operators still getting squeezed by the illicit market. Read it at MJBizDaily.
Mystery strain, $1,000 still unclaimed, hint #6 from Nick: a hint lies within the song from this week. There's only one track in the P.S. for exactly that reason, so put it on and listen close. The QR code on the bag is still the only way to enter. (Hint #5, still in play: it's NOT a mixture of any of our High THC strains.) Here's the disposable on Weedmaps.
Refer a Friend
If you take one thing from this issue, take this: a soft quarter is the cheapest time to find out which brands actually sweat the details. We'll be the ones at the parade handing you the cart, so come find us at SF Pride and tell me whether we're getting it right.
Know a budtender who'd dig this? Forward it. They subscribe, you get a Dealers hat.
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Halara · Emerald Triangle, CA
P.S - My Weekly Bops
P.S. What I'm listening to (just the one this week, and yes, that's the hint):
