Post-Harvest Cultivation Secrets to Maximize Terpenes ft. Jack Grover

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Bryan Fields: What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, with me as always is Kellen Finney, and this week we've got a very special guest, Jack Grover, co-founder of Grove Bags. Jack, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing today? Jack Grover: I'm doing awesome, guys. Thanks so much for having me. This is a really killer way for me to end my day. I've been a fan of the show and I'm really excited to hang out today and kind of nerd out with you guys. Bryan Fields: Yeah, I'm excited to dive in. Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen Finney: Doing really well, really excited to talk to Jack, really excited to dive into all of the nuances that go into delivering the cannabis plant to the consumer — that last mile, you could say it's the bag, right? So really excited to learn all the nuances associated with that, and I think I'm excited to talk to a new coast. Maybe we chatted before the episode, I'll let Jack position himself, but first Bryan, how are you? Bryan Fields: I'm stoked, and I think there's a bunch of topics today that I'm really excited about — things I'm not so familiar with that I'm excited to dive deeper into. Jack, we do have an East Coast, West Coast dynamic, but I'm going to have to put you on the map. When we talk about your upbringing and education, if you had to put yourself on the coast, East Coast or West Coast, which one are you taking? Jack Grover: I'm putting myself on the North Coast, man, where we're here in Cleveland — southernmost city on the Great Lakes. Twenty percent of the U.S. population lives on the Great Lakes, twenty-five percent of the Canadian population lives on the Great Lakes. I don't think you can talk about the U.S. or weed in the U.S. without talking about our region. Bryan Fields: I love it. So let's dive in — for our listeners unfamiliar with you, can you give a quick background about yourself and how you found your way to the cannabis space? Jack Grover: Absolutely. I found my way to the cannabis space, like a lot of us, through patient experience. My brother Charlie, my older brother, has cerebral palsy and suffers from that quite a bit, and finds a huge amount of relief from his relationship with cannabis. I got interested in cannabis because I saw what it did for him in his life, and I started growing it and sampling Cali medical with him, really understanding the plant and the life cycle of the plant. He moved out to LA for law school in '03, and when you talk about the incredible places — I'll give the West Coast its shadow the same way the East Coast deserves here. LA is a very mindful, community-based place in a lot of ways, and he's really had a great quality of life out there, and a big part of that is medical cannabis. When he went out there in '03, it changed his relationship with his life and with himself, because being on so many pharmaceutical drugs for that condition, and then two pills for the side effects of that pill — it's kind of an endless merry-go-round — and cannabis has really been able to simplify and elevate his life. For me, I've had back surgery and spinal reconstruction and used medical cannabis there as well, so I've got a real relationship with the plant that's not just about smoking with your friends in college — not that that isn't great in and of itself — I've always had a deeper, more medical relationship with the plant. Fast forward to Grove Bags: we saw everything going on in the cannabis industry, and we were young guys, excited and thrilled, and we'd grown some weed ourselves and realized there's a lot about this that people don't understand — there's big opportunities to standardize and elevate and deepen the understanding, and create value-added processes and products that are going to really elevate this space. That was almost nine years ago — it'll be nine years in March. In that time we've worked with thousands of cultivation facilities in more than 70 countries. Personally I've been in over a thousand cultivation sites at this point, our team's been across several thousand, so we've had a privileged perch to see the global cannabis industry grow and develop. Bryan Fields: I love it, and I appreciate that breakdown. Take us through quickly — Grove Bags, its value in the market, and the TerpLoc technology. Jack Grover: Grove Bags was started because we wanted to make your favorite growers' favorite products. What we mean by that is we really respected the difficulty, cost, dedication, energy, time, soul, sweat, blood, tears, investment that the best cultivators in the world put into it. We've been lucky enough to meet a lot of the people I consider the best — real pioneers who were passionate about and stewards of cannabis long before it was cool, or even in a mild gray area. But those people had to operate in the dark — there was a lot of conflicting info and methodology. If we rewind nine years, the post-harvest life cycle of the plant was actually a very debatable area — a lot of different opinions, not a lot of data, not a lot of anecdotal market experience. When you'd start talking to people about, well, when you come out of the dry room you want to be at this water activity level, people's eyes would glaze over. Product was moving very quickly, operational efficiency didn't matter, post-harvest curing and optimization didn't matter — and it wasn't until the first organic outdoor glut that people actually started thinking about how do we preserve the quality of this harvest so I can sell in three months when the price of flower rebounds a little from the summer. The industry has grown since then in terms of its need for operational supremacy, but also its understanding of the quality of flower and the life cycle of the product, and how things like water content and moisture activity level directly relate to both brand quality and bottom-line profitability. If you're growing 10,000 pounds of flower — let's say 4.54 million grams of flower at the end of the day — if you're losing 3% of your harvest, or you have a suboptimal dry-cure process where you're losing 3% of good bound moisture weight (not free water you want to expel, but good bound water), that's a straight cash hit to your bottom line. It's got huge implications. Kellen Finney: You just dropped a lot of buzzwords — moisture activity, water content, how that impacts quality. I'm curious about your and your team's journey to understand why these are the variables that impact quality. Was it working with a lot of growers, testing different bags and looking at water activity, or was it more of a shotgun approach? How did you navigate that? Jack Grover: Great question. Part of it was uncovering that the industry had a miseducation and a poor understanding at large of the relationship between relative humidity, moisture content, and water activity level. While there is some correlation, there's not direct causality in a linear, plottable way between those things. In terms of the journey, the biggest thing that had to happen for people to pay attention to the post-harvest life cycle was probably a perfect storm of a few things — not any one thing. Markets matured, flower wasn't flying off the shelves, it had a life cycle, and people started paying attention because they were forced to. People started to understand: okay, I loved what we pulled out of the grow, and I loved it when we put it into its final packaging — pop-top, bag, TerpLoc bag, jar, square container, round container, whatever form factor, each preaching its own methodology or value proposition — but once I opened that final packaging, the flower just wasn't what I was expecting. That's really been the start of our journey. In terms of deepening our understanding, a lot of it was comparative studies — hops are very similar anatomically to cannabis, so we did a lot of food science studies around hops to dial in our science. When the Farm Bill passed, that really allowed us to dial in a lot of our products and dive deeper into the physiological and pharmacological nature of cannabis — how terpenes, cannabinoids, and flavonoids relate to and feed into each other. Once the Farm Bill passed we were able to do food-grade studies on high-terpene-content hemp, which formed a lot of our initial theories that we've continued to research with partners like Cannabis Research Coalition and Beta Labs and other thought leaders. One thing we recently confirmed in our new CRC study was that residual sugars and glucoses in the plant matter were being consumed in an ideal climate to create sesquiterpenes and residual cannabinoids — there's actually a residual digestive process happening enzymatically within the plant even after you've cut and dried it. It still has a volatile organic nature. We've also discovered hundreds of new minor cannabinoids and sub-cannabinoids in the last nine years that we were suspicious about but hadn't yet confirmed. We're at a very different point in our collective scientific understanding of the plant and how to deliver it in its best form to consumers, patients, and stakeholders. Kellen Finney: So just to make sure we're on the same page — you harvest the plant, then cure it, and there's a proper environment the plant wants to be in to maximize those terpenes? Jack Grover: Exactly. One of the things we found is this very interesting relationship between temperature, moisture, and relative humidity in terms of the life cycle and curing of the flower, but also the gas mixtures within the grow rooms — and it's also the ideal gas mixtures in the curing environments. There's an ideal respiratory environment for the plant at each step of its life cycle, and we're so aware of it and cater to it on the cultivation end — we'd see greater profits and greater cannabis as an industry if we paid that same attention on the post-harvest side. Kellen Finney: Does each strain enjoy the same kind of gas combination post-harvest? Jack Grover: That's a really perceptive question. At this point we've packaged tens of millions of pounds around the world, working with a lot of brilliant, passionate, scientific people. One thing we've realized is if you take all the strain names away and just look at groupings of terpene profiles and cannabinoid profiles, there's an argument you have anywhere from five to nine really dominant terpene blends and groups — some schools of thought say fourteen — but for our purposes, five to seven or eight dominant terpene profiles. There is some scientific justification that they prefer different environments and gas mixtures — not wildly different, but it's possible that a few years from now we'll have distinct terp blocks, and depending on your dominant terpene combinations, you'll want a slightly different water activity level, different temperatures, and dew points — say a heavy linalool versus something dominant in limonene or pinene. That's one of the cool expressions of the plant as we move, both as a cannabis industry and a packaging industry, toward very specific effects and very catered combinations of terpene profiles and efficacies. On the packaging end, we're moving into a space where packaging is more and more acutely tailor-engineered to the individual physiology and life cycle of whatever we're packaging. Kellen Finney: It seems like they go hand in hand — if you don't spend the time working with the plant from a post-curing standpoint, it gets to the consumer after being packaged and the consumer might feel a certain way. All those steps seem really delicate to make sure the consumer gets the terpene response they're looking for when they open the package. Jack Grover: Yeah, I think that's a very good way to put it. One of the big things we've tried to do is take this big, complicated, hairy thing that has a lot of voodoo science — like snapping the stem at exactly 90 degrees, these relative, dialed-in feel-and-touch sciences — and try to put hard, numerical, quantitative values around these qualitative experiences. That's a privilege and a responsibility we feel, helping people provide customers and patients flower that reflects the experience, sophistication, flavors, and effects that were intended when that flower came out of the cultivation room or field. Kellen Finney: How long do you think, realistically, you could keep flower good in a bag? Jack Grover: As long as you're not abusing the dew point of the flower — as far as our bags are concerned, we've had test batches run out to four years. I'll give the asterisk that those test batches were kept precisely between 55 and 68 degrees, and the reason for that is the respiration of terpenes and the releasing of volatile organic compounds in the headspace of the package. One of the big things about TerpLoc is it doesn't release those VOCs — it holds them in the headspace and gives them an opportunity to reattach to the flower. That's one of the ways TerpLoc maintains 40% more terpene-to-cannabinoid retention versus other packaging methods. Bryan Fields: Wait, hold on, say that again — reattach to the flower? Jack Grover: So if you hang-dry, you're driving sugars to create the terpenes, and normally it's a one-way spout where you're taking sugar and converting it to terpene — but with TerpLoc technology you've created a sealed vessel, so the terpenes can't go bye-bye, they're stuck in that little bag with the sealed technology, which stops the metabolic process in the flower from an inhibition standpoint. Picture a sealed container and an unsealed container — in the unsealed, open jar, the cannabis is going through temperature fluctuations, stress points, agitation, and volatile organic compounds are released during a burping, flush, or evacuation process, and they don't have the opportunity to reattach the flower — they're lost in that purging, flushing, evacuatory stage. I'd say curing is different from a purge or flush or evacuation — that's a dry stage, because you still have so much moisture content that you need total evacuative gas exchange to cut down microbial risk. Two very different things — but yeah, imagine those volatile organic compounds, that great medicinal-value stuff, just escaping in an open jar. Kellen Finney: How long did it take internally to come up with these findings? I know you leaned on the hops industry and Farm Bill research — from a wider standpoint, what percentage of the industry is focused on post-harvest, diving deep into these areas? Is it small or big? Jack Grover: I'd say holistically in the U.S. and globally, because we're in a new era of cannabis with a lot of knowledge sharing and collaboration, best practices are rising to the top across every niche aspect of the industry. I'd say probably 80-85% of cultivators worldwide — even home growers, which is a very important part of our space and ethos, no ifs, ands, or buts about it — even they are aware of the importance of it. There's been a lot of talk, knowledge, input, and emphasis built around it, and you've got a lot of cup-winning growers who talk about having a very specific, controlled post-harvest process and protocol. We like to flatter ourselves and think we've helped encourage them to be critical and scientific about that part of their process. Kellen Finney: Let's take it to the consumer aspect — we've talked operationally, how it's produced — the consumer sees a product, gets cannabinoids on a label, some terpenes. What should the consumer be looking for when making a flower purchase? Jack Grover: There's been a lot of criticism of cannabis consumers for buying cannabis on a THC basis, the same way you'd go to the liquor store and buy Everclear because it's the most alcohol per dollar — that creates a very one-dimensional, superficial experience with the plant. There's plenty of evidence now supporting the synergistic effect, the entourage effect, medically, between the different flavonoids, cannabinoids, terpenes, and sesquiterpenes — the interplay and synchronization of these compounds gives them a far greater medicinal benefit together than isolated. If you're smoking distillate carts that are pure THC, you're probing for the lowest common denominator of the cannabis experience — not that there's not room for those products, not that people don't enjoy them, but you've eliminated thousands of other chemicals and medicinal compounds within that cannabis plant. Allowing the plant's natural interplay of these compounds has a far stronger effect. Real, whole, full-spectrum flower — without artificial botanical or synthetic terpenes and flavorings — true cannabis product with full-spectrum benefit really has an outsized effect on the consumer. I've been blessed to participate in fenol hunts and smoke flower from guys I got put onto back when I started this business — the best growers in our space — and I'd rather have their higher-terpene stuff and sacrifice some THC percentage, because overall I'll have a better medicinal experience — a deeper one, not in a spiritual sense but scientifically: more potency, a richer medical effect. A lot of people know about Rick Simpson — the reason Rick Simpson Oil is so lauded is that it's a very full-spectrum plant product. Why would you rob yourself of that on your daily cannabis ritual? I don't believe there is recreational cannabis, honestly — I think it's all medicinal, and if you're doing it socially, that's socializing your medicinal intake in a very real way. We seek out full-spectrum medicine when we're a cancer patient — why don't we want that the rest of the time, instead of smoking hot-dog-water carts that are barely even getting you high because they're just 100% THC? Kellen Finney: And the issue with potency in terms of how consumers make purchasing decisions based on total available THC is also a supply chain issue, right? Dispensaries need some metric to grab onto to differentiate cannabis at $60 versus $40 — is there a way to aggregate terpene concentration, cannabinoid concentration, and water activity into some sort of metric that replaces potency as the main differentiator? Good outdoor weed tests at 15-18% and is a much better experience — look at BVE from Preferred Gardens killing it — but you take out the consumer and it's hard to justify it's a better product without education. How do we do what the wine business does and get people educated and passionate about it? Jack Grover: A lot of vineyards don't make money though — a lot of vineyards go out of business because it's not profitable; the distributors make the money in that situation. Kellen Finney: Sometimes — but those guys just sold Dow for over a billion dollars. There are supply chain aspects associated with that — the current wine industry makes it really hard for someone hyper-passionate about grapes to create a viable product that also supports caring for the vineyard. That's challenging. Jack Grover: Of course it's super hard, and it should be easier, but we still see it getting done — Bonny Doon, Biodynamic Frog is still out there, and customers are paying a premium for it, excited about this responsibly farmed, biodynamic, non-GMO product, and it's working. Should there be more of those? Yes. Would the wine industry be better? Yes. Would America be healthier? Yes. Would America possibly be happier with a better hobby? Yes. I'm not saying all Americans should drink a bottle of wine every night, but smoke more weed — there are things to be excited about. In cannabis we have the same problems — I've seen social equity overwhelmingly fail, I've seen great businesses fail, I've seen good businesses starved out by companies not paying them, some terrible stuff happening in California where businesses are preying on each other's solvency, offering 50 cents on the dollar of what they owe in bankruptcy. Kellen Finney: It's also really challenging to find enjoyable cannabis in Colorado because of potency chasing and other things we've touched on — quality is hard to find right now. Colorado's a tough market. Jack Grover: There's some great brands though — I know, I found 710 Labs — shout out, they don't sponsor the podcast, but they're some good guys in Colorado. Bryan Fields: So my question now would be — there's potency testing where people are unsure of the accuracy, if it's inflated, if there's lab shopping. Are we there with terpene testing accuracy? Jack Grover: You're talking about testing labs — it's a toll business, but it's not really working like other toll businesses because you can go to all these different testing labs, and depending on how things are written in the state, there can be a lot of labs in competition with each other trying to make money in a fluid space. A lot of them are calling customers and saying, well, what do you think it should test — they're not using the same equipment, testing methods, training, or education standards, they're not all cleaning and taking care of the equipment. We have equipment we use for very specific types of testing here at Grove Bags that's cleaner and better than some of these testing labs. It's not an even bar, and it's scary because we're regulating cannabis a lot more than food, water, or medicine in this country, and even still it's rife with problems and conflicts of interest. I don't know what the answer is to testing — bad actors continuously fizzle out, but the lack of cohesion on testing standards has been a missed opportunity for cannabis, because that lack of consistency has prevented people from fully trusting and buying into the industry. When operators complain the illicit market has 20-40-70% of the market, well — have you done the right things to get consumers to jump over, or is it some degree of crony capitalism? More is going to happen legislatively around cannabis in the next two years than has happened in the last 20, undoubtedly. Bryan Fields: Going back to the consumer — not all products even have terpenes labeled. In states that do label terpenes, is there a number they should look for, or certain terpenes you'd recommend, for a simple understanding? Jack Grover: If you're prone to anxiety, limonene is the most polarizing terpene — as a fun example, some people love lemon-heads, like 710 Labs' Lemon Heads No. 4 Percy Rosin, that was a fun time in cannabis that got people talking about limonene — it's very isolating, and some people really don't enjoy it and have an anxious reaction to it, probably one of the most polarizing terpenes out there. I think everybody — and I'll plug someone I'm not being paid to plug — Max Montrose's whole school of interpreting cannabis, the cannabis sommelier style, there are great cannabis sommelier programs and certifications, and interpreting for me is a great approach because it takes the approach of not only identifying but understanding and communicating flavors and experiences, just like wine people can tell you what kind of wine or grape it is. Why doesn't every dispensary in the country offer a cannabis sommelier or have a Max Montrose pushing that science? In wine they do vendor nights and speakers — I think the wine industry is doing a better job in some ways with patient education, and our patients are our responsibility as an industry. Bryan Fields: How does that all tie back to your product, the way the industry operates, and the consumer? Understanding the different failure points along the line must be a really delicate balance for you and your team to navigate. Jack Grover: I think the cannabis industry, no matter who you are or what you're doing in it, is very fluid and challenging to navigate. What's served us best is trying to make products people genuinely love, but just as important is making products for where the industry is headed, not where it currently is, because of fluid regulations, fluid tastes, fluid structures. The industry has to find a natural balance — we now have a good understanding of the number of dispensaries per number of people in an area that really makes sense; we can look at Ohio and say there's an objective lack of dispensaries for patient access right now, whereas at one point in Colorado there were more dispensaries than Starbucks, maybe a few too many for patient access. All that comes down to a space that's maturing, still going through growth and change, that hasn't found its final evolution yet. To be a successful value creator and entrepreneur in such a fluid space, you have to build for where it's going. Bryan Fields: What about wholesale transportation — international export/import — is that something your team is involved in? Do you make massive bags? If you're importing to Germany, is there a different bag, or can they all be the same? Jack Grover: Same formulation, same material the bag is made out of, same general guide points. When you're talking about large batches of cannabis for international transport, moisture content levels become very important as they relate to dew point, given potential temperature fluctuations through the supply chain and chain of custody. Our product's being used to package flower going all over the world every day. We make a 10-pound pouch, some 15-pound pouches. [Showing photos] Believe it or not, this was a medical cannabis shipment that got rejected because the box was perforated, but our bags kept it fine — 50 kilos of flower that was in the bed of a truck, in a broken box, on a plane, went across an ocean and came back, and that flower was still good and approved at the highest medical standards to be resold, so that customer didn't totally lose their ass on it. We're in an advanced, integrated global cannabis economy, same as coffee or anything else, and foolish regulations and foolishness on the part of our leadership on both parties has kept us from taking our rightful place leading this industry. It's still American genetics, American growers in a lot of cases, but we're held back from participating meaningfully because of the current regulatory environment. Meanwhile, cannabis is going all over the world — 25% of the world's countries have some sort of medical or recreational program, hybridized. We're in a different era of this plant-based medicine revolution — look at the first schizophrenia drug developed in 13 years using pharmaceutically recreated psilocybin compounds, a breakthrough drug — there's a whole plant-based medicine revolution going on and we're not participating in it nearly to the extent we should because of the foolishness of our government. I'm seeing flower go from Canada to Europe, Israel to Europe, South Africa to Europe to Israel, Europe to South Africa, Canada to Australia — we've got this global GMP program, American genetics and brands are in it, licensing their IP to partners in Canada who grow it to ship to European distribution channels. It's nuts. I think within the next couple years we'll see major changes. I could blindfold you and put you in any number of cultivation rooms and mixed-light facilities around the world, and if you didn't hear the language on the signs, you'd believe you were outside Santa Rosa in the Bay — Alien Labs of Thailand is out there, the Preferred Gardens team of South Africa is out there, and that's an exciting thing about cannabis. Bryan Fields: Slightly switching gears — what is the most expensive lesson you've ever learned? Jack Grover: A really pertinent, timely one — I think there are two ideologies of business. You can do business ethically, protect yourself and your reputation, and still do business with unsavory people or people with a different worldview than you, sticking by your values, mutual value creation and satisfaction. The other part is you can lie to yourself about an opportunity or a relationship, keep making excuses, but at the end of the day, bad actors aren't only going to hold you back, they're going to drive other people out of your organization and out of what you're doing. It's cost me more than anything else not to know when to say something — you have to be aware of who your tribe is, who you're investing in, who you're making yourself vulnerable to. I look at time spent with people I dealt with honorably, as far as my conscience is satisfied, and it's a shame — there are so many great people and opportunities out there, and a fear of allowing myself to be held hostage made me waste more time on people who weren't good people or didn't share my values, preventing me from investing that time in better relationships. Don't allow yourself to be held hostage by fear when you know something's wrong or not the right fit — don't keep dancing in that burning room, you're going to create a problem for yourself. Bryan Fields: Tell me something that's true that nobody agrees with you on. Jack Grover: I used to say this in presentations all the time — everybody wants to know what type of business cannabis is, I'll tell you something super unpopular: 97-98% of cannabis is a CPG commodity agribusiness with different quality levels and tiers, same as coffee, and people hated that. I love cannabis, I make products for cannabis growers, a lot of my best friends are people who grow cannabis, I don't think there's many people with more reverence for the profession than me — I just think that's the market reality. Bryan Fields: Dream smoking session, three people, dead or alive. Jack Grover: I'd have to go Jerry Garcia... Kennedy — I don't want to get political, but it's the first time we've heard a presidential candidate talk so much about public health, chronic health issues in this country, the integrity of our food and medicine, and the stewardship we have for our own people. And my third would be the original founding editor of High Times — I forget his name — talking about counterculture and the evolution of consciousness, and how much the public's opinion and vilification of cannabis and drugs has changed. I think those are three people with really interesting perspectives on life — closed doors, smoking some true fire, private conversation, maybe roll some hash holes for them and get them a little off guard. That'd be a rich conversation. Bryan Fields: Last question for you, Jack — what question do you wish more people asked you? Jack Grover: How do you buy weed, how do you buy cannabis? I've got a whole process — I go off smell, terpene profile, feel and touch, look, trichome health. I always have a microscope in my bag, especially when I'm judging — I might have a couple. Trichome health and integrity is a very important indicator of flower quality to me. Kellen Finney: You're ready to judge wherever — I love this, and in terms of revisiting earlier, nothing and no one can get in the way of a good business doing right by its customers, that's a very durable thing if you're lucky enough to build it. Jack Grover: I think the way we've done that is — I've admitted this before — we got very lucky developing products that people found real value in. We were just some guys who really liked cannabis with some ideas. I don't think we would have stuck with all the challenges, heartbreaks, difficulties, frustrations, and anxiety of trying to get a business going if we didn't love it 100%. Bryan Fields: For our listeners who want to get in touch, want to learn more, where can they find you? Jack Grover: I'm super available, I love to hear from people. You can find me on LinkedIn at Jack Grover, on Instagram at Jack Grover, email me at jack@grovebags.com. I'm super available — you want to talk terps, you want to talk science, one method versus another, I'm ready to drop at a hat, we'll do it on national TV on the cover of Flor, I'm there. Bryan Fields: I love it, I love it. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Jack Grover: Thanks so much for having me. I hope your audience enjoyed it, and I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day.