Friendly Farms : Fakes Are Not So Friendly

A little over a year ago, we reviewed Friendly Farms live sauce carts. We found them to be excellent, the cart that hits like you’re truly dabbing. Well, here comes the bad news as it so often does in this industry: counterfeit Friendly Farms carts have hit the streets!

Counterfeit Friendly Farms spotted on black market sites

Spotted them on DHGate recently, when looking to refresh our top ten fake carts list

Vapes Wholesale follows suit:

As always, the appearance of empty packaging being sold on third-party Chinese sites means that street vendors will be grabbing the packaging to fill with whatever bunk ingredients and selling to gullible vapers. You dear readers of our site are not gullible vapers, are you?

Friendly Farms collaborations, past and present

Friendly Farms lives up to their name, collaborating with other brands occasionally. This does, unfortunately, make it confusing for people trying to tell real from counterfeit. Here’s the current scorecard:

• Connected Cannabis Co.
• Alien Labs – not to be confused with the, like, dozen other “alien” cart brands out there, real and fake
• Sherbinski – Already heavily counterfeited, as we reported back there. This is particularly troublesome, because one Sherbinski cart looks exactly like another thanks to their square traffic cone design motif.

There is also a previous collaboration between Friendly Farms and Higher Vibrations, which is a saga of its own. Early on this year, we were alerted to Higher Vibrations going on using Friendly Farms’ name on their packaging long after the collaboration had concluded. HV was simply filling with their own oil but still using the boxes printed from FF. HV has since gotten over its affair with FF, changed its status back to ‘single,’ and moved on, but counterfeits of carts from that pairing still appear, we hear.

Fake Friendly Farms spotted in the Reddit wild

Starting from this thread reporting a Virginia plug offering Friendly Farms carts, Friendly Farms’ own Reddit account responds to affirm that fakes are out there.

In fact, Friendly Farms is quite active on Reddit and is happy to answer any questions. If only all cannabis product companies cared as much about P.R.! Friendly Farms’ account posts informative tidbits like these:

So you have it from the source: Any Friendly Farms cart containing distillate is fake! The company has also changed its packaging recently “to keep the counterfeiters on their toes.” So here is an updated FF package:

Of course, you can find current versions of all their products on the official Friendly Farms site.

Friendly Farms brand owner weighs in : spotting fake carts

We reached out to the owner of the Friendly Farms brand, and he shared with us the following informative comments on spotting fakes:

Here are a few variations of knock offs that we have come across:

Boxes:

Large friendly farms name on box is glossy on the fakes, real boxes are matte finished and soft touch.

They almost always mess up the dating and batch ID. Our batch ID is based on the date the oil was manufactured (LL-00010419-A) this would be liquid live (LL), manufactured on Jan 4,2019 (010419), first batch made that day (A).

Our products are good for 2 years, most of the knockoffs shows as expiring 1 year after package date.

We have fully updated our boxes so the knockoffs should be apparent now, until they make the new version.

Our newer cured resin comes in a black box.

Another tell tale sign is if our old logo is present anywhere, unless you buy it at a licensed retailer the old logo in gone. Very few remaining on the legal market.

Carts:

There are several variations, but they are easy to spot. All authentic friendly farms carts now available on the legal market have our name and font printed bottom to top vertically. The knockoffs have tried to match this but they always get the font wrong, if it doesn’t match our IG font it ain’t real.

Some of the available versions on DHGate are etched on the metal rather than printed on the glass. We stopped etching nearly a year ago, so there are no more of these on the legal market.

Again look for variations in the font as we use a very particular one.

They have also been found with mistakes on the spelling, there is a large batch of “friencly farms” going around.

The sellers are saying it was an error that we released for a discount, but if there was ever a mistake like that we wouldn’t release them…also the font is wrong.

Any cartridge with our old logo (or anything for that matter) on the mouthpiece is fake as we stopped using those about 5 months ago.

Oil:

Our oil is ALWAYS full spectrum oil. This means that at its best it will be a rich yellow color and at times will appear darker amber.

Our oil will never really look like distillate. Most of the knockoffs we have come across are obviously distillate and they rarely contain actual live or cured resin. If it’s clear or a faint yellow, it’s definitely fake. Our oil is always rich in color due to the full spectrum of compounds present in our oil.

Stickers:

Our tamper evident sticker should say friendly farms, if it is our old logo then it’s a fake. Also, we apply the tamper evident horizontally across the bottom, some knockoffs we have seen place the sticker vertically.

Child resistant:

Sometimes the knockoffs will come without a child resistant tube. In California these are a requirement. If you see a cart in a box without a CR tube, it’s a fake for sure.

So that’s a complete rundown straight from the brand!

Readers, are you spotting Friendly Farms carts from street plugs?

Help us in our continued efforts to stay two steps ahead of the black market! Report your findings here in the comments or in our forum.