2025 California Cannabis Awards returns for 4th year at CA State Fair
The California State Fair’s Cannabis Awards Show occurred on July 12th, 2025 at the CalExpo center. Now in its 4th year, the California Cannabis Awards were hosted in the newly expanded 50,000 square foot California Cannabis Experience. Just like in 2024, the 2025 award show was emcee’d by the one and only Rachelle Gordon.
Since 2022, the California State Fair has been the largest state sanctioned cannabis competition in the world
Seeing the California Cannabis Experience grow year after year since its first iteration in 2022 has been one of the great joys of my cannabis destigmatization journey. In 2022, I arrived to the State Fair as a wide eyed attendee. In 2023, The Highest Critic was a media sponsor. In 2024 and now 2025, I joined as a flower judge alongside other Budist critics. Over these years, I’ve come to get to know some of these farmers that submit their flower to the only state sanctioned cannabis competition in the world. They have similar dreams of destigmatization and they – and their families for generations going backwards and forwards have been the stewards truly championing that.
Watching the awards show gets more emotional for me every year. Every grower, farmer, and their team surrounding them and those medals hanging around their chest emit a sense of pride and normalcy that I find thoroughly unmatched at other cannabis competitions. In 2023, during the first ever California Cannabis Awards Show – the year before human judging was added to the mix, Eric from Hogwash Pharms in Humboldt County summed up the sentiment of getting a different type of noteriety from the government succinctly with his words: “from silver handcuffs to gold medals.”
If that ain’t a sign of times a changing, I don’t know what is. Fast forward to 2025 as I watched awardees walk around with their fresh medals, I ran into Mark Greenshock, who had several medals across his chest which he commented were “nice and heavy!” He last won in 2022, and one of those cultivars even made a reappearance. To me at least, repeat winners signify tried and true cultivars and real breeding projects.
Take the outdoor flower golden bear, which went to Emerald Spirit Botanicals for their Pink Boost Goddess for a second year in a row. To see a farmer win with something that their family had painstakingly bred over generations, that is the real magic that deserves recognition.
On the other end of that spectrum, we had the mixed light flower golden bear – Ridgeline Farms with their Blueberry Caviar – which like the Pink Boost Goddess, was bred in the Triangle by the elder generation.
We also had classics coming back into the light like with the indoor flower golden bear winner, which went to CAM for their run of Super Silver Haze. That is a tried and true cultivar that was not bred by the growers, but they certainly harnessed years if not decades of experience with it.
Cannabis Cultivar Chemical Diversity Continues to Tank
With Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals awarded, and new categories. It’s safe to say that there were way more medal winners than last year. Despite the well deserving winners, I couldn’t help but notice the same downtrend of cultivar diversity and especially secondary metabolite diversity in all of the entries. The data put forward by this state-sanctioned event highlights to me that certain terpene dominance categories are graveyards associated with the relentless march of Post-Prohibition Changes in Cannabis Genetics.
For the longest time, I just stood there, under the blazing sun and the cooling misters soaking in the happy vibes all around.
The green carpet stage was lifted (literally) and constantly hustling and bustling with each farmer receiving their awards from Cultivar Brands’ James Leitz on stage. There was a particular buzz when ABC10 was there to do a live interview.
It’s obviously not the first time a cannabis competition has been on the evening news, but when I say that seeing mainstream media coverage of the California Cannabis Awards and California Cannabis Experience is a glow of hope in an otherwise dreary and depressing cannabis news cycle, I sincerely mean it.
When Joseph Haggard got the opportunity to talk to California on live television, he took the opportunity to speak out against rising taxes. When Jason Gellman of Ridgeline Farms got on stage to accept their Golden Bear, he dedicated it to all of Southern Humboldt. When Anna Willey of CAM got on stage to accept their Golden Bear, she got on stage with a whole crew because they were on home turf in Sacramento. In all these instances, it wasn’t the whole crew though in attendance. Someone or multiple someones that would have also enjoyed the Awards Show had to stay home on the farm or at the grow.
That celebration and intrinsic acknowledgement of the community and culture behind their victories – that is the California Cannabis Experience, imo. Year after year, more Californians are slowly but surely getting exposed to cannabis that is worth celebrating. This event is crucial for breaking down the haze, the redwood curtain, and the mandatory middle people that separate end users from producers and breeders.
Whether the awards and recognition translate to increased sales, as Joseph Haggard told the Future Cannabis Project show, is up to the farmers. Shelfspace on Embarc shelves sure helps, but it should just be the beginning. As I see California Cannabis Awards winners parlay their victories from this competition and other competition into earned media coverage, white label deals, genetics deals (not together, haha…), and other opportunities, I can’t help but wonder which jurisdiction will be the next to take this bold step in Cannabis for their state. I desperately need more datapoints about the chemical diversity of legal cannabis products, after all.
Thanks to Cultivar Brands, Embarc, and all the sponsors for supporting such a historical event. Til next year!
Founder of The Highest Critic
Unpaid /r/trees mod
Certified Ganjier
Kine bud enthusiast
