When it comes to cannabis competitions, there’s no single formula for taking home the gold. Veteran judges from the Emerald Cup and California State Fair told GreenState the winners are those who balance innovation, execution, and quality, while keeping tabs on the ever-shifting trends. From solventless rosin to terpene preservation to judging rubrics modeled after fine wine, cannabis cups have become both more sophisticated and more competitive.
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Innovation Sets the Stage
Claudio Miranda, longtime cannabis judge and cofounder of cannabis rating platform Budist (now a partner of the MJBowl as well as the California Cannabis Awards), explains that the market itself shapes what judges see rise to the top.
“In the early days of competitions, hydrocarbon extracts like shatter, sugar, and budder were leading the pack,” he recalls. “That was the pre-solventless era, when innovation in BHO was driving both sales and awards.”
Today, however, connoisseurs gravitate toward solventless products, especially live rosin.
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“Fast forward to today, and a lot of the awards and excitement are around solventless. It’s not that opinions have shifted arbitrarily; it’s that the innovation curve has taken us there.”
Miranda stresses that cannabis competitions reward the cutting edge. Just as edibles evolved from brownies and cookies into precision-dosed chocolates and nanoemulsion-infused drinks, today’s competitions celebrate innovation in every form.
“There are actual competitions that give out awards in categories like most innovative product,” he said. “That could be the oil, the flower, or even the hardware, like a vaporizer battery or all-in-one device, or packaging that brings something new to the market. Those things should be recognized for introducing new and interesting ways to consume cannabis.”
Execution Defines Excellence
Craftsmanship and execution separate winners from the rest. At Budist, Miranda and fellow founder Jocelyn Sheltraw have developed a standardized judging methodology to ensure fairness across categories. Products are evaluated on aroma, flavor, appearance, and effect/experience, with each broken down into measurable elements such as intensity, complexity, and uniqueness.
“I’ll often do a first pass using my intuition, that blink response—this is fire, this is not,” he explains. “Then I go back through with our analytical rubric and score every nuance. For concentrates, I lean heavily on aroma and flavor. For medicinal products, I care most about whether they deliver on the promised effect. If a sleep capsule keeps me up all night with jitters, that’s not an award-winning product.”
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Consistency in judging also builds trust with consumers.
“If the consumer buys a product we gave a gold medal to, and it doesn’t deliver on its promise, then we did a poor job,” Miranda says. “That’s why a standardized rubric matters. It takes the bias out. We’re not just saying, ‘I don’t like this grower, so that I won’t score them well.’ Every product gets evaluated by the same framework.”
Flavor, Terroir, and the Judge’s Nose
For solventless pioneer Nick Tanem (Nikka T), who has spent decades refining hashmaking and judging competitions worldwide, success starts with flavor.
“Some of the first things I think about if competing is: what are the flavors that are winning?” he says. “Last year and into this year, you saw Skittlez sweep the cups. And it wasn’t just Skittlez crosses, it was the clone-only Skittlez cut. If you had that cut, processed it into amazing rosin, and entered it, you had a high likelihood of doing well.”
Tanem advises competitors to do their homework before submitting.
“The smart place to start is looking at past winners. And really, you’ve got to look at your judge’s panel. See what type of terps they’ve been rating highly. Get into these people’s heads. Go to the events, go to the cups, before you even start entering, and understand the crew. Open the jars, see what’s hype.”
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Like Miranda, he notes that cannabis competitions are evolving beyond old formulas. Terroir, a term to describe how a particular environment influences a crop, has long been a hallmark of wine culture and is beginning to influence hash.
“We’re going back to terroir,” he says. “Different regions are producing hash with completely different profiles, like humid versus dry climates, equatorial versus high altitude. We’re seeing new compounds, new terpenes, new sulfur notes, and new thiols that we weren’t able to hone in on previously. That’s what excites me.”
Execution matters, and Tanem doesn’t hesitate to dock points for flaws.
“I taste everything in the kit, but you start noticing outliers, ones that are crusty, look older, have uneven consistency, or smell putrid,” he explains. “Sometimes it smells like chlorine or pesticides. I’ll still try it, but it’s harsh, leaves residue, and it all adds up to a problem with the sample. Those go straight to the bottom.”
As for current trends, Tanem says the terpene wheel is spinning back toward both the new and the old.
“Lime is kind of the new hot one right now, look out for lime terps,” he says. “But at the same time, people are circling back to classics; people want those old-school flavors again.”
Preservation Is Everything
Alec Dixon, cofounder of SC Labs and a longtime flower judge at the Emerald Cup, takes a broader view: the winners are those who not only grow great cannabis but also preserve its essence. For Dixon, aroma and terpene expression outweigh potency every time.
“When you have 120 entries, you can quickly identify the standout expressions,” he said.
He warns that most growers underestimate how fragile terpenes are post-harvest.
“From the moment of harvest, every day after is a loss factor,” he emphasized. “If you harvest in 100-degree heat, you’ve already lost half the aromatics you grew for.”
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Sun-grown cannabis, with its full UV spectrum exposure, often reaches terpene levels above 5 percent, compared to indoor’s 3–3.5 percent according to Dixon. But mishandling after harvest can erase that edge.
“The people who take terpene preservation seriously by treating cannabis like cabbage will build forever brands,” Dixon declared.
Cold storage, minimal handling, and careful distribution are the keys, he explained, and those who master them consistently deliver stickier, more aromatic flower.
“They sell out faster than it’s trimmed, at the highest price the market can bear, because customers know it’s always going to hit.”
Like Miranda, Dixon also sees consumer trends mirrored in competition entries. More than 70 percent of recent California submissions fall into the “dessert” terpene class—Gelato, Wedding Cake, Ice Cream Cake—reflecting homogenization in consumer demand. Legacy strains like terpinolene-rich Jack Herer or Trainwreck are increasingly rare.
“Exotic used to mean rare,” Dixon said. “Now it’s the most overused word to describe the most overrepresented category.”
The Future of Judging
THC numbers don’t win cannabis cups. Aroma, flavor, effect, and innovation are what matter. Miranda insists that products must deliver on their promises.
“Ultimately, it has to solve the use case. A product that says it’s for sleep should help people sleep. That’s what makes it a winner.”
Dixon sees a future where dispensary shelves look more like the Emerald Cup judging table, organized by aroma categories rather than strain names or THC percentages.
“Imagine walking into a store and choosing from categories like gas, dessert, or citrus,” he said. “It would help consumers find what they actually enjoy instead of chasing numbers on a spreadsheet.”
Tanem sees terroir and solventless hash reshaping the conversation, while Miranda points to innovation and standardized judging as the way forward.
As Dixon summed it up: “Those who can preserve terps and lead with aroma are the ones who create forever brands.”
*This article was submitted by a guest contributor. The author is solely responsible for the content.