New-to-Orlando dispensary Insa Cannabis offers gourmet-style edibles

The holiday season is nigh, and many Floridian medical cannabis cardholders (like myself) are turning to edibles as a discreet method of staying medicated while gathering with family and friends. Unfortunately, many of the edibles available in Orlando dispensaries taste like dollar-store candies doused in bongwater. If you care as much about your tastebuds as you do about THC levels, you may want to take a look at Insa Cannabis, a relative newcomer to the local market whose gourmet-style products — based on complimentary review samples provided to me — have more in common with fine European confections than the stereotypical stoner spacecake.

That level of quality is largely attributable to the efforts of Julian Rose, Insa's head chef and director of R&D, who recently answered some questions via Zoom from his headquarters in Massachusetts.

A native of Quebec, he grew up in his family's pastry shop ("born on a bag of flour," as he jokes) and studied to be a high-end chocolatier, rising to become a global representative of a major chocolate supplier. A consulting job on the West Coast connected him with that region's then-nascent legal cannabis industry, which eventually led him to join Insa shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first and perhaps most surprising thing I learned is that Chef Julian doesn't partake in any of Insa's finished products himself.

"I'm not a consumer at all. I've never consumed cannabis, which is very funny because here I am," Rose admits. "My approach is, I develop the high-end products and at the end I just happen to put cannabis in. The infusion is just another ingredient for me, so my goal is to make it extremely, extremely similar to products you would find in a high-end chocolate shop."

Insa is among a growing number of dispensaries offering patients their pick between edibles made with flavorless THC distillate or with full-spectrum oils packed with sub-cannabinoids and terpenes, which Rose says add another layer of complexity to his recipes.

"If you have a strong flavor, you need to have an opposing strong flavor. So you see the peppermint dark with FSO [full spectrum oil] is quite funky; I call it quite brassy, earthy, skunky; [but] lot of our internal colleagues here love the FSO bar because it has the full-body effect, and the distillate is more like a head effect."

In addition to the chocolate bars, I tried Insa's watermelon gummy drops, which forgo cloying Jolly Ranger-style sweetness or Sour Patch pucker in favor of a flavor resembling the actual fruit.

"In Massachusetts, they're made with actual watermelon juice concentrate, so it's very expensive because, you can imagine, watermelon is just water and very little solids and flavor," Rose reveals. "In Florida we could not have color, even if it's a naturally occurring color, which was a big disappointment. The watermelon juice is red, so the gummies were reddish, and that was not accepted in Florida. All the gummies in Florida are based off of apple juice; we tested here, and I adjusted levels to my liking.

"It comes back my approach: I want to like it, and I want it to taste as real as possible, so I'm going to use the ingredients that I choose, and I have to say Insa has always been extremely open to my philosophy."

Florida's restrictions also prevent Rose from including things like chopped nuts or candy pieces in a chocolate bar, limiting some seasonal offerings. He hopes (as do we) that will change if and when the state legalizes recreational adult use, as Ohio voters recently approved. Once that happens, Rose anticipates an explosion of cannabis/culinary crossovers.

He draws parallels between the mass-market potential of marijuana munchies and the way exotic produce "you could not find in a supermarket 15 years ago now is common, whether it's the cactus fruit or the star fruit, and so you have this evolution in food."

Looking beyond the sweets that currently stock Insa shelves, Rose also imagines serving savory items someday, saying, "If they would cut me loose, I would have, you know, sauces and soups and all sorts of products that could be in the freezer."

Rose predicts, "In five years you'll see it. People are pushing a little bit more to discover, and I think that what's going to be interesting is when you're going to be able to marry ingredients in a more sophisticated way, because people are starting to learn and understand terpenes. ... We're going to dig deeper as consumers get more educated."