Tony Verzura Innovating with Authentic Cannabis-derived Terpenes & Deconstructing Extracts

Tony Verzura Innovating with Authentic Cannabis-derived Terpenes & Deconstructing Extracts

Authentic Cannabis: My goal was to replace all of the fake flavor with authentic, real cannabis-derived terpenes, because A) it tasted better, B) it represented the plant, and C) most importantly, the effects and longevity of the effects were actually real. Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, with me as always is Kellen Finny, and this week we've got a very special guest, Tony Verzura, CEO of Blue River Turps. Tony, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing today? Authentic Cannabis: I'm good, man, I'm good. How are you guys doing? Bryan Fields: Doing well. Kellen, how are you doing? Kellen Finny: I'm doing really well. Really excited to talk to Tony, really excited to talk terpenes and the various products. I'm excited to talk to someone who has a lot of experience from the West Coast. How are you, Bryan? Bryan Fields: That's fair, Kellen, and I know you're really trying to angle Tony here from a West Coast standpoint, but I think there are two things we think about with people's affiliations - where they were born and where they currently are. So Tony, if you had to choose East Coast or West Coast, where would you stack up? Authentic Cannabis: Yeah, definitely - I was born in Hollywood, Florida, not Hollywood, California. I grew up actually in the Midwest, in Kansas, so I went from about 20 million people to like 10,000 midway through childhood, which gave me a good perspective on both. I was the youngest of, between brothers and step-brothers, about seven kids. When I was 14 or 15 we went on a European trip - my first experience going from England through Amsterdam down to Pompeii, Italy. It was my dad's way of teaching me the world in three months: drop you off, I'll see you in three months, no money, no clothes, go figure it out. On that trip I definitely smoked weed, got some old-school green hash - crazy different experiences. That was my first turn-on, and that's where I got my first skunk seeds, around '94, '95. Because of the laws at the time I kind of stayed under the radar until Colorado became the first state to amend its constitution so medical marijuana was protected for caregivers at some level from the federal government. I jumped back into cannabis as a caregiver first, on the medical side for many years - most of my early years were medical-driven, helping patients and myself. Then I ended up in California because Colorado went recreational - I was like, 'I'm done, I'm not sticking around for some recreational sellout.' California was all medical at the time, then they went adult-use too. Everywhere I went, adult-use programs seemed to hurt the medical programs; there was never a model with a duality that supported both sectors, which I think is really important. After meeting my wife, who's East Coast, while I was West Coast, and studying policy in different states, I felt Massachusetts had a good duality - a strong medical program, at times even bigger than adult-use. So I've been all over - even did some products in Florida. Definitely East and West Coast. Bryan Fields: What do you think is the biggest challenge for those markets in balancing that duality between medical and recreational? Authentic Cannabis: I don't believe a state should over-restrict this. There are what's called limited and unlimited licenses. Unlimited means unlimited canopy, unlimited dispensaries, and an unlimited number of licenses issued. A lot of states build their programs based on popularity - looking at population and estimating something like 7% cannabis users on average, versus a city like Boston at 14%. Those percentages, plus lobbyists and whether a state leans Republican or Democrat, shape policy. Florida, being more conservative, has a limited-license model with unlimited canopy - only about 20 licenses, very hard to obtain, with prerequisites like decades of farming experience. Colorado was the opposite - unlimited licenses; there was a point with a thousand dispensaries, now maybe 300 - based on how many patients you cared for and your canopy size. The better grower and caregiver you were, the more plants and patients you were allocated. I subscribe to that model on the medical side; I don't think limiting operational licenses necessarily helps. Michigan is probably the second-highest consumption state by volume, around $3 billion in cannabis goods, but you have to weigh that against population versus California - Michigan has very heavy consumers relative to its size. That's an unlimited-license state - you could have a 250,000-square-foot indoor grow or 100 acres if you keep paying for licenses. Massachusetts is limited - only three retail, three grow, three manufacturing licenses per operator, capped by kilowatt usage and square footage, so you can't really exceed 100,000 square feet. It's more like NASCAR racing, which drives a craft market. In 2019 Massachusetts had a reputation for having probably the worst weed in the country, but that's changing because operators, limited in scale, are forced to hone their craft - the MSOs and non-craft players won't survive in a market like that. Then there are caregiver models layered on top of the commercial adult-use and medical licensing structure. Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, and Florida all handle this differently; some don't allow home grows. I don't agree with that - if someone isn't commercializing, growing plants at home should be a right. Growing cannabis is difficult, and growing specifically to make hash is even harder - that's a true home-brew craft model that has to exist, because people are in different financial situations, and sometimes an individual making a topical or tincture at home, someone you trust, produces a far better product than a dispensary, even without lab testing. Those caregivers tend to be the most passionate people - living-soil growers doing something different, not really chasing money but trying to help people - and that model has to exist to foster genetics and innovation. You have to let them flourish, not to the point of feeding a giant black market, but flourish. I think Massachusetts checks all three tiers well. California is a bit Wild West with its caregiver model - it's the biggest black market, the West Coast always has been, everything ships east, and that won't change until the feds allow interstate commerce. You'll never get California-grown cannabis replicated in Massachusetts, for the same reasons lavender grows in the Northwest and not the Midwest, and wheat grows in Kansas and not Michigan. Bryan Fields: So the regulations and how each state is set up from a market standpoint are going to dictate which brands have a chance of success in that market. Authentic Cannabis: Correct. Bryan Fields: So strategically, what has Blue River done, and can you give our audience some background on your brand and products, and how that's shaped where you've focused your resources and time given these market and regulatory factors? Authentic Cannabis: Yeah, so I started in the '90s as a grower first, a caregiver first, which is probably why I'm biased toward letting people grow for themselves. I was always fascinated with the plant and trying to find new things. When I was in Colorado we were vertically integrated, medical, and I eventually transitioned out. There was a moment when I was challenged on another show to try to isolate cannabis terpenes, and that was the essential-oils angle we hadn't really explored - that was the first step toward Blue River. I was always producing and making products for other brands - hash makers, BHO brands, solvent and non-solvent - always a product maker, but for other people. Blue River itself really started with that terpene challenge. Like everyone starting out, I tried steam distillation and other techniques borrowed from industries like lavender. Once I found my own method - which took a lot of R&D and failed attempts - I finally had a pure vial I could actually test, and that took a long time too, since labs had to start testing for terpenes. When I hit 98% terpene purity in those vials, I knew I'd gotten rid of the hydrosols and other byproducts and had the pure essence of the flower in a vial. My goal was to address the huge market using fake flavoring in distillate products - still common today - and replace it with authentic, real cannabis-derived terpenes, because A) it tasted better, B) it represented the plant, and C) most importantly, the effects and longevity were real, versus just getting high off distillate THC and fake flavoring. The modulation of how THC enters the body and mind happens through those terpenes. That was the start of Blue River conceptually. I popularized the word 'terps' - I used to say terpenoids, then terpenes, then in California it became 'terps,' and in Amsterdam people started calling me 'Tony Terpene' or 'TP Tony.' Most scientists cringed at that, but musicians and others picked it up, and that's where I found the brand identity: authenticity, representing the plant, and quality of experience - I want people to know that whatever Blue River product they try, it's authentic to the plant. Growing up on a farm in the Midwest, I always wanted things organic, whatever I made - topical, sublingual, whatever - I was done with what I call 'hot dog water.' That brand identity started there. California gave me a lot of support to do high-end small batches, and I started making extracts differently - mixing terpenes with full-melt hash, with rosin, pushing things from a level 10 to a level 15. My first Blue River award was in 2014, mixing terpenes with full-melt and with rosin, even putting terpenes into BHO. That was highly controversial - I won some High Times awards but people started hating on it immediately, because reintroducing terpenes into six-star hash or turning it into rosin was seen as sacrilege even by other hash makers. My argument was that we both start with the same pound of flower - there's no reintroduction of anything that wasn't already in the plant. That mentality pushed me to bypass hash and rosin entirely at one point and start making deconstructed, solventless, mechanical extracts - isolating cannabinoids and terpenes mechanically and designing my own textures. That led to products like Fla and Jelly, names that partly came about because Instagram kept shadow-banning and blacklisting anything cannabis-related - I got banned six times - so I needed names that wouldn't trigger it. Fla came from being stoned and thinking of flan as my favorite dessert. Kellen Finny: And that's honestly how we met, back in 2018 - I got to try your banana Fla and I'd never seen anything like it. I was like, 'what is this?' So how do you balance creating game-changing new products like that with maintaining the market share you've already built? Is there some kind of resource balancing happening there? Authentic Cannabis: To be honest, when you met me in Oakland I was just like a mad man in a lab - before my wife, which I think helped bring balance. I was just getting high, creating, pushing limits. I had my own space, my own time, nothing else going on in life. A lot of the Fla and Jelly work was funded on the side because I was furnishing cannabis-derived terpenes to other companies - brands like Lift Tickets, Gold Drop, and Lemon Tree wanted authentic cannabis terpenes, which is expensive given the cost of flower and the process. We learned to scale that up, but I was more interested in designer dabs - where this whole thing was going. There was a huge learning curve: taking something that's 20 grams in a jar and putting it into a half-gram or full-gram unit changes everything about it, and the packaging technology at the time, around 2017, wasn't there yet. This year we switched all our jars to Miron Infinity jars - they have patented tech, violet glass, they're the most expensive, but the research shows they prevent flavor loss and degradation. As a consumer, you want your gram to stay perfect on the shelf while you're dabbing it. Once you strip a trichome head down to pure cannabinoids and terpenes - removing flavonoids, liquids, waxes - you get 100% purity, but you lose whatever was holding it together, so you get hydrophobic and hydrophilic reactions, absorption issues, and aging effects that don't happen the same way with regular hash, which ages from blonde to brown because of retained fats. Consumer feedback - 'your stuff dried up on me' - pushed us to adapt through magnetic-seal jars, foil seals, changing suppliers, and other packaging shifts, which taught me how to actually scale and commercialize a product versus something that's a one-off flex, like our new dual-layer two-gram units that we only sell in our own Cambridge and Somerville stores because they're not scalable. We also make a product called our POA, combining Fla and fresh-press techniques to get a clear, consistent texture alongside other textures, which changes tack, terpene content, cloud thickness, and effect longevity, and lets us combine two different batches or textures together. We also brought back old-school hash - basically five-star pressed into hash balls - after bringing on a right-hand man, Will, with 20 years of experience, who pushed us to get six-star hash and bomb live rosin into the catalog as a baseline, while we build out the more experimental designer-dab side. As we became more vertically integrated - unlike California, where we were a standalone extraction and creative center with no cultivation or distribution - we focused on affordable, high-quality products without overpricing, similar to how Tesla offers electric cars at different price points. We try to cap Fla around $60 a gram retail and old-school five-star hash around $40 a gram, because by the time a product passes through a distributor and retailer, prices balloon - and I wouldn't pay $100 a gram for anyone's extract, no matter how cool it is, and neither should consumers. We also learned, being a caregiver and customer ourselves, that aging product needs to go on sale like fresh-squeezed juice - you can't charge $60 a gram for something three months old. Being transparent about that - discounting older product to $30 or $40 a gram - builds trust with customers. Kellen Finny: How important has access to retail locations, and talking directly to consumers, been to the evolution of these products? Would you say that's one of the biggest differences between your California operation and where you are now? Authentic Cannabis: It drives everything. We had some of that in California, but things there often went into gray areas - like whether a store even had climate-controlled vaults, since many shops transitioned from medical to adult-use without adapting infrastructure, which affected failure rates on different devices. Now, with hundreds of people a day coming through our stores, that feedback loop is everything - we're consumers too, so nothing hits the market without it. Every year we roll out new packaging, devices, jars, and products directly because of customer requests - like people asking for old-school brick hash, which led us to create both a cured $30-a-gram blonde hash and a fresh-frozen version. A single social post about that can get 20,000 views and huge engagement, which tells us we're onto something. We're working on making direct feedback channels - like a contact form on our website - even better. My advice to consumers: businesses that care about your concerns will adapt if you engage them directly, like a DM, rather than blasting them publicly for free product; that kind of feedback doesn't actually help anyone improve. Bryan Fields: Is there any feedback from customers, or an internal creative product you've been chasing, that hasn't quite been mastered yet - something that, when you nail it, will be a game changer? Authentic Cannabis: The device world is still evolving. Puffco does a great job, and we're exclusive to Puffco in our stores because I know Roger and the crew, and they're genuinely listening to their audience - across the Plus, Proxy, and Pro tiers - about how to get bigger, more controlled clouds, which helps us push our extracts further. On the product side, I'd love a device for properly packaging rosin - for example, getting a rosin core into the middle of a joint automatically, the way people do infused pre-rolls by hand. No real device exists for that yet; it would need something like a giant needle or pressurized applicator that could handle wet batter texture and scale commercially. On vaping hardware, we're shifting from alloy, cotton, or standard ceramic - which all interact with live rosin's cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids and change color over time - toward horizontal, lab-grade porous ceramic buckets, similar in concept to Puffco's chamber, where you're not vaping through any wicking material at all. That tech isn't fully mastered yet, but we're working with a few groups, including one featured on our website with a brand called Kung Fu, on early-stage versions. Vape is probably the fastest-growing category, but it's also the hardest hit by federal and big-tobacco-driven policy trying to smother vaping altogether, so the tech and the policy are heading in opposite directions. Beyond that, we're working on a Fla 5.0 concept and multi-textured, multi-strain-blend concentrates - for example, combining a gassy Fla with a fruity fresh-press so every dab is a little different, appealing to high-tolerance users or those chasing a specific creative, euphoric, or heavy-body-and-mind experience. We're essentially curating a menu: hash is heavy body and mind, rosin is mind and body, Fla is more 'shoulders up.' It's about price point, experience, and constantly improving the behind-the-scenes technology to scale it. Kellen Finny: I want to dig into terpenes specifically, since cannabis-derived terpenes are obviously your staple, but there are other options on the market. How can consumers tell the difference when choosing a product if they specifically want cannabis-derived terpenes? Authentic Cannabis: We actually only reintroduce cannabis-derived terpenes back into one product now - Fla - and even our vape doesn't do that; the terpenes present are only what was already in that specific plant material, with no reintroduction. Flower contains terpene groups, and within the trichome head itself there are actually three different terpene groups, plus oils at the microscopic surface. Alive versus cured trichomes yield monoterpenes versus sesquiterpenes respectively. Cannabis contains over a hundred different terpenes - linalool, also found in lavender; d-limonene, found in oranges; pinene, found in pine forests - all present in cannabis's full terpene spectrum. Every region where cannabis grows outdoors produces a dominant terpene profile based on genetics, sun, and elevation - plants grown at 500, 1,500, or 3,000 feet, or in different regions like Mendocino versus Morocco, will express different nuances, the same way different regions produce different oranges or grapes. As for processing: if you see 'natural flavor' on packaging, that's vague marketing - something like 'pumpkin spice' doesn't come from cannabis at all; it's a flavor compound, maybe naturally derived, but non-cannabis-derived. Policymakers dislike non-cannabis-derived terpenes because those compounds, when combusted or vaporized alongside THC distillate - sometimes as a cutting agent, like vitamin E acetate controversies taught us - create very different, potentially riskier products. Marketers rarely say 'distillate' outright; they use vague language instead. At our dispensary, we don't stock CO2, butane, ethanol, solvent-based, or non-cannabis-derived terpene products at all - to me that's the health-risk tier, similar to unregulated e-juice vapes, even if the end product passes testing. People do ask for it because it's cheap, gets them high, and doesn't smell as strong - there's a real market for that, we just don't serve it. The next tier is cannabis-derived terpenes extracted via CO2, which I'd still classify as a solvent process because it dissolves the flower, similar to ethanol or hydrocarbon extraction, just with different post-processing. Butane-based products, in my opinion, fall into the live-resin category - a hydrocarbon solvent passes through the plant material, and because polarity properties differ so much between water and hydrocarbons, that changes how the terpenes behave. That's actually why people criticized me for putting terpenes back into hash or rosin years ago - they assumed I was reintroducing a hydrocarbon into a solventless product, when really I was extracting terpenes directly from the hash or rosin itself, not adding foreign material - something I plan to finally show in a behind-the-scenes video after keeping the process private for years. So to summarize the pyramid: fake terpenes plus distillate at the bottom; cannabis-derived terpenes (often via CO2) plus distillate above that; hydrocarbon-derived live resin, which captures terpenes with flavonoids in a single pass if done with full solvent recovery, above that; and finally unadulterated live rosin, made mechanically with no reintroduction at all, at the top. It's incredibly confusing for consumers because brands market these categories inconsistently - even legitimate live-resin makers often avoid the term because they're afraid it might turn off customers who don't understand it. It's like asking for fresh-squeezed orange juice: one glass is made by simply pressing oranges, the other by running a solvent gas through the fruit and then fully recovering that gas - both might test clean and taste similar, but once consumers understand the process, many won't want the second glass. That awareness is driving huge growth in the solventless vape category, even though live resin and rosin will always carry a higher price point - live resin around $40 a gram, live rosin around $40 for a half gram - and price point remains the industry's biggest barrier. We work every day on bringing solventless prices down to make it accessible to the masses, because if it's not affordable, none of the quality argument matters to a consumer who just wants to get high at the right price. Bryan Fields: All right, let's do prediction time. Tony, do you see a world where a consumer can select individual terpenes and/or cannabinoids to blend for a personalized product experience? Why or why not? Authentic Cannabis: Some technology like that already exists, and yes, I believe it's possible - but whether it takes off depends on the inputs. If the components going into that machine aren't organic, naturally derived, or backed by technology consumers trust, it won't fly, even if it's a cool device. There's also a whole other world coming, similar to 3D food printing that's already being developed for other industries out of necessity. I think eventually some smart innovator will be able to read a full cannabinoid and terpene genetic profile and essentially program a machine to output the perfect extract or oil. I do think that will happen - I'm just not sure it'll happen in my lifetime. Bryan Fields: You just found Kellen's next project to work on, if you want to team up to make sure it's an authentic experience. Kellen Finny: I'm down. We'll make it so the printer cartridge is literally just raw atoms - hydrogen and carbon - and build any molecule from the ground up. Authentic Cannabis: Given what I know about your background, that's not crazy at all - they're actually doing that right now with small, automated chemical-synthesis reactors that hold basic organic building blocks and can produce entire compound libraries. Kellen Finny: Exactly - miniaturized reactors with a reservoir of basic building blocks that can assemble almost any molecule. I geek out on this kind of stuff. Authentic Cannabis: I agree completely - it's like the shift from analog tube guitar amps to solid-state ones; we're talking about the same kind of transition, just at the molecular level. I also follow a website called Worldometer, which tracks real-time global data - births, deaths, carbon output, resource consumption, days of coal or gas left. With the world population still growing rapidly, we're going to be forced to move to different methods for food and resources - today's batteries and solar tech will eventually look outdated too. Bryan Fields: Couldn't agree more. From a cannabis angle, I think a fun product could be something like those old candy sticks with four different sugar flavors you'd dip into - imagine that, but with four different strains and a dabbing element. Authentic Cannabis: Funny you say that - we were literally talking about a 'Fun Dip'-style dab product for our 2024 catalog, but held off because of concerns around it looking too kid-friendly. I do think things like that, along with consumption lounges once that becomes legal, will open up a lot of creative possibilities - we've already done things like terpene cotton candy and cotton-candy-flavored rosin popcorn at private sessions, which people loved even without a strong high. Kellen Finny: What do you think, Bryan? Bryan Fields: It's hard to top those ideas, but all I could picture was something like a soda-fountain machine with individual selections. I think the important part is that someone like you, Tony, is pushing boundaries and not just letting the masses dictate every product category - I appreciate that approach. For our listeners who want to learn more, where can they find Blue River? Authentic Cannabis: blueriverturps.com. Bryan Fields: Cool, we'll link that in the show notes. Thanks for taking the time, this was fun.