Will that be Black Widow CBD, Super Skunk or Skywalker Kush No. 1?

The names of the pot products on offer after recreational cannabis becomes legal across Canada Oct. 17 will be as intriguing as they are inscrutable.

And with sparse packaging information and little producer advertising to guide you — the legalization law restricts them both severely — how’s the newbie Dude supposed to know which to choose? Welcome to the world of online “trip advisers.”

Yes, as with seemingly any perplexity out there, the internet will provide a wealth of combustibles advice for baffled consumers on websites that employ connoisseur expertise and crowdsourced consensus to help guide you to your desired high.

“The trip adviser is our core asset. Consumers can read about every product and every producer and educate themselves about the category ... through consumer driven reviews,” says Matei Olaru, CEO of Toronto-based Lift & Co., which offers one of the two main online guides Canadian cannabis buyers can access.

The trip guide will be available in a free smartphone format, which consumers can open as they browse retail locations or place orders online come Oct. 17.

The guide will also help consumers navigate a market that has climbed to some 800 products under the existing medical regime and could climb past 1,000 in the first year after the recreational business opens.

Lift has also helped create a retail training program for store employees that, so far, Nova Scotia has adopted for its cannabis operations, and with talks underway with other provincial cannabis vendors across the country.

The other major trip adviser site will be provided by the cannabis resource gadfly Leafly, which expanded its U.S. operations to Canada last year in anticipation of legalization and to service the many Canadians who currently use its media products and guides.

Like the original TripAdvisor web service — which bills itself as the world’s largest source of travel information — Olaru says the Lift.co cannabis guide will help bridge the gap between a consumer’s desires and the otherwise hidden products that would satisfy them.

“You go to a new country and you want to find a good restaurant but you don’t know how to find that good restaurant because you don’t know what’s going on in that market,” he says.

“In Canada, cannabis producers can’t talk about their product’s effect, they’ll soon have to rely on plain packaging, there’s no metric of quality they can communicate so our ‘trip adviser’ platform ... will help empower consumers with the information they need.”

How good is the cannabis you’re looking at? How long will its effects last? How is it different than another product?

The answers to these questions will be nowhere near apparent as consumers browse Ontario Cannabis Store outlets — or shop online — where all goods will be displayed in plain black or white packages that bear a product’s brand name and logo, levels of the active cannabinoid ingredients THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol) it contains, a warning label and little else.

The questions, however, have all been considered and answered by people who have used the products before, whether as legal medicinals or otherwise. And some 65,000 of them have shared their experiences with the Lift platform to form a data set that includes millions of information points and covers more than 800 products.

“They talk about how long the product lasts, the top effects that they felt, whether it was relaxation or euphoria, let’s say, (and) perhaps, how it rates on a five-star system,” Olaru says.

“Everything you take for granted, let’s say in an Amazon review or a TripAdvisor review, we do for the cannabis industry,” he says.

The Lift guide covers up to 24 elements — including things like taste, aroma, appearance and potency — in each product review.

And aside from reviews, the company’s adviser will offer an algorithm that can match consumers with products they are likely to prefer given their answers to some personal questions, Olaru says.

“It’s a ... recommendation engine that gets to know you,” he says of the program, which will launch on legalization day.

“You’ll go to our platform and say ‘you’re 25 years old, you’re new to cannabis, you don’t want to feel like this, you want to feel like that’ and we’ll recommend (or) suggest products you can try and as you try more products we’ll get smarter.”

To monetize the site, Lift will take on advertising and shop the market intelligence information it gains to producers, governments, retailers and other industry players.

The Leafly platform can also be accessed on smartphones while shopping.

“We’ve helped millions of people navigate their journey in cannabis, whatever that might be,” says Jo Vos, managing director of Leafly Canada.

“Governments are being cautious (with cannabis information) and rightly so, but consumers are and will continue to look for more contextual information more so than what they will experience in those retail environments,” Vos says.

Vos likens cannabis selection to shopping for fresh produce and says her site will provide the sensory details bland government packaging withholds.

Vos says her site will provide information on the type of high a product is likely to produce.

The site also provides a “Cannabis 101” segment that tutors users on such things as consumption alternatives, constituent chemicals like the buzz-inducing THC and the medicinal CBD, how to come down off a bad high and “five ways to help your budtender help you.”

Like the Lift adviser, the free Leafly program will rely on crowdsourced reviews — the company says it has millions — to evaluate products.

Vos says its appraisals are also based on the opinions of a connoisseur staff it employs in its Seattle offices.

These are people like Will Hyde, a cannabis “sommelier” who’s been involved in almost every aspect of the industry — and been on both ends of a joint — since before it was legalized in Washington state six years ago.

“I got my start in the cannabis industry like most people as a consumer, long before it was even an established industry,” says Hyde, a Senior Subject Matter Expert at Leafly. “And since that time I’ve just followed my passions which has led me to Leafly.”

In between sparking up and settling down at his current job, Hyde says he’s grown pot at personal and medicinal supply levels, worked with small-scale THC extractors and in large commercial laboratories.

He’s also been a pot dispensary “budtender” — a job which like its bartender equivalent requires an expertise in the intoxicating products practitioners serve to their customers across the counter.

“I’ve sort of run the gamut of the cannabis supply chain and that really just started from my own personal connection with cannabis and wanting to educate myself further,” he says.

Like a sommelier will do for wine, Hyde says he can “recommend cannabis strains and products and consumption methods and giving people sort of a lay of the land on how they can incorporate cannabis into their lifestyle.”

Hyde says his expertise allows him to evaluate important traits like the smells, colours and shapes that would signal the quality of different marijuana strains.

“You’re looking at everything from the colours that it’s showing, to the structure of the bud, to the density of the bud, to the amount of resin that’s available to the naked eye ... and sort of how frosty it looks,” he says.

“And then when you dive a little deeper and obviously you open the jar up ... the first thing that’s going to hit you is the smell, the aroma of the cannabis and we look for a number of different things.”

Cannabis smells — which are harbingers of taste — have a musical element, Hyde says, with some strains producing single note aromas while others have “bitonal” olfactory effects.

“A good example of that would be a strain like strawberry-banana ... (which has) those competing flavours of strawberry and banana sort of battling together to create one complex mix of flavour,” he says.

“And then we see another level of that which is anything that is deeply complex, meaning it’s showing more than two or three flavours ... and just like musicians playing together one can sort of take the lead at times depending on what those aromas are and whether you’re smoking them (or) vaporizing them.”

Hyde says the THC and CBD profiles of cannabis products on offer in Canada will be part of Leafly’s trip adviser format and can generally give users a hint of what to expect of their highs.

That being said, Hyde stresses the feelings any strain of pot will produce can change from person to person based on their metabolism, body chemistry and prior cannabis experience.

“We can sort of paint a picture of what the road you’re about to walk down might look like,” he says. “But we can’t tell you the exact address of the house you’re going to pass.”

Lift, which runs North America’s largest cannabis expo, has partnered with MADD Canada to create a retail training program to educate store employees, Olaru says.

Will Hyde, a Senior Subject Matter Expert at Leafly, is helping to build a trip adviser website for the cannabis resource company. Hyde has been involved in almost every aspect of the industry since before cannabis was legalized in Washington state six years ago.

Lasting two to five days, the online program will educate point-of-sales workers about product specifications and on spotting customers who should not be purchasing pot because of age or intoxication.

The LCBO, which is slated to run Ontario’s cannabis retail operations, is saying little about any plans it has for its stores at this time.

But Beverley Ware, a spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Liquor Corp., says her agency has adopted the program, which will help some 200 employees learn the cannabis ropes beginning in August.

“The important aspect for us is that our employees have a very good understanding of the products,” says Ware, whose agency will open 12 cannabis outlets Oct. 17, most of them within existing liquor stores. “We want them to be able to educate and inform customers so that they can make the right choice of the right product for them for the experience they’re looking for.”