Last verified: March 2026

The Origin of Girl Scout Cookies

The story begins in San Francisco's Sunset District, not in a laboratory but in a residential grow. Jai Chang, working out of a house near Noriega and 25th Avenue, crossed F1 Durban Poison with OG Kush. The resulting cultivar was dense, aromatic, and hit differently than anything on the market. Jai handed it to his collaborator with a simple introduction: "This is Thin Mint Cookies, bro."

That collaborator was Berner — Gilbert Milam Jr., a San Francisco native who had been budtending at the Hemp Center since he was 18. Berner had noticed something that no one in cannabis was doing at the time: branding. Cannabis was sold by weight and potency, not by name recognition. Nobody was building consumer loyalty around a specific strain the way a winery builds loyalty around a varietal. Berner saw the gap.

Building a Brand Without a Trademark

You cannot federally trademark a cannabis strain. Cannabis is Schedule I, and the USPTO will not issue a trademark for an illegal substance. So Berner did something clever: he trademarked the clothing. The Cookies logo, the packaging design, the aesthetic — all trademarked as apparel and merchandise. The cannabis itself rode on the back of the brand. It was the first time anyone had applied streetwear branding to cannabis, and it worked because the product was genuinely exceptional.

Berner placed Cookies in hip-hop music videos, leveraging his connections in Bay Area rap. The strategy was deliberate: instead of advertising cannabis (which you could not do legally), you advertised the lifestyle. The Cookies brand appeared in music, on clothing, on social media — and the flower followed.

Cookies Oakland: 1776 Broadway

Cookies Oakland opened in December 2019 at 1776 Broadway — the former Oaksterdam University building where Richard Lee had trained 30,000 students. Two generations of Oakland cannabis history, one address. The East Bay flagship represented Cookies' homecoming: the brand may have been born in SF's Sunset, but its culture — the hip-hop DNA, the street credibility, the unapologetic Blackness — was always Oakland.

By August 2022, Berner was on the cover of Forbes. Cookies was valued at over $150 million with 70+ dispensaries globally. The brand that started with a crossed seed and a clothing trademark had become one of the most recognizable names in cannabis worldwide.

The Cookie Fam and the Genetics Tree

GSC did not stay in one line. The genetics branched into a dynasty that now dominates menus nationally.

Gelato

Jai Chang and Mario Guzman (who would later launch Sherbinskis) formed the Cookie Fam and crossed strains to create Gelato — a GSC descendant known for its rich flavor profile and balanced effects. Gelato became a standalone phenomenon, spawning its own phenotype numbering system (Gelato #33, Gelato #41) and becoming a menu staple across the country.

Runtz

Runtz emerged from a cross of Gelato and Zkittlez, bred by Yung LB, Nick, and Ray. Runtz became the strain of the late 2010s and early 2020s — the most hyped name on dispensary menus from California to New York. Its candy-like flavor profile and vivid bag appeal made it the strain that launched a thousand imitations.

Gary Payton

Named for Oakland NBA Hall of Famer Gary Payton, this strain was bred by Kenny Powers (Powerzzzup Genetics) in collaboration with Cookies. The naming was intentional — an Oakland basketball legend lending his name to an Oakland cannabis strain. Gary Payton became one of the top-selling strains at dispensaries nationwide.

The Scale of It

GSC and its descendants — Gelato, Runtz, Gary Payton, Mochi, London Pound Cake, and dozens more — account for an estimated 20–30% of top dispensary menus nationally. When you walk into a dispensary in Denver, Detroit, or Boston and pick a strain off the shelf, there is a reasonable chance it traces its genetics to a house near Noriega and 25th in San Francisco or to the Cookie Fam's Bay Area breeding operation.

The Hyphy Connection: Cannabis and Bay Area Hip-Hop

Cannabis and hip-hop are not just parallel cultures in the Bay Area. They are the same culture. The music references the weed. The weed references the music. The people are the same people.

"I Got 5 On It" (1995)

The Luniz released "I Got 5 On It" in 1995 — a $5 contribution to a communal sack of weed. It became the Bay Area's anthem, peaking at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and resurfacing in Jordan Peele's Us (2019). The song was not about luxury cannabis. It was about pooling $5 to buy something you could not afford alone. That communal ethos — we share, we go in together — is fundamental to both Bay Area hip-hop and Bay Area cannabis culture.

RBL Posse: "Don't Give Me No Bammer"

RBL Posse set the quality standard: "Don't Give Me No Bammer Weed" was a declaration that Bay Area smokers demanded better. Bammer — low-quality, compressed, probably from out of state — was unacceptable. This quality consciousness prefigured the entire craft cannabis movement by two decades.

Too Short: "City of Dope"

Too Short, Oakland's godfather of rap, documented the city's relationship with cannabis across decades of music. He actively campaigned for Prop 64 in 2016, bringing street credibility to the legalization effort. When one of Oakland's most iconic voices told his audience to vote yes, it mattered.

E-40 and "Broccoli"

E-40 (Vallejo) contributed the slang term "broccoli" for cannabis to the national vocabulary and later launched his own cannabis product line. E-40's influence on Bay Area language is enormous — he is credited with popularizing dozens of slang terms that entered mainstream use.

Mac Dre and the Spiritual Father of Hyphy

Mac Dre — the spiritual father of the hyphy movement — was murdered in 2004 in Kansas City, a loss that still reverberates through Bay Area culture. Hyphy was his creation: sideshows, ghostriding the whip, going stupid, going dumb. And at the center of hyphy culture was cannabis — specifically, purple. "Smokin' purple" was not just a preference. It was an identity.

The Purple Strains

Purple Urkle and Granddaddy Purple were the Bay Area's signature strains before GSC took over. Keak Da Sneak rapped "I'm smokin' purple, sippin' yac" — purple cannabis and Hennessy cognac, the hyphy sacraments. The Bay's love for purple-hued flower predated the modern strain-branding era and created a consumer preference for colorful, visually striking cannabis that persists today.

Mistah F.A.B. and the "Dope Era"

Mistah F.A.B. — "I Got Flavors" — built the "Dope Era" brand on Broadway in Oakland. Like Cookies, Dope Era started as clothing and expanded into a lifestyle brand intertwined with cannabis culture. The Broadway location connects it physically to the Oaksterdam corridor where Richard Lee transformed empty storefronts into the heart of cannabis reform.

The Black Panther Thread

This is not a digression. It is the foundation.

The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland in 1966. Its core principle was community self-determination — the right of Black communities to control the institutions that affect their lives. The War on Drugs was, in practice, a tool for undermining that self-determination — mass incarceration, asset forfeiture, and the destruction of community institutions through targeted enforcement.

The thread from the Panthers to the equity program is organizational, not metaphorical:

• The Black Panther Alumni Legacy Network partners with CBCB (a Berkeley dispensary) on community programming
• 40 Tons, a cannabis brand founded by Loriel Alegrete, was inspired by Corvain Cooper's life sentence for cannabis and channels proceeds to cannabis prisoner justice through Justice Row
• Eco Cannabis employs formerly incarcerated individuals and sources from equity cultivators
• Oakland's equity program itself — with its police-beat eligibility criteria targeting the neighborhoods most affected by enforcement — is a direct response to the same dynamics the Panthers identified 50 years earlier

The hip-hop, the genetics, the dispensaries, and the equity program are all expressions of the same principle: the community that bore the cost should share the benefit. That principle was articulated on the streets of Oakland in 1966. It is still being fought for on the same streets today.

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