Is Dabbing Dead? Puffco’s CEO Says It’s Never Been Better (or More Flavorful)
In this interview with Puffco Founder and CEO Roger Volodarsky, he explores what inspired him to take concentrate consumption to the next level and how this revelatory experience is connecting him with a like-minded community that’s elevating the hash space to a more refined, precise realm.
He shares 10 years of insights around consumer preferences, the evolution of hash, and what it means to finally find your tribe.
Cannabis & Tech Today: As far as the consumer’s taste from 2013 to now, what kind of trends are you noticing?
Roger Volodarsky: I think the most exciting part of contemporary hash is the constant evolution. So year one, I started in the cannabis space and the only thing we know concentrates as, except for traditional hash, is what we were calling wax, which we then learned was [butane hash oil] B. H. O.
Year two, live resin becomes a thing. Now, they’re freezing the flower before they process it. Then the next year, distillate became a thing. Distillate was not popular at all and it just hit the scene. The year after that, flower rosin happens, and the year after that hash rosin happens.
Now it’s easier to do and you’re getting way more flavor and your high is not intense anymore. It’s actually more pleasurable.
The past 10 years, I could probably spend an hour talking about how every single year there is a leap, and this is still happening today … The story of cannabis as it relates to hash, to me is the fastest-growing innovative area of cannabis. It’s also the fastest growing in terms of community. But to be in the contemporary hash space is to exist in a space that is constantly evolving.
C&T Today: What do you wish that people understood about concentrates that maybe they don’t?
Roger Volodarsky: There’s a lot of preexisting perceptions about concentrates, and I don’t think a lot of it is positive. If we look at traditional hash, it has been vilified across the world.
Even though you can go to almost any place in the world and find it, it has been extremely vilified and people have seen it close to other drugs that are super addictive and hard, like heroin and opium. So there’s that stigma that comes from the old world, but then contemporary hash hit the scene in the early 2010s, which is what Puffco was born out of.
Those days were filled with lots of videos of people taking these really big rips on red hot nails, coughing their brains out, some of them passing out. And that only reinforced this perspective that concentrates are extremely strong and for people looking to get blasted, not just a little bit high, not for medicine, you’re using it to get absolutely ripped.
That’s just not where it is today. Where it started, I think a lot of us fell in love with concentrates because we were able to get a more intense high than we were from flower. But over time, with the introduction of low-temp dabbing, I found that I actually turned to concentrates fully in 2015.
CONTINUE READING THIS STORY HERE