The mission.
Cannabis is the largest unregulated consumer category in the United States. A federally-legal hemp market now sells federally-legal isomers of THC at gas stations in states where state-legal marijuana is illegal. Dispensary menus advertise "indica" and "sativa" as if those words mean what consumers think they mean (they don't — the categories are commercial designations, not genetic). Lab transparency varies brand-to-brand by an order of magnitude.
DankeSuper exists to navigate that mess editorially. We do three things: we publish a visual + dosing standard called Altitude Control; we curate an Index of third-party products placed against it; and we run the Atlas — an analytical engine that maps cannabis chemistry into a single chemical space. Long-form context lives in the Journal.
Our principles.
Chemistry over category.
"Indica" and "sativa" don't reliably predict effect. Terpene chemotypes do. Cannabinoid stacks do. We place every product by its chemistry, not by its marketing.
Frameworks over opinions.
Every placement we publish is reproducible. Read our framework, look at the product's COA, and you should be able to derive the same answer. If the math lands differently, we update the framework or the listing, transparently.
Editorial cannot be bought.
Brands cannot pay for Index reviews or scores. Verified certification is a separate, disclosed program with its own price and its own rules. Sponsored content is clearly labeled and never appears in the Index or Atlas.
Adult readers.
We write for cannabis consumers as the literate adults they are. The Apartamento / Pitchfork / Strategist register, not the dispensary-uplift register. We assume you can read a chemistry table. We assume you've been doing this for a while.
Show the work, always.
Every listing detail page has a "How DankeSuper plotted this" panel with the actual math. Every journal piece carries citations. Every claim has an evidence tier — STRONG, MODERATE, or LIMITED — visible to the reader.
The rules we hold ourselves to.
The Altitude Control framework is brand IP. The Index, the Journal, and the Atlas are editorial. The wall between the two is real and operational.
- 1. A brand cannot pay for an Index review or a score. Editorial coverage is determined by the editors; payment buys certification, not placement or praise.
- 2. A Verified brand has no veto over its own review. If we Verify a brand's product but then review it poorly, we publish the review anyway. The Verified seal certifies truth-in-labeling, not quality endorsement.
- 3. Sponsored Journal content is clearly labeled (SPONSORED · BRAND NAME at the top of every sponsored piece) and never appears in the Index, the Best New archive, or the Standard.
- 4. Affiliate links on listings do not influence placement. We disclose affiliate relationships in microcopy on every listing page and in the global footer.
- 5. Our editors disclose any personal investment, advisory, or family relationship with covered brands. Any conflict triggers reassignment.
Methodology.
The Atlas is powered by Phytonomy — a PCA-based analytical engine that projects the L2-normalized 11-dimensional terpene fingerprint of 2,257 cultivars into a 2-D chemical space. The underlying data is the Pestele et al. 2022 dataset (PLoS ONE, PMID 35576208), 89,923 lab samples aggregated to per-cultivar medians.
Altitude Control placements are computed from each product's Certificate of Analysis using the published DankeSuper Cannabinoid Pharmacology Framework v1. Twenty cannabinoids are scored on a 2-axis grid — altitude per mg, and four-quadrant quadrant lean. The framework is open methodology; brands and partners can download the scoring data and apply it to their own products.
Get in touch.
DankeSuper is operated by an independent editorial team. All chemistry, placement math, and framework decisions are reviewable in the public source documents linked from each listing. v1.0 launched May 2026.