Matt Engel at MOCA Humboldt Talks About Cultivating Wookies and Grape Cookies

Matt Engel started his journey in the cannabis space in the early days of Illinois' medical market.

Engel and a friend were awarded one of the first Illinois medical cannabis licenses in February 2016 and opened a retail location in Chicago's Logan Square. After Illinois legalized adult-use cannabis in 2019, MOCA earned a license to sell to the state’s expanded consumer base at its Logan Square location and later opened up an adult-use dispensary in River North.

Today, both locations are operated by multistate cannabis operator Ascend Wellness Holdings, which acquired Illinois' MOCA locations in 2020.

But that's just part of Engels' story. Engel, originally from Chicago, moved to Humboldt County, Calif., in 2005. While going through the medical licensing process in Illinois, he was also operating in California's medical market under Proposition 215 as a delivery service.

"I was growing everything and making all the products. Essentially just all small batch products, and [I] had a patient base locally and was just doing a delivery service," he says. "When the [adult-use] licensing process came about in California, we applied for a microbusiness license out here, which we have now. Over the past several years, we have transformed that to a brick-and-mortar version of what the delivery service was."

© Courtesy of MOCA Humboldt

Now, MOCA operates as an indoor, soil-grown cultivation operation in Eureka, Calif., focusing on producing small-batch, high-quality products and providing unique experiences for consumers.

"We have a 6,600-square-foot facility. We grow in-house; we do extraction in-house with the material we grow; we also make edibles and confections in our commercial kitchen all in-house and all single source. And then the retail showroom is on-site as well," he says. "So it's kind of like a craft brewery where everything is made in-house and brought right down the hall for the freshest possible."

And MOCA has been recognized for its high-quality products. The company won six awards in the 2022 California State Fair cannabis competition for three cultivars–Wookies, Grape Cookies and ZOG. Wookies won gold for the best of indoor for the THCa award category, and Grape Cookies took home gold for the best of indoor for the CBGa award category. And ZOG won silver for the Caryophyllene category.

Cannabis Business Times spoke with Engel to learn more about his gold-medal cultivars and their most exciting attributes, as well as his thoughts on the California State Fair's first-ever Cannabis Awards.

Andriana Ruscitto: Can you tell us a bit about Wookies? What are some of its most interesting attributes?

Matt Engel: Wookies is what, I guess, you'd call a gas strain. It's made by crossing Girl Scout Cookies with The White and Chemdawg 91.

© Courtesy of MOCA Humboldt

It took a while to get everything going. … We've been open for just over a year. So when the building got going, we grew first before we opened our retail. We had our first harvest right around Christmas of 2021, and that was the first batch of Wookies. All the strains and flavors that we started with were essentially cultivars that we had been working with previously that were in our catalog and that we were able to bring when we first got going here.

So both the Wookies and the Grape Cookies were cultivars that we have had in our catalog for some time, and I had a decent amount of experience working with [them] already. We hadn't really done too much testing on them yet, because we weren't operating at that point, but we definitely had experience working with them. Wookies is high in myrcene, β-caryophyllene and limonene. … Generally, for everything we grow ... we plan our menu according to the terpene profiles and not necessarily using the older terms of indica, sativa and hybrid. We've kind of shifted into more of a terpene focus. We highlight the terpenes in our branding and really try to use that to guide the flavor profile and effects as we are educating our customer base.

AR: Did you set out to grow a THCa dominant strain?

ME: Living in Humboldt over the years, you just work with so many different people and you kind of source genetics and catalog your vault of strains. But no, we weren't necessarily working to grow the highest THCa dominant strain. It's almost even the opposite, where a lot of the newer markets really do have a high focus on potency. We really try to shift the focus more to terpene profiles and the overall effects and flavors of the flower.

AR: Can you tell us about Grape Cookies and some of its most interesting attributes?

ME: Grape Cookies is a strain that was bred by a good friend of ours, Doc Wheeler. That is a cross between Grape [Kush] and Forum Girl Scout Cookies.

© Courtesy of MOCA Humboldt

It was something that our friend had bred and that we had the privilege of being able to grow. When we entered that into the competition, that was really the first time we had done testing on it.

One thing to keep in mind with the California State Fair Cannabis Awards is that they're … based purely on test results. ... which is unique because other competitions, [like the] Emerald Cup, ... are based more on subjective judging by a large group of people that taste and try out the product and then judge it, whereas the [California] State Fair is specifically based on lab results.

We didn't necessarily know what we were going to get when we first tested the Grape Cookies. We found that it is dominant in β-ocimene, which is a slightly rare terpene. It also has an unusually high potency of CBGa, which is a little bit of a rare cannabinoid. It is essentially the building blocks of THC and CBD. It's what the cannabinoids start off as, and then as the plant ages, they shift over to THC or CBD. But with this strain specifically, even as it finishes, it shows high levels of CBG. We've tested a number of batches now, and we consistently get a 4:1 ratio of THC and CBG. So that is unique and something that we haven't seen in any other cultivar.

AR: What was your impression of the CA State Fair Cannabis Awards in general?

ME: I thought it was just a great thing in general. It's a really nice way to try and normalize it and make cannabis something that's accessible to everyone. This was in an exhibition hall right next to award-winning chocolates and coffees and beers and cheeses. It was just another beautiful thing created in California that people can come and learn about [and] appreciate. … Last year was the first year, and it seems like there's a really great response. We look forward to seeing how it's growing this year.

AR: In terms of the California cannabis market in 2023, what is one thing you'd like to see change?

ME: We'd love to see more retail options for people in the rest of the state. There still are a lot of municipalities. Just the way Prop. 64 was created, it's given powers to local municipalities to limit or completely ban dispensaries. There are a growing number of dispensaries, but it'd be great to see just more dispensaries throughout the state.

AR: Are you planning to enter the California State Fair Cannabis Competition this year? If so, can you tell us a bit about what you've been working on?

ME: It is the entry window right now. We plan on submitting a few entries, possibly a new batch of Grape Cookies again.

Another thing that we do with our shop is we have three flowering rooms, and we pretty much always grow between four to eight strains per room at a time, and we're harvesting generally once a month. So we have a thing we call 'fresh drop Friday,' and we release a new flavor of flower every single Friday of the year.

So, we are always sourcing new genetics. We run some of the same things over again, things that we like or things that people like. But basically, every week, we are cutting our flower, testing it, packaging it, and releasing it the following week, which is about as fresh as you can get, especially on the licensed market. With that being said, we have a lot of batches that we're testing, and we have until the middle of next month to submit [them]. So, we're kind of just waiting to see what else we have come in, but we have some really exciting things that we have already gotten test results on that we're looking forward to submitting and that we are waiting to see what else comes up next month to see if we have any other potential interesting entries that come up.

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