Minty Blizzard by Essence: Florida's #3 Eighth Is an Icy Daytime Sativa

Scan Florida's best-selling eighths right now and it's a wall of dessert crosses and gassy West Coast cuts all chasing the same cookie-and-runtz lane. Then there's Minty Blizzard, (the) Essence's icy sativa that's currently sitting at #3 among Florida's best-selling flower eighths — roughly $621,018 in a single week and north of $2.3 million over the trailing stretch, at a statewide average of $34.13 an eighth. In a medical market this saturated with cake, a bracing mint-and-pine daytime smoke holding its own at the top of the chart is the more interesting story.

(the) Essence is Verano Holdings' in-house flower program, the phenohunted sibling brand sold exclusively through the company's MÜV dispensaries — a footprint that just grew to 86 Florida locations and 163 dispensaries nationwide with this month's MÜV Bradfordville opening. Where a MÜV shelf carries flower from several outside brands, Essence is Verano's own cultivation team distilling its best genetics into a tighter, occasion-built lineup — flower and pre-rolls the brand describes as hand-selected and hand-trimmed. Minty Blizzard is the cut Verano is currently leaning on to prove that model can move real volume, not just niche appeal.

The cross is Amnesia Haze onto The Menthol, an old-school haze lineage paired with a menthol-forward donor, and it shows the moment the jar opens. Limonene and beta-caryophyllene lead the terpene profile, throwing a citrus-bright top note that folds into a genuinely cooling mint-and-pine exhale — closer to old-school ice cream genetics than the modern gas-and-cake language dominating the rest of Florida's top ten. It's a flavor built to read differently on a menu where almost everything else is named after a dessert.

Current Florida batches are running hot. Listings pulled across MÜV's menu this week show Minty Blizzard testing anywhere from the mid-20s up to 33.4% THC depending on the specific harvest and store. The effect tracks the genetics — Verano's own strain guide bills it as 'Cerebral, Creative, Uplift,' a sativa built for daytime output rather than couch-lock, with the caryophyllene lending a faint peppery undertone that keeps the high from tipping into jittery.

Minty Blizzard is in stock across dozens of MÜV locations statewide, with confirmed menus this week running from North Port to Yulee, Ocala to Okeechobee, and Tampa to St. Petersburg — part of a MÜV footprint that spans 71-plus Florida stores carrying the Essence line out of the brand's 86 total locations. Sticker price on the shelf runs about $50 for 3.5 grams before MÜV's loyalty pricing kicks in, which is how a $50-plus jar nets out to that $34.13 statewide average. At #3 on the eighth chart, it's proof a mint strain doesn't have to be a novelty — it can be a legitimate volume seller.