Flash Frozen Cured Tech- How Space Weed Was Founded

Space Weed didn’t start as a marketing idea — it started as a technology problem. For over a decade, the people behind Space Weed and Cannagenesis have been obsessed with one question: “If we could freeze cannabis at its peak and bring it back as smokable flower without damage, could we make weed safer, cleaner, and better than anything hang drying can do?” The answer turned into a patented process called Flash Frozen Cured™ and a brand that budtenders and consumers simply started calling “Space Weed.”

Cannagenesis was founded by Eric in 2013 and licensed in early 2015 as one of the first legal recreational cannabis companies in the world, based in Bellingham, Washington. He ran a 30,000-square-foot facility with a mix of indoor and sun grown flower and quickly ran into the same wall every serious cultivator hits: post-harvest. There wasn’t enough room, time, or control to hang-dry everything perfectly. Product was molding, degrading, losing terpenes, and aging out on shelves. In the new legal market, Eric saw something very clearly — consumers didn’t want “old weed,” and traditional drying was turning good flower into stale inventory.

HIGHEST QUALITY FOR EXTRACTS

The first major shift happened when Cannagenesis started freezing its harvest. Initially, this was just to make better extracts. In the extraction world, everyone already knew that fresh frozen flower produced the highest-quality live resin and live rosin. Fresh frozen simply carried more terpenes, more aroma, more “life” than hang-dried inputs. That raised the real question: if fresh frozen was clearly superior for concentrates, why were smokers still stuck with flower that had been slowly degraded by air, time, and moisture?

So Eric began experimenting with ways to take that fresh frozen flower and dry it back into something smokable without losing all the benefits. It took years of research and development, running batch after batch under different temperatures, vacuum pressures, and timing profiles. Sometimes the flower was too brittle, sometimes it didn’t burn right, sometimes the structure collapsed. A lot of perfectly good weed was destroyed in the process. But over time, he found a method that consistently produced an incredibly dry, shelf-stable flower that still looked vibrant, still smelled loud, and smoked softer than the hang-dried competition. That invention became the Flash Frozen Cured™ process.

LOOKS DIFF-OUT OF THIS WORLD

The name “Space Weed” didn’t come from a branding agency — it came from the people. When these unusually light, airy, bright-looking buds started showing up in stores, budtenders and customers needed a way to describe what they were seeing. They started calling it “space weed” because it looked so different from traditional flower. The name stuck. Cannagenesis leaned into it, secured patents on the technology and trademarks on the Space Weed name, and built a protective moat of IP and trade secrets around what they had created.

As the tech matured, the team behind it did too. Eric first met LMC around 2018, when LMC was a student at Western Washington University. Eric put up a Craigslist ad for marketing help, and Luc showed up willing to work for free just to prove himself. He didn’t come in with entitlement — he came in with hustle. Over time, he became an employee and then much more: the loudest, most consistent supporter of Space Weed, building social media presence, networking, and championing the product long before most people understood what it was. Luc, who later went on to build a major cannabis media presence of his own, but he never stopped cheering for Space Weed.

On a parallel track, Fabian discovered Luc from the outside looking in. As a lawyer deeply involved in cannabis, psychedelics, AI, and other regulated spaces, Fabian started noticing that Luc’s content kept surfacing in the community — brand deep dives, strain histories, and detailed, original cannabis storytelling that no one else was doing. He made a mental note: “At some point, I want to meet this guy.” That connection eventually happened through a mutual client, and after Fabian and LMC finally spoke, Luc said, “You’ve got to meet Eric.”

Fabian’s first in-person encounter with Eric and Space Weed happened at MJ Unpacked in Detroit. He hadn’t planned to go, but after seeing the patents, hearing the story, and trusting Luc’s instincts, he bought a ticket, got in the car, and drove up. On the expo floor, he spotted a small guy with a backpack that said “Space Weed” and knew instantly that was Eric. They stepped outside, sat at a table, and Eric pulled out the product. For Fabian, who meets cannabis brands constantly, it was the first time in a long time he looked at flower and thought, “This is actually different.” It looked and smelled unlike what he’d been seeing in a saturated market where, in his words, “everybody’s selling the same shit.”

The real turning point was when Fabian smoked it. Eric rolled up some Super Lemon Haze — still Fabian’s favorite Space Weed strain — and they lit up outside the casino. The joint burned smooth, the flavor exploded, and the high hit clean and strong. It wasn’t hype and it wasn’t gimmick. Fabian saw something rare: true product differentiation and an entirely new category of flower. That experience, plus his growing respect for what it took Eric to get to that point, led him to say, “I think we should work together.” He came in as both counsel and partner, helping to design the licensing, capital, and IP structure around Cannagenesis and Space Weed. Over time, more attorneys joined the cap table, including a patent lawyer who reviewed the tech and became a believer.

While the tech and legal backbone solidified, the day-to-day engine of Space Weed was building too. Melissa — known in the community as Major Melissa — joined in May 2024 and stepped into the role of Director of Operations. In a startup like Space Weed, that means everything from social media and email marketing to affiliate relationships, packing, shipping, and managing the website and daily operations. She describes the experience as a true startup adventure: no two days the same, constant problem-solving, creativity, and communication. Working so closely with the brand and product turned her from a longtime cannabis user into a full convert — to the point where she now says if she’s going to smoke, it’s only Space Weed.

From the storytelling side, Michael “Wex” Wexler has had his own evolution. He had been no stranger to cannabis long before working with this team, but being immersed at this level — seeing the science, the patents, the legal battles, the market feedback, and the human stories — changed how he views cannabis compared to his early years. For Wex, Space Weed reframed the question from “What strain is it?” to “What did we actually do to this plant after harvest?” He came to see that much of what people accepted as “normal” — harshness, degradation, inconsistency — wasn’t about the plant itself; it was about a drying method that had never really been updated since prohibition days.

Behind all of these perspectives lies a long stretch of trial and error. The R&D phase for Cannagenesis and Space Weed meant destroying a lot of weed and spending a lot of money without a guaranteed payoff. Because Eric ran the company as a sole proprietor without outside investors breathing down his neck, he had the freedom to sacrifice inventory to experimentation. He also had the benefit of a live, highly competitive legal market to test products in. That meant putting experimental batches on shelves, watching how they sold, gathering feedback from budtenders and consumers, and learning which strains and formats excelled under the Flash Frozen Cured™ process — and which didn’t.

Over the life of the project, Space Weed has released around 100 different cultivars. Today, Cannagenesis no longer operates its own grow. Instead, the team partners with cultivators. This model is part of what makes the technology so powerful: they can walk into a farm, select standout plants, and buy them day-of-harvest. For growers, that’s a dream — they get paid immediately and skip the labor-intensive, risky stages of drying, trimming, testing, and warehousing product while hoping it sells before it degrades. For Space Weed, it means they can work with diverse genetics and farms while staying focused on what they do best: post-harvest science.

When it comes to selecting DNA and cuts, Space Weed’s process leans heavily on both art and science. Because flash-frozen, vacuum-dried flower maintains its original size and color, the buds you see in the grow room right before chop will look almost identical once they’re finished. That allows the team to hand-select plants with the most striking structure, color, and aroma. If they’re curious about a new cultivar, they can take a small sample, run it through their system, and have smokable flower within about 24 hours to evaluate. Lab tests, visual inspection, and combustion behavior all feed into the decision of whether that cultivar becomes part of the Space Weed lineup or not.

Early on, the product drew plenty of critiques, and those critiques helped shape the superior version that exists today. Some consumers and buyers thought the buds looked “too light” or “too dry” compared to the sticky, dense hang-dried flower they were used to. Others questioned the texture or assumed low moisture meant lower quality. Budtenders, on the other hand, consistently reported something the team hadn’t even realized was such a strong differentiator: Space Weed smoked smoother. That repeated feedback — smoother, softer, less harsh — became one of the brand’s major selling points. By listening closely to what customers loved and what confused them, the team refined not just the product profile but also how they talked about it.

Melissa’s own experience captures many of those refinements in human terms. After 10–15 years of using cannabis and going through a major personal health transformation, she became more careful about what she put into her body. She still loved cannabis for creativity, motivation, and mood — but she didn’t want to feel like she was punishing her lungs. With Space Weed, she describes a “lighter, more intentional type of high.” It doesn’t feel heavy in her lungs or her body. She doesn’t get couch lock. Instead, she feels uplifted and motivated enough to go outside and run hard — and actually does. What matters just as much to her is safety: she appreciates that Flash Frozen Cured™ flower destroys existing mold and doesn’t allow new mold to grow inside the package. Traditional flower often holds 12% or more moisture, which can quietly support mold and pathogens even when the bud looks fine on the outside. For her, knowing she isn’t inhaling invisible contaminants is a huge part of why she considers Space Weed a superior product. She also loves the big bright buds, the way they break down easily in her fingers, and the fact that nothing goes to waste — even the stems crumble down and burn no differently than traditional flower in her experience.

All of this leads to a central idea the team wants people to understand about flash-frozen cannabis: hang drying is not the pinnacle of cannabis science. It’s just what the underground market did out of necessity for decades. From a scientific and commercial standpoint, air-drying and curing expose the flower to oxygen, time, inconsistent humidity, and microbial risks. The result is faster degradation, loss of terpenes, and the constant possibility of mold growth — especially in high-moisture product that sits in sealed bags. By contrast, freezing the plant at harvest and drying it under vacuum conditions locks in the chemistry at its peak while stripping away the environment that fungi and bacteria need to survive.

The implications go beyond flavor and effect. Freeze-dried pharmaceuticals are now standard in much of the drug industry precisely because they are safer, more shelf-stable, and more consistent over time. Cannagenesis is applying that same logic to cannabis. The team believes they’ll be able to prove not just that Flash Frozen Cured™ flower tastes and feels better, but that it’s objectively safer and more shelf stable than traditionally dried flower. In an industry where margins are thin, regulations are shifting, and many operators are struggling, technology like this — protected by patents and structured as licensable IP — offers a different path forward. Instead of just trying to be another brand on a crowded shelf, Space Weed and Cannagenesis are positioning themselves as the infrastructure behind how the next generation of cannabis is made. And for everyone from health-conscious consumers to cultivators looking for a better way to move their harvest, that shift may be the most important innovation of all.

BUY SPACE WEED---Mails To all 50 States