Mark Kazinec talks Best in Grass
Best in Grass is bringing its national cannabis competition and product feedback platform to Missouri for the first time, providing a consumer-led format designed to give participating brands more than a trophy or title.
The competition will give consumers an opportunity to evaluate locally produced products across 12 categories.
Judge kits are set to be available starting September 19 at approximately 30 dispensaries throughout the state of Missouri, including: Shagri-La, Sunrise, Latitude, Hippos, Standard Wellness, Riverside Wellness, Blue Sage, KC Cannabis, and Vertical.
The judging period runs through November 15, with winners expected to be announced during the Best in Grass awards event in Kansas City in January 2027.
For Best in Grass co-founder and COO Mark Kazinec, the Missouri launch is also an opportunity to distinguish the company from competitions that preceded it.
Kazinec managed High Times Cannabis Cup events from 2018 through 2023. He said he developed the People’s Choice model at High Times, allowing dispensary customers rather than a small panel of industry insiders to determine the winners.
“I created the People’s Choice model at High Times, and that was worth preserving, to allow real people who spend money at dispensaries to be the ones to have their voices heard,” he explained.
When Kazinec and co-founders Mark Kazinec & Joey Posney launched Best in Grass in 2024, they retained that consumer-centered foundation while changing how brands enter, how kits are priced, how results are collected, and how the organization produces its awards events, he told Greenway.
“What was worth changing when we started Best in Grass was allowing cultivators and manufacturers to enter our competitions, free of charge; paying our bills on time so that we had awards ready upon announcement; hosting well-produced events that bring the community together for an elevated evening celebrating the fruits of the industry’s labor; making the judge kits affordable to the public so real people can participate, from all walks of life; and creating a custom judging portal that gathers real feedback and provides valuable insights for the brands participating,” Kazinec continued.
With that in mind, participating cultivators and manufacturers enter Best in Grass competitions without paying entry fees. And the company has intentionally aimed to make judge kits affordable, enabling a broad range of consumers to buy into the experience.
“We started Best in Grass in January 2024 just to do things in a much different way,” Kazinec said. “No pay-to-play, no pay-to-win, no bribes, no rigging, no nonsense.”
Overcoming competition fatigue
Establishing the Best in Grass model in Missouri has required the company to address skepticism created by operators’ previous experiences with product competitions.
“I experience skepticism in every single market that we run our competitions in,” Kazinec said.
Businesses that felt previous competitions did not deliver on their promised value may be reluctant to commit inventory, staff time, and marketing resources to another program, even without an entry fee.
“When High Times goes into markets and runs their competitions, it seems to leave a bad taste in businesses’ mouths,” Kazinec said. “They become scarred and traumatized, so they attribute ‘competitions’ to a bad thing with no value. We’re having to pick people off the floor and show them that a real competition can exist with integrity, honesty, and professionalism.”
Kazinec said brands frequently ask whether sponsors, personal relationships, or companies entering more products than their competitors can influence the results.
Best in Grass responds by reviewing judging data for irregularities and identifying any attempts to manipulate scores.
“Brands want to know if they can trust us to not allow people to sway the results, whether it’s a friend, a sponsor, or somebody who enters more products than the next brand,” Kazinec stated.
“We reassure them that we will never allow any outside forces to affect the scores, and in fact, we scrape through all the data to ensure that there is no funny business from brands trying to vote for their own products. We have several processes in place that catch this if it happens.”
The efforts Kazinec and team make to ensure the integrity of the responses lead to positive experiences that have helped the company develop repeat relationships with brands, retailers, and consumers.
“Luckily, after each of our competitions, we receive incredible feedback on the way that we’ve delivered value to our clients, both consumers and businesses.”
Built for consumer feedback
Kazinec and Best in Grass plan to assemble approximately 3,300 judge kits for Missouri and distribute them through retailers across the state.
Kits will feature products organized by category, allowing judges to compare similar offerings and submit evaluations addressing characteristics including appearance, aroma, taste, and effects.
The Missouri competition includes flower, pre-roll, infused pre-roll, vape pens, concentrate, and edible categories.
Best in Grass kits are expected to range from $50 to $180 before tax, depending on the category and included products.
Although select industry figures and community advocates have been invited to participate, Kazinec said the objective is to collect feedback from consumers who routinely purchase products at Missouri dispensaries.
“It’s a great way for brands to get into a competition for free, for them to get real feedback from people who actually spend money at dispensaries, not just a bunch of industry folks,” he explained.
Brands will receive summaries of the judging criteria submitted for their products, demographic information about consumers buying within the category, information about judges’ purchasing preferences, and insight into why those consumers use cannabis.
Kazinec said the written comments are particularly useful.
“They will get the summary of all judging criteria that was provided for their products, including an understanding of the demographics of consumers purchasing the category of products,” he explained. “They will gain insights into what the judges of the category have as purchasing preferences and why they are choosing cannabis. The real feedback comes from the comments themselves from the judge.”
“They will, of course, have to read between the lines, as it’s consumers judging, so they will say it tastes like hash or tastes like hay. So that’s in the cure, the packaging, or even the flush times in growing.”
According to Kazinec, companies have used feedback from previous competitions to change cultivation inputs and edible ingredients.
He discussed seeing brands collaborate following competitions, then return with the resulting products and win awards. In other cases, he said, smaller brands that won their categories sold through subsequent product releases.
“We have seen and heard people enter the competition because they know it’s consumers judging, so they will enter products for that purpose,” Kazinec continued. “We have seen a ton of collabs happen after a contest is done in the state, and when we returned, they entered the collabs and even won some more hardware. We have had small brands win the competition and then sell out the next few product rounds as a result. Some revisions to products are changing out inputs ranging from nutrients in grows to ingredients in edibles to make things taste and smoke better.”
Those outcomes are more important to Best in Grass than the awards alone.
“Our business is providing brands with real feedback, and when we can develop robust feedback reports for these brands to learn and improve from, we consider that a win,” Kazinec told Greenway. “Furthermore, because feedback is our business, we ask for honest feedback from our clients. When we receive positive feedback from clients who intend to do business with us year over year, we consider that a win.”
Moving a competition from state to state
Building a consumer competition across multiple regulated markets requires Best in Grass to adapt the program to each state’s rules, purchase limits, product categories, supply chain, and retail structure.
Kazinec said securing approval from a state’s regulatory authority is often the first hurdle.
“One of the first difficult parts is gaining approval from the state’s regulatory body,” he said. “All regulatory bodies work in their own way, and sometimes they can take 6 months to a year to finally get approval.”
The company must then identify an intake partner with enough space and staff to receive products and support the assembly of thousands of kits.
“Once we have approval, it can be a challenge to find a real intake partner that has the space and staff to accommodate a project of this size,” Kazinec continued.
In Missouri, Kazinec said the company kept each kit within the state’s applicable purchase limits and worked with state regulators and licensed partners to review its procedures.
Team members entering licensed facilities were fingerprinted, background checked, and credentialed, he said.
“We are not playing around. We are not going to risk our brand. We’re not going to risk our partners’ brands,” Kazinec said. “We stay under purchase limits. We approach the state: ‘Hey guys, this is who we are, this is what we do.’ We are following every single regulation to the T.”
The core Best in Grass model remains largely consistent nationwide, but packaging, labeling, purchase limits, and track-and-trace requirements can force state-specific changes.
Product categories may also be added when a market has significant consumer and brand participation in a category such as moon rocks.
“The model is pretty much the same in each state, with changes based on regulations in packaging and labeling, purchase limits, and track and trace,” Kazinec explained. “We’ll open up certain new categories for states that have robust markets of moon rocks, for example.”
New York provided one example of how state-to-state adjustments may be necessary.
“Most of our competitions require 1-gram units for flower,” he said. “It’s the best way for us to maximize the variety of brands in a competition without going over purchase limits.
“In that case, we had to create special flower categories for 1-gram units and for eighth units, simply based on the challenge that brands faced when getting the net weights approved.”
The demands on brands and retailers
Brands enter without paying a fee, but participation still carries a significant product cost.
Kazinec didn’t shy away from that fact.
“The smaller brands can’t always afford to invest the amount of product that we request, which we do, in fact, request a lot of product to ensure that consumers all across the state are able to judge and so that a small group of friends can’t heavily sway the results,” he explained.
Retailers, meanwhile, must balance their desired margins with the company’s effort to keep kit prices accessible to consumers.
“The retailers can be some of the hardest ‘yeses’ to receive,” he explained. “They’re very focused on margins, and we can’t always allow them to upcharge on our judge kits in the way that they would like to.”
Once retailers join the program, the large number of individual products can create operational challenges at the register. Some kits can contain more than 40 SKUs that must be properly recorded through the state’s regulated sales system.
“A lot of the stores get concerned when we have upwards of 40 SKUs in one judge kit for them to scan out at the register,” Kazinec said. “In order to ease their pains, we provide scan sheets so that they can quickly scan barcodes right off a sheet of paper instead of opening up the bags and scanning out each and every individual item.”
Best in Grass also provides participating retailers with spreadsheets containing product information and offers product education for dispensary teams.
“We provide detailed Google Sheet grids outlining all the SKU information from net weights to milligram contents,” Kazinec continued. “We also provide retailer education calls to ensure that everybody feels comfortable and confident with how to talk about Best in Grass to consumers, and lastly, we are the first line of defense for customer support.
“If a customer has any issues, they can email us, and we will likely respond within 24 to 48 hours to help them troubleshoot their issue. We’re very on top of things.”
Kazinec said the work also depends on timely communication among the competition, participating brands, intake partners, and retailers.
“My biggest pet peeve is having to follow up and hunt down people in this industry who are not good at communication, setting themselves reminders, and doing what they say they’ll do,” he said.
Product collection is only one part of the process.
Best in Grass must coordinate brands, package thousands of kits, deliver them to retailers, prepare store teams, support consumers during judging, analyze submitted evaluations, and produce an awards event after judging concludes.
Measuring the Missouri launch
Best in Grass is partnering with Delphi Brands in Missouri. The company also identified General Hydroponics as a partner.
Retail participants listed include locations operated by Sunrise, The Forest, Latitude, Shangri-La, Riverside Wellness, Blue Sage Cannabis Deli, High Profile, Hippos, Vertical, and KC Cannabis.
Kazinec said the company will evaluate the Missouri launch based on the number of participating clients, the pace at which judge kits sell, attendance at the Kansas City awards event, and the overall sentiment it receives from the community.
The company is managing the Missouri rollout as part of a broader national schedule.
“Our Illinois submission process is coming up in the middle of September, as well as the California award show in downtown Los Angeles on September 17.
“Right after that, we have our submission process for Oklahoma at the end of September as well,” he continued. “Our New Jersey and Boston award shows take place in November, and our Chicago award show takes place in December.”
Best in Grass is also finalizing its 2027 calendar.
“We have our 2027 calendar being finalized and will include about 12 competitions in different states, where the intake process takes place in one month and the award show takes place two months later,” Kazinec continued. “We are often on the road, traveling from state to state, showing support for the brands, being a part of the community, and bringing people together to celebrate the blood, sweat, and tears that we all put into this ridiculous industry.”
For Missouri, the immediate task is executing the program as promised.
The longer-term opportunity is showing that a cannabis competition can function as both a consumer experience and a source of practical market intelligence.
“A good competition that can be run with integrity and honesty is out there,” Kazinec said. “That’s what we want to show people.”
More information about competition rules, judge kits, and participating locations is available at bestingrass.io.
