Let’s live and listen to music all day, every day. Let’s allow our hearts to beat together in a rhythm that lifts us as one. Let’s access parts of our selves we’ve missed or didn’t know we had. Terpenes and cannabis will be our guide.
After struggling with anxiety and depression, Justin discovered the transformative power of cannabis with Tom’s support. Their journey led to the realization that terpenes, not just strain types, were key to effective relief. Combining their professional skills and personal experiences, they launched Terpene Journey in 2017, pioneering a “terpene-first,” whole-plant approach. Today, they are dedicated to providing high-quality, lab-tested cannabis products with innovative shopping tools that enhance life’s activities with the complexity and richness the plant offers.
Award-Winning customer experience
We’re highly-recommended and have won awards for our outstanding customer service & experience. We have won the North Shore Magazine 'Best Dispensary' award two years running.
We are shaping the future of cannabis shopping
We are a cannabis dispensary committed to pioneering new approaches to cannabis shopping and putting the complexity of the cannabis plant at the heart of our operations.
The Entourage Builder, a proprietary cannabis shopping experience
We elevated years of peer-reviewed research on terpenes to develop a first-of-its-kind energy spectrum for cannabis product filtering, recognizing the importance of the entourage effect in determining product effects.
It distills dozens of data points into an easy-to-use tool for simpler product selection
Lab data-based product packs, powered by science, not marketing departments.
Mixing up pre-defined entourage effects, we create proprietary product packs with specific goals in mind, like our Supercharged Pre-Roll and Muscle Packs. Always automatically changing as new products arrive to offer you the best we have across our menu at any time for the specified goal.
A rewards program that’s easy to use and fast to earn.
Stay a Daytripper, become an Adventurer, or go as far as a Journeyer – our exclusive Terp Rewards program tiers mean you’ll earn points faster the more you journey with us. An industry-leading Rewards program that easy to use and quick to earn.
We aim to simplify and clarify cannabis, without compromising detail, to empower better product matches for your goals.
Fun, easy to identify terpene icons.
We put the terpenes front and center on every product card and listing on our site, easily learn as you filter. Visit our “Shop by Effects” pages, built for every terpene in the Entourage Builder and even sort by terpene amounts for more granular control.
An award-winning in-store team of budtenders and inventory ninjas.
Our team is so much more than just a product fulfilment team, getting your orders completed fast and accurately. They’re highly educated cannabis connoisseurs who personally review every lab test and become subject matter experts on everything from extraction methods used for a product to what type of soil the product grew up in.
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Way more and better organized product filters than any standard cannabis menu.
We aim to educate through our filtering system. We make it easy to view product tags on product pages and click through to view products with their soil types, wrap types, predominant cannabinoids, etc. And, each of these tags is built with The Entourage Builder right there for your use.
Our dedication to selecting and offering high-quality, truly local craft cannabis runs through everything we do.
Owned and operated by Swampscott residents -- Terpene Journey's menu brims full with over 24 other Massachusetts-founded, owned, and operated cannabis brands, from the Berkshires to where the sand meets the seas in Gloucester. Look for the "Local Brands" tags on our products menu pages online.
More than an empty slogan, our definition of local cannabis is rigorous and dedicated.
Owned and operated by Swampscott residents -- Terpene Journey's menu brims full with over 24 other Massachusetts-founded, owned, and operated cannabis brands, from the Berkshires to where the sand meets the seas in Gloucester. Look for the "Local Brands" tags on our products menu pages online.
A local cannabis company whose DNA (and jobs) from budtender to the CEO are here. 100% founded, owned, and operated from Massachusetts.
First-time business owners, family-driven shops, and microbusinesses.
Companies whose founders have a long passion for cannabis, and for those founded by people disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs.
We only work with partners who commit to whole-plant lab testing – across a broad-spectrum of terpenes and cannabinoids.
Many large operations will commit to high-level, top-line lab testing but balk at the additional cost of adding terpene testing. It’s simple for us – they’re tested for all or we don’t carry them.
We’re so much more than high-THC.
Naturally, we’re a cannabis dispensary so we stock high-THC products but we also put a premium on diverse terpene and cannabinoid profiles. Similar to how each person’s system is different, so are the activities we pursue in our lives. Even if someone uses sativa/indica indications to determine how a product will impact them, what about the 80% of products that are “hybrids”? Just ignore them? We believe that all kinds of lifes’ activies can be enhanced by cannabis and the diversity of strains is a wonderfully complex soundtrack of options to all these different activities.
We believe our impact is heightened by supporting our industry and our communities.
We’re a social equity company, supporting other social equity companies.
We are the only cannabis dispensary menu that has a filter across all of our product pages where shoppers can filter to view only products cultivated or processed by other social equity companies. In Massachusetts, social equity companies are run by founders who were parts of populations disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs and are certified by the Cannabis Control Commission of Massachusetts
We partner with community organizations, like The Yoga Loft Marblehead, to integrate cannabis into everyday living.
We believe activities can be enhanced by cannabis and we live that value with community events, such as our partnership with The Yoga Loft in Marblehead with programming called Cannaflow – aimed at pairing yoga practice with cannabis.
Ongoing support of groups and causes important in our communities.
We’ve helped support a number of local Swampscott causes over the years and continue to do so every year from Reach Arts, Swampscott Senior Center, Swampscott Library, Anchor Food Pantry, and the Swampscott Cultural Center.
We’re so proud of our award-winning customer service provided by our friendly & knowledgable team.
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“Let’s live and listen to music all day, every day. Let’s allow our hearts to beat together in a rhythm that lifts us as one. Let’s access parts of our selves we’ve missed or didn’t know we had. Terpenes and cannabis will be our guide.”
– Tom and Justin, Terpene Journey Founders
Celebrating Local Growers and Unique Terpene Experiences
Life’s activities aren’t black and white and neither should the cannabis we use to supplement and enhance life. While many dispensaries in the cannabis industry opted for an easy, scientifically unsound direction for their sales operations (focusing on sativa and indica designations to determine expected product effects), Terpene Journey was the first (in 2017) to put the beautiful complexity of the cannabis plant at the heart of its operations and effects.
Terpene Journey was the first cannabis dispensary with a “terpene-first”, whole-plant approach to selling their products.
We believe in cannabis as a life “enhancer” and ally – not a drug in a traditional sense. We ask first, what activity is it you’d like to enhance with cannabis?
At the very core of the Terpene Journey ethos is the diversity of experiences our customers have, sometimes with the same product. Rather than simply write off these diverse experiences with unhelpful generalities like “effects may vary” or “everybody’s system is different” we put the information consumers should have directly in front of them to help make more informed product decisions.
Unlike the typical dispensary, our commitment to quality and product transparency starts long before the product ever is on our menu. We only work with partners who commit to whole-plant lab testing – across a broad-spectrum of terpenes and cannabinoids. Many large operations will commit to high-level, top-line lab testing but balk at the additional cost of adding terpene testing. It’s simple for us – they’re tested for all or none. Our inventory team is so much more than just a product fulfillment team, getting your products on the sales floor fast. They’re highly educated cannabis connoisseurs who personally review every lab test and become subject matter experts on everything from extraction methods used for a product to what type of soil the product grew up in.
Similar to how each person’s system is different, so are the activities we pursue in our lives. Even if someone uses sativa/indica indications to determine how a product will impact them, what about the 80% of products that are “hybrids”? Just ignore them? We believe that all kinds of lifes’ activies can be enhanced by cannabis and the diversity of strains is a wonderfully complex soundtrack of options to all these different activities.
Rather than simply call something “Sleep” or “Wake” (we’ll do that too), we also believe it’s important to ground this in the “why”, especially when no dispensary that currently exists can really say any of these terms with near certainty. That’s why you’ll find the detailed lab results on every product page but also why we created the Entourage Builder that can be found on every single shopping page, front and center. We put the entourage effect at the center of our shopping experience, not as a lame excuse for why the product didn’t hit a certain way.
Since 2014, Swampscott has been Justin and Tom's home and backdrop to many adventures on the water all over the North Shore of Massachusetts. It’s been a place where people are kind, open-minded, & living their best lives.
Like many companies, Terpene Journey was born out of a combination of opportunity and a personal emotional connection to the product. After years of trialing a wide variety of “traditional” , pharmaceutical solutions prescribed by mental health professionals for recurring anxiety and depression, Justin was at his wits’ end. In retrospect, he was more than at wits’ end – he had lost several years of fuller life as he learned that many of these drugs were merely dulling sensation -- all sensation.
Fortunately, Justin’s husband Tom helped destigmatize the use of cannabis and began a new journey for both of them. Justin visited a medical marijuana doctor and received his prescription: look for indica strains so they don’t exacerbate your anxiety. Dutifully following these suggestions, Justin soon found a whole lot more to this than he imagined. Purchasing an array of options at this local dispensary, Justin’s first indica strain did just the opposite of his doctor’s instructions: his anxiety was off the charts, and this repeated itself. Intriguingly, one of the options Justin tried from his husband was labeled a “sativa” – the opposite of what had been recommended for him.
Like most things in Justins’ life, his curiosity was sparked (he was a data scientist by trade) but so was his commitment to finding a path forward for his mental health. Treating his experiences like the data journals he so often kept throughout life for other areas, Justin dove into endless amounts of research online and learned about the entourage effect. Collating, tabulating, recording – Justin began to reach statistical significance on his journey and was fascinated that none of how the doctor or the dispensary was recommending products worked for him. There were some sativas, some hybrids, some indicas that increased/decreased his anxiety symptoms. It wasn’t this designation at all that predicted his experience – it was a combination of terpenes. Linalool and limonene became Justin’s antidote (albeit at certain ratios) – but, finding consistently tested, consistently labeled options was difficult.
Enter Terpene Journey. A marriage of both professional pursuits & emotional connections began for Tom & Justin. The opportunity of a new industry starting from scratch was a perfect match for Tom’s dream & his background in change management and building new initiatives for other people’s businesses. Justin found that not only sharing his findings would help chart new directions and paths for other people in the same struggle, but that the industry’s cornucopia of data also hit on his professional strengths and passions too. Together, they lept into the industry and, like the ocean that was the backdrop of Terpene Journey’s birth, weathered several years of regulatory and financial hurdles to open Terpene Journey Swampscott in August 2021.
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