The strong, lingering scent of weed has always been an obstacle for stoners who want to get high without alerting everyone within a 10-mile radius. Now that marijuana use is as common among Baby Boomers as it is among teens, the older crowd in particular, brainwashed by the war on drugs to despise that skunky aroma, is looking for ways to medicate without smelling. Weed without its trademark odor may sound like a miracle, but flavorists at the Dolce Foglia flavor house may have found a way to make it happen.
Aiming to make weed more approachable, especially for medical patients who just want to feel better without earning the stoner stigma, Dolce Foglia manufactures a wide range of cannabis products infused with potent scents and flavors that promise to mask the strong smell and taste of my personal favorite plant. “We wanted to make it more publicly friendly, so people wouldn’t have the negative connotations that cannabis carries,” says Dolce Foglia COO Joshua Cobos.
If adding flavors to pre-rolls sounds sketchy, rest easy knowing that “the ingredients used in making the flavors are on the Generally Recognized as Safe list.” But while safe, the flavors are quite potent. “Until cannabis, there hasn’t been a need for flavors to be this strong,” Cobos says. “We wanted to showcase our abilities by proving our flavors are so strong we can apply it on the cannabis itself.”
As for whether Dolce Foglia succeeds in creating products that can get you discreetly but exceptionally high, I chose a few of their flavored pre-rolls — peppermint, pineapple and banana — and put them to the test.
Even before lighting up, I can tell that the pre-rolls smell nothing like weed, and the intended scents shine through: The peppermint pre-roll smells like peppermint; the pineapple pre-roll smells like pineapple; and the banana pre-roll smells like a banana-flavored Laffy Taffy, for better or worse. In that sense, you could definitely store these in your stash without smelling up the place or alerting the perceptive nose of your weed-hating mother.
The flavor and smell upon lighting up is equally as potent, but not excessively so. The peppermint pre-roll tastes like mint gum, and even left my mouth feeling refreshed, a nice alternative to cottonmouth. The pineapple pre-roll is subtle in a good way, unlike artificially flavored pineapple candies, and the same can be said for the banana pre-roll, which was a pleasant surprise. The taste and smell of weed are nowhere to be found, and afterward, my apartment smelled like I’d just lit a bunch of scented candles.
The one hurdle I can see is, while these pre-rolls smell nothing like weed, they still look like massive joints, and therefore, smoking them openly in public would likely attract some unwanted attention. But if you smoke behind closed doors, you should be able to then walk around in public smelling less like weed and more like pineapple, or whatever flavor you prefer.
Overall, Dolce Foglia does an impressive job of imparting flavors and scents on already potent weed in a way that makes it somewhat more discrete (and tasty). That said, people will still be suspicious when you step out of your just-hotboxed car, and a colossal plume of pineapple-scented smoke comes billowing out after you.
Ian Lecklitner
Ian Lecklitner is a staff writer at MEL Magazine. He mostly writes about everyone's favorite things: Sex, drugs and food.
