MJBiz - July 2023 - 38

Manufacturing
Milestones
Delight Made Right
Cultivator uses homegrown produce to create one-of-a-kind edibles
By Omar Sacirbey
T
urkish delight, the sweet, chewy,
powdered confection, has
captured Nathan Cozzolino's
imagination since he was young.
" I thought there was a dreamy
quality about it from my childhood
reading, " Cozzolino, the owneroperator
of Rose Los Angeles and
maker of cannabis edibles brand Rose
Delights, said of the candy that appears
in " The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe " by C.S. Lewis.
As an adult, Cozzolino made buying
Turkish delights from a neighborhood
candy store an after-school ritual he
shared with his son.
'Infinite possibilities'
As an infused cannabis product,
Turkish delights can be as practical as
they are magical, he said.
" The formulation gives infinite
possibilities in terms of the types of
ingredients that you can use. You can
throw anything at it and make it make
sense and make it taste good, " said
Cozzolino, who started the Californiabased
cannabis company Rose Los
Angeles in 2017.
Rose Delights, the brand's marquis
product, are cannabis-infused Turkish
delights. Rose Los Angeles also sells
packaged flower, infused chocolates
and capsules.
" It gives you an opportunity to create
a more shelf-stable, gummy type of
product without having to introduce
all sorts of weird synthetic or artificial
ingredients, " Cozzolino said.
Cozzolino's culinary team and
occasional guest chefs have created an
exotic selection of homegrown flavors
38 July 2023 | MJBizMagazine
infused with single-strain rosin from
flower grown on Rose's Farm in Penn
Valley, California. The farm also grows
many of the fruits and vegetables that
go into the delights. Ingredients not
grown on the farm are sourced from
local farmers and specialty producers.
Flavors of Rose Delights include
apple-ginger-ume (a Japanese fruit
similar to a plum) infused with
Sunshine No. 4 rosin, pear-kimchi
infused with Maltese orange rosin
and, in a nod to the traditional Turkish
delight, two types of rose hibiscus: one
infused with Fruit Gushers (an indica
strain) and the other with Super Lemon
Mac (a sativa).
" The whole intention behind Rose
Delights was to create an edible
product that took responsibility for and
cultivated the majority of its inputs, "
Cozzolino said.
Rose's Farm is located in
Penn Valley, California.
Courtesy photo
Farm and Flower
The process begins at Rose's Farm,
a property in central California
that includes a 10,000-square-foot
cannabis garden.
Rose Los Angeles uses only a fraction
of the garden to grow roughly
300 plants, which typically yield
about 500 pounds of dry cannabis.
Of that, 100 pounds is selected for
manufacturing rosin, which will go
into Turkish delights or chocolates,
and the rest is sold as packaged flower.
If Rose maxed out its grow space, it
could harvest more than 1,000 pounds
of flower and produce 30,000 packages
of Rose Delights per month, Cozzolino
said, adding: " We just focus on the
genetics that are inspiring. "
Cozzolino noted that Rose uses the
same grades of flower for rosin pressing
that it sells as packaged bud.
" Whether we're packaging it for
prepackaged flower sales or we're
putting it in a 35-micron bag for
pressing, the process all the way
up until the very end is exactly the
same. So, all of our flower is treated
like smokable flower, " he said. " It's
all graded similarly; we're not only
pressing smalls, we're pressing 7-gram
buds. "
After harvesting, the flower is cured
for 10-14 days and then stored in bins
separated by strain. It often won't be
trimmed until it's ready for sale or
pressing. Rose's trimmers are careful
not to overtrim buds, which can cause
unnecessarily trichome loss.
" For pressing, we want to preserve
those. But we get off anything that
could affect the flavor-so anything
MJBiz - July 2023

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