In what appears to be a Canadian first, a federally-licensed processor and seller of medical cannabis has released purchasable samples of dried cannabis strains to its registered patents.

The samples are sold in glass one-hitter pipes that can be immediately lit and smoked, and the company says they are filling a need they identified.

The one-hitters each contain 0.25 grams of milled dried cannabis, specific to certain dried cannabis strains otherwise offered for sale by CannMart in whole bud and preroll form. The product currently retails for $3.99 plus tax on the company’s website.

At press time, CannMart only advertised tasters for sale on its website for five of its dried strains: Sweet Dreams, Sensi Star, Cold Creek Kush, Bougie Shoes, and White Window.

Aaron Bouganim, managing director for CannMart, says eventually the company will roll out the tasters for strains across their entire menu.

Under federal cannabis regulations, producers must let Health Canada know about products at least 60 days before making them available for sale. Bouganim says Cannmart gave Health Canada the required heads-up, and that the government posed no contentions about the product.

He says the products fulfil a market need the company identified.

“The need stems from patients not having the ability to try out or test products before buying large containers,” and follows the company making dried cannabis available to its patients in 1 gram and preroll formats.

The glass tasters come in the same excise stamped, child-resistant plastic containers that CannMart’s joints are sold in, but the tasters themselves are completely clear—save for a quarter of a gram of cannabis packed in the end.

Patients that order the tasters will find a black stopper on the end of each of them.

Simply take it off, bring the taster to your mouth, light it, and inhale.

The launch of the product demonstrates ways in which the industry continues to evolve.

Canadian Industry Challenges

Canada’s legal medical and recreational cannabis industry can currently only make available to Canadians certain product types: dried flower, prerolls, capsules, and oil.

In prior years, a handful of legal cannabis producers tested the limits of what they could sell by releasing dry sift, or kief, powder to registered patients in 2018.

Health Canada would later pull the plug on those offerings, releasing a statement to stop companies from classifying the powder as a form of ‘dried cannabis,’ which they are legally permitted to sell.

But these tasters, filled with only ground, dried cannabis, appear squarely permitted under Canadian federal regulations—CannMart just seems to be the first to release products that allow sampling of cannabis in such a small amount.

Until recently, commercial medical cannabis providers have not sold dried cannabis to their patients in containers smaller than 5 grams, but some now sell dried cannabis in 3.5 gram containers in line with the recreational market.

While recreational retailers across the country do sell a variety of 1 gram flower and prerolls, those product formats are have not been as widely adopted on the medical stream.

CannMart is technically not the first licensed producer to sell cannabis within a cannabis accessory.

One day before cannabis was legalized for recreational purposes in October, Aurora Cannabis announced it was launching a vaporizable cannabis oil high in cannabidiol (CBD) which is contained in a standard vaporizer cartridge.