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Abstrax Tech produces the terpenes and essential oils that make joints, vapes and edibles taste like marshmallows, candy canes and tropical fruits. Meet the high-minded masters of pure imagination.
By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff
In Long Beach, California, the best nose in the cannabis industry sits at a long desk in a small white room with fluorescent lights and a dropdown ceiling. Iain Oswald, who goes by the nickname “Dr. Dank”, loads a vial with shredded weed into a piece of equipment. In a few minutes, a skunky aroma is emitted through a cylindrical apparatus, which is affectionately called the “sniffer.”
For most people, weed smells like a skunk because that’s the way God intended. But Dr. Dank, who is as much a pothead as he is the lead scientist at Abstrax Tech, wanted to find out why. The gas chromatography mass spectrometer at Abstrax’s R&D center, which produces botanically-derived terpene blends for the cannabis industry, gave him the answer. The distinct scent is due to a volatile sulfur compound known as 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol. And why do some cannabis strains smell like gasoline? Dr. Dank found that the gassy aroma is due to the presence of prenyl mercaptan.
Abstrax’s business is all about helping cannabis brands differentiate their products from the seemingly endless varieties of flower, edibles, vapes and pre-rolls in the $30 billion (annual sales) legal industry. Any decent dispensary in America sells hundreds of products by dozens of brands. The way to stand out is adjust the effect, taste and price. Want a marshmallow-flavored cannabis vape? Abstrax can do that. Looking for a pumpkin pie-flavored edible for Thanksgiving? That’s also possible. How about a fantasy flavor like Roald Dahl’s invented snozzberry? Abstrax is working on it.
While many people enjoy the taste and smell of marijuana, there is a bigger market of potential customers who want a mango-flavored gummy that gets them high, helps them go to sleep, or eases back pain. When THC, the compound in marijuana known for getting people stoned, is extracted from the plant, none of the terpenes, the fragrant molecules found in every plant on earth that makes, say, a rose smell like a rose, are burned off. (Terpenes are a large class of hydrocarbons found in plants, insects, food. Natural rubber, for example, is made from the terpene polyisoprene.) To make a cannabis edible or vape taste like a candy cane or a cherry pie, custom terpenes and flavorants need to be added back in. And this is Abstrax’s sweet spot.
“My ultimate goal is to be Willy Wonka to the industry and to have the fantasy flavor factory for everybody and their brand,” says Kevin Koby, the 32-year-old CEO and cofounder of Abstrax.
Koby, a trained chemist who cofounded the company with his brother Max and friend Jack Peat, is well on his way becoming cannabis’ candy man. Abstrax has created a library of thousands of terpene blends and flavors it sells to 5,400 companies in the legal cannabis market across the United States and the world. Abstrax’s terpene blends are why Jeeter, the country’s largest pre-roll joint maker, sells jays that taste like banana, kiwi, and apple fritter. Wana, one of the largest and oldest edibles manufacturers is also a customer. Pax, the vape company, Raw, the rolling paper brand, and the largest dispensary chains and manufacturers from Curaleaf to Green Thumb Industries to Trulieve all use Abstrax. Controlling about 30% of the cannabis terpene market, Abstrax generated an estimated $45 million in revenue last year by selling bottles of proprietary flavor and aroma blends that are infused into edibles, vapes and joints and expects to hit $55 million by the end of 2025.
Koby’s team of scientists can take a nugget of cannabis flower, drop it into their sniffer and in a few minutes print out data mapping every compound and the exact ratios of terpenes, ethyls, thiols, esters, aromatic alcohols, and aldehydes in that specific strain. Abstrax then recreates that blend by sourcing botanical essential oils and sells them to brands looking to make their mark in the marijuana market.
For legendary cannabis breeders like Mario Guzman, founder of the Sherbinski brand, Abstract’s olfactory factory creates essential oil blends that smell like his popular dessert-like strains, including Bacio Gelato, which has a hint of Thrifty’s ice cream. Abstrax has also made a blend that smells like classic strains like Jack Herer, which is which characterized by its piney and citrusy aroma. But there are more customers who want their cannabis to taste like strawberries or like a wildberry Slurpee.
Because weed remains illegal at the federal level, cannabis companies cannot grow pot in, say, California and sell it legally in New Jersey. This means consistency is one of the biggest issues plaguing brands. That’s where Abstrax’s proprietary terpene blends come in.
“It makes for a more mature industry,” says Peat, the 41-year-old cofounder. “Coca-Cola can’t just change the recipe every month and have it taste different, right? Coca-Cola’s flavor is from the coca plant, it’s a crop, but they standardize it, just like we standardize all of our flavors.”
Koby was not born a Wonka, but he grew into his role. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara with a degree in chemistry and joined a friend to work as a trimmer at a grey market cannabis grow near the Mexico border. Koby lived in his buddy’s camper until he got a job at as an analytical chemist, testing cannabis for a lab.
He would drive around Southern California, picking up samples of flower from dispensaries to analyze the bud for pesticides and cannabinoids, terpenes, microtoxins and mold. He then helped the company build and scale its manufacturing lab, making THC distillate in Washington state.
In 2015, Koby returned to California to work for Kingpen and Loudpack, two early legal cannabis companies, in Los Angeles. He got the company’s lab up and running until it hit $1 million in revenue a week, won several industry awards, and then he decided it was time to start his own company.
The original business plan was to build a white label THC concentrates manufacturing lab. Koby raised $750,000 from Ricca Chemical, a research chemical company he had worked with previously, and bought the sniffer equipment. The Koby brothers and Peat rented a building in Long Beach and started a THC extraction business, but they were losing money after every run selling concentrates wholesale. They were buying $40,000 worth of weed every week to distill the THC from the biomass from a range of growers across California and got the idea to test each bud in the sniffer to see what made it unique.
“We started asking questions like, ‘Why is this OG Kush better than that OG? And we would look at the data and see what the difference is,” Koby recalls. “That would inform our flavor formulations and that’s how we found all these different nuances in all this cannabis.”
By 2017, Abstrax, which now had a staff or scientists, bottled its first terpene blend. To train the team of cannabis chemists, Koby brought in specialists from Big Tobacco, including Barbara Taylor, who worked at Altria as the cigarette maker’s principal tobacco flavorist, and noses from the fragrance industry such as Antoine Lie, who helped develop perfumes like Armani Code and Versace Crystal Noir.
“In a cigarette factory, there are giant vats of whiskey and vanilla and they dip the tobacco leaves in them and roll them out and cure the leaves so the flavor is infused, then they shred the tobacco and make them into a cigarette,” says Koby. “This is why a Marlboro Red tastes like a Marlboro Red. We took these learnings from Big Tobacco, the flavor industry and perfume and applied it to cannabis.”
By the following year, Abstrax was operating in a small strip mall office in Irvine when Wana reached out to discuss creating proprietary terpene formulations. Soon, Abstrax made its first cult flavor called Tiger’s Blood, which is a mix of watermelon, strawberry and coconut. “Our Tiger’s Blood was an invention by one of our flavorists,” he says. “When I taste it, I don’t even know where to begin to describe it.”
And Abstrax doesn’t only produce pleasant-tasting terpenes. One foul compound that Koby’s team sells is called skatole, which they found in the weirdly savory-smelling strain Garlic Onion Mushrooms in 2023. It still makes him turn up his nose. “Some things you cannot un-smell,” he says. “In small amounts, people like it, but in large quantities it’s disgusting. There is still 10% of me that wishes I didn’t know that smell: it’s like mothballs and shit.”
The use of flavoring to create product differentiation has been a winning strategy with vices for decades. Big Tobacco used flavors to make cigarettes more palatable until the U.S. banned flavored cigarettes, with the exception of menthol in 2009. Unregulated nicotine vaporizers like Geek Bar, boasts kid-friendly flavors like rainbow blast, pink lemonade and banana taffy. The trend has also proven successful in the spirits industry, from Stolichnaya’s orange flavored vodka to Malibu’s coconut rum to Fireball cinnamon-flavored whiskey. Even nitrous oxide (or laughing gas), the drug of choice for Phish and Grateful Dead fans, has leaned into the flavor phenomenon: Georgia-based Galaxy Gas, which went viral for its huge, brightly colored tanks, sells mango smoothie and strawberry cream-flavored versions of its so-called “hippie crack.”
Even Abstrax is expanding beyond cannabis—it also has a burgeoning business in the craft beer scene with its subsidiary Abstrax Hops. Every year, the company hosts Skunk Works Lounge, a brewing competition that features beer makers like Cigar City, Mountains Walking and Creature Comforts that all use Abstrax’s pure hops extract and hop terpene blends, from pineapple and watermelon to one that evokes “musky passionfruit and citrusy key lime.”
Some of the nation’s most well-known brewers, including Petaluma-based Lagunitas, uses Abstrax’s terpenes to make its beer standout. Jeremy Marshall, the longtime “Brew Monster” at Lagunitas, says the company worked with Abstrax to create a terpene blend for its newest beer, out later this month, called Hazicus Maximus. The New England-style IPA is infused with grapefruit terpenes, has 9% alcohol and “is intensely juicy and fruity and terpalicious,” says Marshall. This is the second “terp beer” Lagunitas has made with Abstrax essential oils, the first being Super Critical, which essentially tastes like weed and is only sold in California.
“The Abstrax guys are visionaries,” says Marshall, who says he once gave Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella advice to improve his homebrew. “They remind me of the tech guys of Silicon Valley, they think big, they think fast.”
Despite the science driving Abstrax’s success and wide adoption by some of the biggest companies in legal cannabis, the three founders started the company because, well, they like to get high.
“We came to the industry wanting to work with beer and weed because we love beer and weed,” says Koby, who, with his black beard and unbent baseball hat pulled down over his head, looks like your typical weed bro. “It’s that simple. Learning more about what we love and being able to elevate what we do at the end of the day is what keeps us in the groove.”
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