By Sean | Founder, Originals CBD
People ask us regularly where our flower comes from.
The honest answer is that we don't always tell them. Not because we're hiding something - but because the sourcing relationships I've spent years building are genuinely one of the things that separates what we do from everyone else. In a market where competitors have been known to follow our lead the moment we make something public, protecting those relationships is just good business.
But the process itself - how I find suppliers, how I vet them, how a product goes from a first conversation to a jar on our site - that's something worth talking about openly. Because it's where most of the real work happens, and it's almost entirely invisible to the person opening the Mylar at the other end.
If you've read the founding story post you'll know why I started Originals CBD - and why the integrity of what goes into the jar has never been negotiable for me. Sourcing is where that integrity either holds or falls apart. This is how it works.
How It Starts - Finding Each Other
Sourcing works both ways. Sometimes I go looking. Sometimes I get found.
On the outbound side - Instagram is probably my most valuable tool. The CBD and hemp growing community is remarkably active on there and if you know what you're looking for you can spot genuinely exceptional work before it ever reaches a UK audience. A cultivator posting harvest photos with the right trichome coverage, the right colour profile, the right genetics behind it - that catches my eye. I reach out directly, introduce myself and start a conversation.
On the inbound side I get approached regularly. Suppliers from France, Switzerland, America, Spain - emails arriving with catalogues, samples offered, relationships proposed. Some of those are immediately interesting. Some go nowhere within the first exchange. You develop a sense very quickly for which is which.
And then there are the expos.
Spannabis and Mary Jane - Where Relationships Actually Start
There's no substitute for being in the room.
At Spannabis and Mary Jane I walk the floor looking for stands connected to the CBD industry - cultivators, breeders, distributors, genetics companies. When something catches my attention I introduce myself, ask whether they've worked in the UK market before, get straight into the questions. What are you growing? What genetics? How are you growing it? What does your drying and curing process look like? Do you have samples?
Those conversations can last half an hour. Sometimes longer. The ones that go somewhere are usually the ones where the person on the other side of the table knows their product inside out - not just the COA numbers but the story behind it. How the genetics were selected. What the farm looks like. What went into the cure.
If there are samples available I test them on the spot. That's one of the genuine advantages of being at an expo rather than waiting for a courier - you get an immediate, unfiltered first impression rather than something that's travelled across borders for a week.
If the sample hits the mark I go to the next level of conversation. If it doesn't, I'm polite and I move on. There's no point wasting either side's time.
The FaceTime Farm Visits
Once a relationship develops into something real - once we're working together, once there's trust built on both sides - it often naturally progresses to something more personal.
A lot of the farmers I work with are genuinely proud of what they've built. And they should be. These are people who've invested years into their growing operation, their soil programme, their drying rooms, their curing setup. When they offer to show me around via FaceTime it's not a formality - it's an invitation to understand what I'm actually buying.
I've spent hours on FaceTime calls walking through grow rooms and drying barns with people on the other side of the world. Seeing the operation, asking questions, understanding the process from seed to cure. It makes the relationship more personal and it makes my understanding of the product more complete. By the time something arrives as a sample I already have a picture of where it came from and how it was made.
I haven't made it to any of the farms in person yet - though that's very much on the agenda. When I eventually get to Oregon's Rogue Valley or wherever else the work takes me, those relationships will already be built. The FaceTime visits have made sure of that.
When the Sample Arrives - What I Actually Look For
This is probably the part most people have never thought about.
When a sample arrives it goes through a proper assessment process. Not a quick look and a sniff - a methodical evaluation that covers several distinct stages. After years of doing this I could probably do it in my sleep, but the process never gets cut short. The moment you start rushing the assessment is the moment something slips through that shouldn't.
The visual assessment
First impressions are visual. Has the flower been dried and cured correctly? What's the colour - are we seeing the vibrant greens, purples and oranges of a well-finished flower or something that's yellowing or browning, which can indicate oxidation or age?
I squeeze the bud gently. Good flower has spring to it - it compresses slightly and bounces back. Flower that crumbles to dust has been stored too dry. Flower that feels damp and doesn't spring back has curing or humidity issues.
I listen to the stem. A nice clean snap when a small stem is bent indicates the flower has been dried correctly. A stem that bends without breaking is still holding too much moisture.
I look at trichome coverage under magnification. This tells you a lot about both quality and harvest timing. Clear trichomes indicate the plant was cut early before full cannabinoid development. Cloudy or milky trichomes represent peak cannabinoid expression. Amber trichomes indicate THC has begun converting to CBN - these tend toward heavier, more body-focused effects. A good mix of cloudy with a small percentage of amber is generally the sweet spot.
I check for any signs of mould or pest damage. Both are immediate disqualifiers - no exceptions.
The aroma assessment
How does it smell out of the bag? Is it loud - does the aroma hit you immediately and develop as you work with it? Or is it flat and muted, which can indicate poor curing, age or simply mediocre genetics?
A damp or musty note is a red flag. Chlorophyll that hasn't broken down properly gives a harsh, grassy character that shouldn't be there in well-cured flower. These are signs the finishing process was rushed or poorly managed - and rushed finishing is something I have very little patience for.
The taste assessment
This is the final stage and the most definitive one. I do several taste tests in different ways to build a complete picture. Does the aroma carry through into the flavour? Is there complexity - do different notes reveal themselves as you go? Or is it flat, one-dimensional, harsh?
The taste test is where everything either confirms or contradicts what the visual and aroma assessment suggested. A flower can look exceptional and smell good but still let you down at this stage. And occasionally something that looked ordinary surprises you completely when you actually taste it.
How Much Gets Rejected
More than you might think.
I recently received seven flower samples and fifteen to twenty hash samples from a single supplier. The products looked professional. The catalogue was well presented. But when I started asking the fundamental questions - where was it grown, who are your suppliers, can you give me full traceability - the answers weren't there. They were effectively a reseller with no meaningful supply chain visibility. That isn't inherently wrong as a business model but it does mean I can't verify what I'd be putting on the site. That's a non-starter for me.
On top of that, very few of their products hit the mark on quality assessment. Out of that entire submission, almost nothing made it through.
That's not unusual. The ratio of what I look at to what actually gets stocked is heavily weighted toward rejection. It has to be. The moment you start compromising on the assessment process to fill gaps on the site you've started down a road that ends with customers getting something they didn't expect. I've been on the receiving end of that as a consumer myself - it's exactly why I started this business - and I'm not going to be the person doing it to someone else.
We'd rather have a smaller range of things we believe in than a larger range of things we're not sure about.
The Ones We Got There First
We were the first UK vendor to bring Flow Gardens to this market. The first to stock Rogue Origin. The first to work with Goldbar420 on their hash range.
None of those happened by accident. They happened because I was looking in the right places, asking the right questions and moving quickly when something exceptional came across my path.
After the third or fourth time a competitor appeared with the same product shortly after we'd introduced it, I made a decision to stop publicly identifying our suppliers. That might seem unnecessarily secretive from the outside. From where I'm sitting it was simply necessary. The relationships and sourcing decisions that produce exceptional product take significant time and effort to build. Protecting them is part of doing the job properly. I make no apology for that.
The Ones That Got Away
There are always some. That's the nature of this business.
Sometimes the worlds just don't collide at the right time. A cultivator I've been talking to gets approached by someone who can offer more volume or a better price. Shipping complications make a product commercially unviable. Competition means something I wanted is already committed elsewhere before I can secure it.
You can do everything right on your end and still lose a product because someone else got there first or the logistics didn't work out. It happens. You accept it and keep looking.
The search never really ends - which is both the hardest and the most interesting part of what I do.
This article reflects the personal experience and perspective of the author. Sean is the founder of Originals CBD.