Sonoma cannabis company Solful collabs with the Noise Pop Festival
San Francisco’s hometown Noise Pop Festival kicks off this week and it is no surprise that the festival where over half of the 150 plus bands playing are local chose Solful, committed buyers of local, sun-grown cannabis, to be its first cannabis sponsor. To celebrate local bands and farmers together, they released the “Snap, Crackle, Noise Pop” pre-rolls, a festival-optimized original that comes in a stylish collectible tin with five joints…and maybe a surprise inside.
The Sonoma-rooted, conscious capitalist company opened its first dispensary in Sebastopol with the mission of building out a retail support system for local growers as regs came online in 2016. It is an organic, place-rooted strategy that demonstrates the two organizations are perfect for each other, just like weed and live music.
“We really wanted to come out with something we thought would be the perfect thing to have while you were watching live music, you know?” said Solful founder and CEO Eli Melrod when we chatted about the collab. “We actually tried a lot [before finding] a blend of two different strains from us, well,…basically rolling a bunch of jays.”
Giotis: “Extensive market research.”
Melrod: “Yeah, yeah (laughs), so from that we came up with, really, your perfect companion for live music.”
Solful understands about experience, offering the smoothest of dispensary vibes and really good, healthy cannabis in Sebastopol, Healdsburg, and San Francisco. The customer flow and budtender sensitivity to what the customer is actually looking for are legendary. Well lit, hands on, easy. Award winning.
That is the beauty of Solful; the company has excelled at its mission of growing the infrastructure for the culture of weed. It starts with thinking about community. Solful is part of “the broader community of local businesses that are doing good work,” said Melrod, whose first concert on weed was a The Living Legends set at the Fillmore for an independent hip-hop benefit.
“The more we can lock arms with organizations [who share the same values], the more we can find that win-win,” he added while also emphasizing the importance of building community at every level, among the staff, in the stores with customers, with the farmers.
The name for the blend, “Snap, Crackle, Noise Pop,” is inspired by a 1997 San Francisco Examiner article penned by 90s Noise Pop organizer Jordan Kurland where he laid out the homegrown aesthetic of the festival’s “subdued” and “organic” approach, much like Melrod’s own sane-scale approach to local sungrown cannabis farms.
In the 90s the organic growth of an anticommercialization festival may have seemed obvious, but with Noise Pop venues Bottom of the Hill and Thee Parkside announcing closures, live music needs the support and participation of overlapping communities to keep the economics going. That’s us. We’re the communities.
The Snap, Crackle, Noise Pop pre-rolls are available for $35 at all Solful locations. The tins include a code for a ten percent discount off of general admission Noise Pop badges—and get this—for one blessed individual, one of the pre-roll packs, only one, is redeemable for two free general admission Noise Pop badges, unlocking every show at every venue at the festival.
I tasted this lovely joint with its 90s aesthetic. It was well suited to the live jazz-thrash gig where I previewed it—the taste vintage, almost dry, with a hint of tobacco. The kind of joint you could tuck behind the ear for a show.
Snap, Crackle, Noise Pop pre-rolls are available in Sonoma county at Solful Sebastopol, 785 Gravenstein Hwy S, Sebastopol, and Solful Healdsburg, 465 Healdsburg Ave, Healdsburg. $35 for a pack of five.
The 2026 Noise Pop Festival runs from Feb. 19 to Mar. 1 at 15 different venues in San Francisco and around the Bay. For more information and tickets, noisepopfest.com
