Hi, a part of my company recreates custom cannabis strains using all-natural botanicals and I would like to start some discussion about CDTs and BDTs and how they belong on the shelf together, not in competition.
Our goal as a supplier to cannabis folks is to build consistent and repeatable products. This helps build your customer base, build the brand, and to scale accurately since the CDTs are craft and small batch and ultimately hard to replicate.
Obviously, our BDT blends really thrive for the folks who are making discreet or fruity flavored vapes and want to keep it all-natural and GMP. Both the live resin vapes and the flavored disty vapes sell at about the same rate nationally (in our experience with MSOs), and they belong on the same shelf together- not in competition with one another.
Some companies worked so hard for their CDT and they love it so much that they leave all that money on the table and won’t even consider offering a flavored distillate lineup. I think it’s a big mistake to conflate the two options, and since we aren’t out here pushing botanicals as a perfect replica of cannabis strains, just hear me out.
The flavored vapes are trending up so fast right now with new states going rec and an influx of mature, professional, and elderly consumers who need to medicate without stinking up the whole nursing home. I usually vape live resin but occasionally I go to the airport, hotels, Costco, etc… and I like to medicate in public without drawing attention to myself. Again, we do a TON of strain-specifics BDTs also because they are about 1/10 of the price, and scalable and repeatable. A lot of brands choose this route, and we are ALWAYS sure to manage expectations and have a conversation about creative interpretation, CDTs vs BDTs, etc.
Some folks who have a special CDT will add just one percent of it to a larger batch of our terpene blend custom ‘replica’ to be able to scale it up and use it for more projects. There are many other ways of enhancing the original flower terps that we have worked on in past projects (spraying subpar flower to go into pre-rolls, adding terps to shatter, etc).
All of us at this company love and consume live resin and CDTs, it’s what fuels our passion to create the best BDT blends, but I will be first to tell you that they are a ‘direct representation’ and not a perfect match (and we all know this already). But when I started this job I had really low expectations because I had been using BDTs and essential oil compounds for many years to much disappointment. I’m still here because it’s a 110+ year old flavor house that just happens to have thousands of terpenes and flavonoids on the shelf, and the difference in these blends gives me a ton of hope for where this industry is headed. (CDTs are in a similar boat on a similar ocean- about 1 out of every 100 is actually as delicious as they say they are).
Everything you see on the GC with your CDTs, we can get into the bottle with botanicals. But, nature is very hard to replicate, and our subjective brains make it even harder (like when someone says they want an ‘apple’ taste but there are about 5000 different varietals of apples in nature and the customer is most likely just talking about green apple. Meyer lemons vs regular lemons. Key limes vs regular limes. Your OG kush vs my OG kush vs literally any other OG kush. Etc…). People trying to agree on how good your CDT or your cannabis replica terpene is should be even harder, one would think.
Since we are consistently working with CDT farmers and processors in tandem, I can confirm that there are about 300 AWFUL HDT/CDTs on the market, and for the price jump it’s just not a great look. I know of 2 total CDT processors making clean and repeatable no-heat CDTs, and I push them all day.
If you haven’t tried our BDTs yet I’m happy to send you free samples just message me. I’m also happy to refer you to the good CDTs I know of.
The whole point of this is to say that YES, good CDTs are almost impossible to find in this sea of samples that smell like hay or wet grass clippings. BDTs too. And you most definitely get what you pay for in this project… a $.13cent plastic cartridge vs the $1.75 all glass and ceramic units. $1000/L disty vs $4000/L disty. Quality is always going to sell faster when it comes to inhaling vapor and passing the product over all those tastebuds.
Thanks for reading and I would love to hear your thoughts!