Solventless concentrates are quickly becoming the new gold standard in the cannabis extracts niche. It’s one of those fairly rare cases of simplicity meeting luxury.
According to BDSA, a cannabis market analyst firm, in the first quarter of 2018, there were only 4 rosin vape cartridge products sold in Colorado. Fast forward to the first quarter of 2021, and they became 160. That’s a 40-fold increase in 3 years!
The same trend can be observed in California, going from 16 to 28 products in the same period. The reasons behind the rapid rise in solventless concentrates’ popularity are a few.
Safety and Purity
This is the first and most obvious one. In fact, it’s perfectly logical not just within the cannabis world, but the worlds of wellness,foods and drinks as a whole in which safety and purity are becoming a bigger priority as a result of our increased access to information on health and the hazards to it.
In the context of the increasingly health-oriented world, just the mere possibility of the presence of pesticides and solvent residues are enough to scare even experienced users who previously never bat an eye consuming black-market cannabis, let alone new consumers.
Even the safety guarantee of respected third-party authorities can’t beat the peace of mind that a lack of solvent can provide. No solvent, no risk.
It’s Attractive to Manufacturers
Eliminating solvents also means eliminating the need for some of the complex equipment and machinery and respectively the know-how to operate it. This, in turn, lowers the bar for manufacturers, in a couple of good ways.
First and foremost, it’s a chance for cannabis farmers who know more about growing quality cannabis and less about concentrating it in a fancy laboratory to play the concentrates market.
Second, it lowers the financial entry point for them, since extraction equipment that uses solvents tends to be quite expensive.
Energy Conservation
Because of their simplicity, solventless extracts also spare energy, which in turns saves money – for both the manufacturers and respectively the consumers, even if the product is high-end like rosin.
As the demand for the solventless concentrates increases, their larger-scale production will become more and more feasible, only accelerating their rise in popularity. And it seems that this should be good news for everyone.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shatter_marijuana_concentrate.jpg