For decades, RAW has politely stayed on the sidelines of the legal weed gold rush, playing the role of the undisputed king of paper while letting everyone else handle the combustible green cargo. Founder Josh Kesselman watched from the comfort of his smoke-shop empire, happily providing the unbleached wrappers for a booming multi-billion-dollar industry without ever actually touching the plant. But watching amateurs roll trash into beautiful cones has finally broken his spirit.
After sampling countless commercially produced dispensary joints—estimating with palpable grief that roughly eighty percent of them were outright heartbreaking excuses for cannabis packed with stems and loose floor sweepings—Kesselman decided that if you want a joint done right, you have to grow the flower yourself.
Enter RAW Genetics, the brand’s official baptism into actual THC. Rather than building a grow operation from scratch on a whim, RAW’s parent umbrella swallowed up the twelve-year-old California breeding powerhouse originally built by brothers Bradly Van Gundy and Mason Yerger. These are the botanical minds responsible for menu staples like Stuffed French Toast and Zlushiez, effectively giving RAW the street cred and dialed-in cultivars needed to make the jump from desk accessory to top-shelf dispensaries.
The debut menu splits into two distinct camps for purists and cloud-chasers alike. On the dry-herb side, the newly branded RAWthentic line rolls out flower-packed staples ranging from five-gram sets of pint-sized Dog Walkers to full-gram 98 Specials and hefty singles capped with reusable glass mouthpieces. For those who prefer their terpene profiles delivered via clean extracts, the RAWsin line steps in with solventless hash rosin concentrates, stuffing infused pre-rolls with heavy punch and debuting USB-C powered vape hardware engineered specifically so you never taste burned oil again.
The rollout quietly debuted on New Mexico shelves before planting flags across Arizona and California, with lab testing wrapping up in New York and Oklahoma. From there, the road map stretches through New Jersey, Colorado, Michigan, and beyond as state-by-state licensing allows.
After spending a generation serving as the canvas for everyone else’s smoking experiments, RAW is betting that consumers are ready to buy the painting directly from the framing company. Given the dismal state of average dispensary pre-rolls, raising the bar was long overdue.
Dabbin-Dad Newsroom
