Edibles and vape pens in California commonly contain artificial flavors. Shareef El-Sissi wants to change that, so in 2017, he started building a massive hemp farm on the sun-soaked eastern edge of the Bay Area.

Seven years and $10 million later, he just may have solved pot’s artificial flavor problem.

The former pot company CEO is now behind one of the largest hemp farms in the entire state, a 260-acre property near the town of Byron. His farm grows millions of pounds of hemp flower each year, and he’s using it to produce natural flavors for marijuana products.

Shareef El-Sissi founded Terpene Belt Farms near Byron, Calif., to create a natural source for cannabis flavors.

Hemp plants pictured at Terpene Belt Farms in Mountain House, Calif., Sept. 19, 2024.

“The downstream applications that can come from it are endless,” El-Sissi said as he toured his farm during a recent hot September Thursday, surrounded by enough cannabis plants to fill 150 football fields. “Everybody has just been looking at [cannabis] to get high, and upregulating it to get high, but this plant is the most prolific producer of fragrance on the planet.”

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Cannabis, as it turns out, is the plant world’s natural flavor factory thanks to a smelly chemical compound produced by its flowers called terpenes. They’re why rich people in Santa Barbara hate the smell of new weed-farming neighbors and why your cousin could never hide his Thanksgiving hobby of smoking pot between plates of turkey.

Shareef El-Sissi believes cannabis plants can provide natural flavors for a wide variety of products.

El-Sissi’s hunt for flavoring agents has made him focus exclusively on terpenes; he completely disregards the active chemicals found in pot like THC and CBD. But terpenes are a tiny part of the plant, forming only a small percentage of the weight of a cannabis flower. If you want an industrial amount of natural terpenes, you have to produce huge amounts of cannabis flower,........

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