The Harvest Cup

“Our original goal was to find the best cannabis and cannabis related products in New England … I feel we have done a good job with that and continue to learn, grow, and change each year.”

Since hosting their first expo in 2017, the organizers behind the Harvest Cup have built one of the most anticipated annual cannabis events in New England. This year’s competition, trade show, and concert goes down for two days at the DCU Center in Worcester starting Nov. 13, and also features an afterparty on Saturday night with Badfish.

As for the cup categories, judges are currently evaluating the best: Sweet Edibles; Savory Edibles; Beverages; Syrups, Sauces, and Condiments; Topicals/Therapeutic; Topicals/Cosmetic; CBD Flower/Extract; CBD Edibles; Tinctures & Capsules; Concentrates; and Flower, which this year will be “broken down into six categories based on terpene-dominant profiles as provided by lab results: limonene, humulene, pinene, linalool, caryophyllene, and myrcene.”

We asked event organizer and the Harvest Cup Director of Communications Jenn Blakeney Borjeson what to expect with this year’s festivities.

From our own experience and from the buzz around New England, the Harvest Cup feels like a grassroots event that got big fast but still has those original roots. Is that how it seems from the organizing perspective? And to what do you attribute your success so far?

We work hard to provide a safe space to hold a professional event that maintains that “grassroots feeling” and I’m thrilled that’s how you see it. We attribute our success to the people and relationships that we’ve developed over the years.  We worked hard right from the first event in 2017 to gain people’s trust. And it worked. People trust us—they trust our process, our competition, and our event. That means a lot to us as event organizers.

What was your original mission and what were your original goals, and how do those compare to what the cup looks like now?

Our original goal was to find the best cannabis and cannabis related products in New England and to bring the cannabis community together. I feel we have done a good job with that and continue to learn, grow, and change each year. We have had a kickoff party for our vendors, judges, and competitors every year but this is our first year hosting an official after party with music.

At the category level, what are we looking at this year and how do you adjust the competition itself to changes in the market…