Best In Grass: Behind The Scenes New Mexico 2026

The judge kits for Best in Grass have officially dropped. Walk into a participating retailer, grab a kit in your category, sample what’s inside, and cast your vote. While this sounds simple enough, the execution is anything but.

So what it Best In Grass, what does it take to participate, and is it worth it?

What Best in Grass Is — And How It Works

Best in Grass isn’t a licensed producer. It isn’t a retailer. It isn’t warehousing product. It coordinates. It builds the structure, markets the event, sets up the submission system, and lets the community help carry it forward.

And this year, the community showed up.

I reached out to a number of local influencers and participants who picked up kits. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Words like “fantastic,” “amazing,” “eventful,” “fun,” and “worth it” came up repeatedly.

Multiple judges highlighted:

• The variety of products inside each kit

• Exposure to brands they hadn’t tried before

• Smaller producers getting real visibility

• An easy-to-use judging portal with detailed scoring

• The excitement of being part of something community-driven

One judge mentioned discovering local brands they had never heard of — and genuinely enjoying them.

That variety is one of the strongest points of the entire program. You’re not buying a single product. You’re buying a cross-section of the market.

For small brands, that exposure matters. For established brands, it’s a way to introduce something new without having to host your own event. And because Best in Grass isn’t a local operator itself, leaning into local community voices makes sense. If it’s going to work, it has to be embedded.

It Takes A Village…

Behind the scenes, participation isn’t light work.

The first challenge comes before anything ever leaves the building: deciding what to submit, and how.

Do you send your top product—the one people already know and love?
Do you debut something new and hope the audience connects with it?
Or do you play it safe with a reliable performer that represents your brand well?

Products that align with typical CPG items are typically easier to pick and ship, just pick a good batch and call it macaroni. Flower is a different story.

Most producers don’t normally carry 1g prepack units, which means participating often requires trimming down larger buds or assembling smaller nugs to meet the format. That adds time, labor, and packaging work just to create the samples.

And once the product is packed, another reality becomes clear: how something is shipped can be almost as important as what’s inside it.

All samples have to than be delivered and consolidated at a single distribution hub — in this case, P37. Every brand’s entry, across every category, flows into one central location. From there, the real work begins.

Each product must be:

• Received and verified

• Sorted into its correct category

• Allocated into the proper judge kit

• Physically assembled into bundles

• Labeled and organized by retail destination

• Then redistributed out to participating stores

A lot of hands. A lot of movement.

Once retailers get them, they have to build these products into their POS systems properly so they can be sold compliantly. Judge kits aren’t normal SKUs. They’re bundles of multiple products, multiple weights, multiple categories. It’s operational lift for everyone involved.

If the products are setup incorrectly, the sales experience can be choppy; prices can be added up incorrectly, and patient units incorrectly deducted.

Sticky Icky

Some producers used mylar bags for their pre-packs giving them little protection. My Luna Leaf sample got smashed by my Cathy’s Farm sample, as they used a full-size glass jar — their flower was perfectly intact, but the jar smashed neighboring mylar samples in the same kit.

It wasn’t malicious. It was just physics.

The same thing happened in edibles. Equilibrium submitted a chocolate bar that was packed in a flexible mylar. It arrived smashed like a bug. Even on a normal shelf, that product might need a secondary structure. In a shared transport box? It didn’t stand a chance.

So, Is It Worth It?

Overall, yes — the positives are strong.

Kits are moving — especially in the solventless categories, those flew. The slowest? Traditional edibles and beverages. The community is engaged. The feedback is good. The submission system works. Consumers are happy with the variety and the fairness of the format.

But participation comes with tradeoffs, and risks.

All The Kings Men…

If something goes wrong—who does it land on?

The producer who packaged it?
The distributor who handled it?
The retailer who sold the kit?

The truth is a little uncomfortable: everyone fails.

That’s one of the trade-offs when you participate. You give up control over presentation. Now that’s true any time you sell product through retail channels, of course. But under a spotlight like this, the margin for error shrinks.

A smashed chocolate bar, a compressed flower sample—those things might normally get caught in the day-to-day flow of retail. In a judge kit, bypassing shelves, going straight to consumers that are actively evaluating every detail, they stand out immediately.

Sometimes that’s the uncomfortable part of exposure, you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression.

But it can also be a useful one. Events like this don’t just test the product itself—they test the entire system around it, from packaging choices to logistics to how well something survives the trip from producer to consumer.