Thanks to mainstream marijuana-themed marketing, even those who have never inhaled are now aware of 4/20, but celebrations of 7/10 (aka OIL Day or Dab Day) still remain largely confined to connoisseurs of cannabis concentrates. I’m first and foremost a fan of the full flower as found in nature, but it’s impossible to compete with THC extracts — especially in the form of 510 cartridges or disposable all-in-one vaporizers — when it comes to convenience and discretion. With its potency and portability, it’s easy to understand why oil has exploded into a vital element of Florida’s medical marijuana industry, but with a vast variety of methods available for extraction, patients are learning that not all vapes are created equal.
Enter AYR (pronounced “air”) Wellness, a well-established multi-state medical marijuana operator that expanded into the Florida market in 2021 with their acquisition of Liberty Health Sciences. I patronized LHS a few times during my early days in the MMJ program, lured in by their low prices. But I soon found their Dompen brand of distillate-based vapes flavored with botanical terpenes to be the THC equivalent of Everclear with Kool-Aid: strong, sweet and certain to leave you with a headache.
After AYR took over, they introduced their Haze line of live resin extracts, an upgrade over distillate that uses native terps, but still extracted using harsh hydrocarbons; as well as Camino chews, which were my first (and remain my favorite) exposure to sleep-promoting CBN. However, the gold standard of live rosin remained beyond AYR’s grasp, in part because their plants were being grown at a hybrid indoor/outdoor greenhouse in Gainesville that didn’t produce the consistently high-quality bud required for expensive solventless extraction — which uses only pressure and ice water instead of chemicals, preserving the plant’s natural terpene profile — to be profitable.
That all began to change late last year, when AYR opened their first-ever all-indoor cultivation center in Florida. In June, I drove two hours north to Ocala for a tour of the nearly 100,000-square-foot facility with Brett Sorauf, director of operations; Evan Agundez, senior cultivation manager; and Robert Vanisko, senior vice president of public affairs. Before inspecting the state-of-the-art growhouse, which occupies almost 50,000 square feet, we had to suit up hazmat-style in head-to-toe overalls in order to avoid contaminating any of the scores of strains of gorgeous green ganja arrayed in seemingly endless sustainably irrigated aisles, growing from clones to colas under optimized LED illumination. Sorauf says, “This facility has been a long time coming, and the intention that’s gone into it cannot be overstated. We brought in a whole new technique, lessons learned from the past, [and] new people are here.”
The fruits of AYR’s efforts can be found in their new Kynd flower, which is now exclusively grown in Ocala; the products that I sampled were a marked improvement over my prior experiences, particularly the Sugar Berry Scones, which manages to pack nearly 4% terpenes and over 31% THC into its lovely trichome-laden nuggets. That strain, along with fan favorites like Powdered Donuts, may soon be joined by OG Diablo, Mango Sapphire, Formula One or one of a dozen others that Agundez has added to AYR’s Kynd crop rotation, based on internal phenotype hunting.
Genetics is “something we’ve put a lot of effort into for the last couple years, and [we’ve] come up with a much stronger program in terms of one keeping a lot of favorites consistent, but also rotating a lot of exciting and new things through,” says Vanisko. Unfortunately, old-school landrace sativas like I prefer are still rarely on the menu. “It’s difficult to grow them in commercial environments; they can just take an exorbitant amount of time to fully finish out to where they just honestly sometimes don’t even make economic sense,” Sorauf explains.
Oil is only as good as the flower that goes into it, so Kynd’s upgrade has carried over into the HZ line of live rosin AYR recently launched around this year’s 4/20. “In all markets we’re seeing patients mature towards these more sophisticated products, such as rosin,” says Sorauf. “It’s the purest form of the product and the plant that you could possibly have, and I think there absolutely are our patients that are looking for that.” After sampling a couple varieties of HZ, I can vouch for the gassy, juicy Mandarin Diesel’s well-balanced effects; and although I usually avoid disposable vapes for environmental reasons, I appreciate that AYR’s hardware has an inconspicuous soft-touch exterior with a ceramic core that resists overheating.
AYR is pairing the introduction of their leveled-up products with a roll-out of refreshed retail locations that started in Lakeland, along with improvements to their website promoting visibility of terpene information, in an effort to educate consumers out of chasing ever-higher THC percentages. That’s an uphill battle that I fully support, so after years of driving past their dispensaries, I’m finally giving AYR another look. “It is a night and day difference from what patients have experienced in the past,” promises Sorauf, “and the best is yet to come.”
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This article appears in July 8-14, 2026.