AN IMMERSIVE FEATURE · TRUE TERPENES
True Terpenes makes the flavor and aroma systems that end up inside $8 billion in consumer products each year. Yet most cannabis consumers have never heard their name.
At a time when more and more customers are shopping by flavor, the brands buying True Terpenes' products treat them as an advantage, rather than an ingredient line. Here's why.
WRITTEN BY JACKIE BRYANT
CHAPTER 01 · THE THESIS
Heat, time and extraction strip an enormous amount out of cannabis between the field and the shelf. How you add it back is the difference between a product that hits and a product that dies on the shelf.
In 2022, a group of researchers ran 3,063 blinded consumption sessions and asked people how much they enjoyed what they had just smoked. Enjoyment tracked with one thing: how pleasant they found the smell. THC percentage showed no real relationship to it. Neither did total terpene content, and that second finding is the one the industry keeps skipping past.
It is worth sitting with, because it means piling terpenes into a jar is not the move. What matters is whether the whole thing smells like something, and getting there is a question of how a profile is built, which is craft rather than concentration.
Source: Russo, Plumb, Demirel, Sackett and Wilson-Poe, "The Nose Knows," Psychoactives, 2022.
Look at any dispensary menu. The products moving fastest are those named after a flavor. For many consumers, a flavor they know and love is the way in.
Products with a flavor in the name hold 53 to 56% of national dollar share every month, and 56 to 60% of infused pre roll sales. True Terpenes sits one step upstream of all of it. The profiles its team is working on this year are the ones that show up in the jars people buy next year.
Source: National Top 100, vape and infused pre roll, year to date 2026.
"Consumers are no longer choosing based on strain names alone. They're shopping by flavor and expect the experience to live up to that first impression."DANIEL COOK · CEO, TRUE TERPENES
CHAPTER 02 · INSIDE TRUE TERPENES
This is not your average cannabis manufacturer.
True Terpenes is a terpene manufacturer and flavor house in Hillsboro, Oregon, selling to brands, multi state operators and processors across the market. What leaves the building is a flavor and aroma system that somebody else formulates into a vape, a pre roll, a gummy, a beverage or a concentrate.
Behind every bottle is an ISO Class 9 facility, a product team with full time quality engineers, and four independent third party certification programs audited every year.
The international standard for quality management, which means an outside auditor checks every year that the systems running manufacturing and quality assurance actually work the way the company says they do.
A food safety certification built on ISO 22000, covering how food grade ingredients are handled across the supply chain and on the production floor.
Current Good Manufacturing Practice, the manufacturing discipline the FDA requires of food and drug makers, verified here through independent audit.
An in house ingredient safety assessment, led by a full time toxicologist, that became the ASTM global standard for vape ingredient safety.
ANALYTES ON EVERY LOT'S COA
109 pesticides. 58 residual solvents. 4 heavy metals. Plus appearance, odor and density, reported on every lot shipped, for anyone who asks.
Analyte level results reported on recent published COAs, True Terpenes versus three direct competitors, anonymized.
CHAPTER 03 · THE PORTFOLIO
We don't like to choose just one. But it's the easiest way to find your way around the True Terpenes catalog.
From the dankest heritage strains to the loudest fruity and dessert profiles, True Terpenes has a flavor for every cannabis consumer.
HOVER OR TAP A SIDE · CLICK A LINE TO OPEN IT
C SERIES · IT SHOULD TASTE LIKE THE PLANT
F SERIES · IT SHOULD TASTE LIKE A FLAVOR
MODS · THE TUNING TOOLS
Layer one modifier over a base and the same bottle becomes a different product on the shelf. Tap one to see what it does on the Made to Create menu.
WHAT IT DOES
Three levers. Each one shows up on the menu as named, validated pairings with a base.
THE FIELD · WHERE HEADSTASH STARTS
HEMP TRUE TERPENES GROWS ITSELF
HEADSPACE CAPTURE IN THE ROW
FIELD SENSORY · THE NOSE FIRST
THE TEAM IN THE FIELD
CHAPTER 04 · THE FLAGSHIPS
Sauce, at scale.
Headstash is the sauce component of a formulation, built to drop straight in. It starts with hemp HTE from plants True Terpenes grew itself, then layers in botanically derived exotics to replace what off gassing, heat and processing strip out along the way. Louder than live extract, richer than full spectrum.
It runs under 0.3% total THC, so it ships as hemp, and the tenth batch performs like the first. Intensity, compliance, consistency at scale.
What comes back is what True Terpenes calls a living spectrum: the full range of aromatic compounds you would find in a plant that is still alive. Terpenes are part of that. So are the exotics that give each strain its unmistakable character.
FOUR FAMILIES EXTRACTION LOSES
EACH CARD TURNS · TAP ONEINTERACTIVE · FIVE PHENOTYPIC BASES
INTERACTIVE · MADE TO CREATE
Every recipe here is a validated pairing from the True Terpenes Made to Create menu: a Headstash base plus one other True Terpenes product at a set ratio. Pick your base above, then a recipe. Fine tune it to make each blend your own.
INTERLUDE · THE FLAVOR QUIZ
THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM
HEADIEST
Hemp HTE and the exotics the plant makes. As close to the flower as a bottle gets.
MOST FLAVOR FORWARD
High intensity fruit and dessert flavor, built for the consumer who shops by taste.
LOUD is high intensity flavor built for flavor first brands, and for the consumers who shop for cannabis through taste rather than lineage. LOUD meets consumer expectation for bold fruity and dessert flavors, every time.
CHAPTER 05 · APPLICATIONS
Six formats. One flavor partner.
Batch to batch consistency, viscosity that behaves in the device, and the best tasting flavors on the shelf.
Infusion that survives shelf life, with flavor and aroma that hold from the jar to the last pull.
Aroma applied without a wet or greasy finish, and a profile that holds up over the weeks a jar sits on a shelf.
Character put back into an extract that surrendered some of it in processing.
Bitter blocking, flavor masking and cannabinoid compatible profiles.
Flavor systems for hemp D9 and everything forming around it, which is turning into the most mainstream door in the category.
CHAPTER 06 · THE FOOTPRINT
Farm Bill compliant and shipping from headquarters outside Portland, Oregon, to 49 states and 107 countries. Watch the map light up, then tap a stop to see where True Terpenes lands next.
From its headquarters outside Portland, Oregon, True Terpenes reaches 49 states and operators in 107 countries, among them Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel and Australia.
CHAPTER 07 · THE PEOPLE
A flavor science team, a genetics program, and a toxicology group whose work the rest of the industry now measures itself against.
2003
Chris Campagna, now founder and chief innovation officer, finds cannabis while looking for an alternative to pharmaceuticals during a long recovery from a rare autoimmune disease. He gets better, and the interest sticks around a good deal longer than the illness does.
2011
Dr. Ethan Russo's paper "Taming THC" teaches Chris that terpenes are the power behind cannabis, and the reason he prefers some strains over others. For him it is the terpinolene in Durban Poison.
2016
After building a business connecting patients with growers in the early days of Oregon medical legalization, Chris founds True Terpenes to bring terpenes to patients and consumers in a way that is consistent and safe.
2017
Terpene strain profiles launch. Advanced analytics pinpoint classic cannabis strain profiles and recreate them from botanical isolates, giving the company a floor: a way to prove a profile is what the label says it is.
2019
Flavor Infused Strains launch to meet a market turning toward flavor. The same year True Terpenes becomes the first terpene supplier in the space to invest in ISO 9001:2015, FSSC and GMP certifications.
2020
Dr. Russo joins the True Terpenes Science Board.
2021
Live Resin hemp derived terpenes arrive. The sensory program launches with an evolving cannabis aroma lexicon and the aroma wheel, and the team begins growing its own high terpene cultivars to extract for Live Resin.
2022
From one person shipping terpenes out of a Portland garage to a team of 100. True Terpenes moves into True HQ for full control over its process, and hand harvested Live Resin 2.0 debuts.
2023
True Terpenes collaborates across industry and academia on a framework for regulators and manufacturers to assess vape ingredients on scientific data.
2024
ASTM International passes two standards for assessing non cannabinoid ingredients in cannabis vapes, both adopted from research by True Terpenes head of research and toxicology Shawna Vreeke, Ph.D., with Echoleah Ruffer, Ph.D., DABT. The first sets out how to evaluate the toxicological data on an ingredient. The second explains how to calculate a daily inhalation exposure limit from it. Before them, regulators had almost nothing to work from except bans.
2026
Ten years in. Durban Poison, the strain the whole thing started on, comes back for the anniversary.
A certificate of analysis tells you what is in the bottle. It cannot tell you what happens when that meets your oil, your device and your customer. Request business samples and find out.
REQUEST SAMPLES →