This month we sat down with potrepeneur Dave of Goodies Green Label, makers of fine medicated cookies, lasagna and other treats for Medical Marijuana patients in Seattle.

MJ: In the past year you've started supplying some of the local MMJ providers with edibles -
GGL: Evergreen Holistic in Kent; also a new one, Herbal Choice Caregivers, that's also in Kent. Crocodile Collective in Lake City, Suzy-Q's in North Seattle, Blue Cannabis Network in Kitsap, and a new one, Painless in Seattle, which is a delivery service. Those are currently the providers that we're dealing with.

MJ: Can individuals call and subscribe or get deliveries?
GGL: Absolutely, we do wholesale and also work with retail patients.

MJ: Full disclosure: you were one of the founding advertisers in our first issue, in May 2010. The Seattle MMJ scene is still expanding rapidly - how has business been for you since then?
GGL: Oh yeah, we've at least quadrupled ... since May? Thanks to publications like yours and great reviews from the MMJ community our business has exploded.

MJ: Are you maxed out as far as how many edibles you can produce?
GGL: Pretty close with the people I have. But there's other people that I have standing by who will be ready to help us bake and stuff. So am I maxed out? No but almost.

MJ: So let's talk abut the edibles. Great brownies and also the Italian food, the marinara sauce -
GGL: We offer the medicated sauce, and then we offer the medicated entrees: meatballs, manicotti, stuffed shells, lasagna. We offer all those, pre-medicated for people. They can buy individual servings from some of the collectives that carry our full line or they can buy large portions directly from us.

MJ: As I look at your menu ... is everything always in stock? You are still a small business after all, not Frito-Lay.
GGL: We bake all the sweets on our menu every two days so there's no need to keep anything in stock. The product doesn't last that long and most of it is spoken for even before it's baked. But if you order something the longest you'll have to wait for anything is a two days because of the amount of baking we do.

We also offer home cooking products as well. Alcohol tinctures is a huge favorite but we also have medicated butter, olive oil, canola oil and vegetable oil.

MJ: We all know that edibles are the best way to ingest pot if you want to save your lungs, but I have some dosage questions. I eat half a brownie and wait an hour - is that the general rule?
GGL: Yes, and as long as the dosage remains constant with the people that bake the goodies for you, you can gauge your dosage. It's very difficult to specify a dosage for somebody else because you don't know their tolerance. So what I tell people is that to figure your dosage out, start with a quarter of a cookie or a brownie, because they are very potent, and wait an hour, hour and a half, and see what that does to you. And then you can gauge your dosage from there.

Here's what we do with our products: we size our cookies, our fudge, and our brownies specifically so that the dosage is exactly the same in a cookie as it is in a piece of fudge as it is in a brownie as it is in a muffin. And because we grow our own medicine for baking, the potency of each batch is consistant as well. It's all metered, so everything remains constant.

MJ: What about driving? I know that, if I make sure to wait ten minutes or so and sip a little coffee, I can drive after smoking a bit, in an emergency situation. I'd be fine. Do you recommend mixing edibles with driving?
GGL: No, absolutely not, not with edibles. Edibles can be very potent: they have a much more medicinal, almost narcotic effect than smoking, and it lasts a lot longer. If you take an edible, if can definitely knock you out and impair your ability to drive.

We added a whole line to our baked goods: "Cafe Mocha", which is our milk chocolate with coffee added in to it. The coffee gives it a great flavor, but the caffeine gives it an extra boost to people who want to medicate in the morning but also want to get on with their day. We put the coffee in there to counteract the knock-out effect. On our menu we have the mocha now in cookies, fudge and brownies.

And we offer a guarantee on all our products: if you're not satisfied for any reason, you can return it for a full refund or an exchange. I'm not gonna let any of our products go out there that somebody's not satisfied with. We offer this because I've heard from a lot of people that say they have tried [another company's] edibles and felt no effect from them, or disliked the flavor.

Also I would tell people be very careful about the edibles they buy. We grow our own medicine specifically for baking for a couple of reasons. First off for the potency, but equally as important is the purity. We make sure our medicine is organically grown and flushed for a good two or three weeks before we pick it. Anything that is not flushed out of the plant prior to harvest gets cooked into the butter and the people ingest it. Besides from tasting horrible it's just not healthy to eat the residues left over in the plants from all the fertilizers used during the growing process.

MJ: You mean vegetable matter?
GGL: Not that so much as potassium, magnesium, nitrogen, all of the chemicals that they may have been using as fertilizer. The plant will metabolize those out given enough time, but many growers will just keep pumping nutrients in there to get the biggest buds they can until the very end.

So if that stuff is not flushed out by using clear water in the last part of the growing process, it remains in there. It just can't be that healthy eating fertilizer in your butter, and it has a nasty taste. So people need to be really careful about what edibles they buy if they don't know what's in them.

Besides, anybody that doesn't grow in-house ingredients for their baking can't make an affordable product. You just can't buy it out-of-house and cook with it and still have it be cost-effective. And you can't guarantee the quality unless you grow your own. We grow our own specifically for baking, and we grow some pretty potent shit. A careful blend of Indica and Sativa. The marketing is all good and fine, but if the product sucks it doesn't really matter.

by Mary Jane - editor@wildworldnews.com

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This story originally published in Mary Jane Magazine #2, Fall 2010.