SUNY Niagara is already a local leader in cannabis education and the college will take it one step further next year.
The community college will offer a new culinary cannabis skills certificate program starting next fall, a co-curricular program between the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute and the school’s horticulture program. The school’s board of directors approved the new program at its monthly meeting this week.
“This is a new industry in New York, and new industries need good education,” said Nathan Koscielski, assistant professor of hospitality and culinary arts at the culinary institute that teaches the culinary cannabis courses. “Because we are a state school, we can provide the right education.”
The certificate course requires 30 credits and lasts one year. In addition to the culinary institute’s courses on how to process cannabis in the kitchen, students will also take horticulture classes on growing, drying and curing it.
Koscielski is an expert on the use of cannabis in everyday nutrition. He has taught courses on culinary cannabis and edibles, the first of its kind for a SUNY school, before cannabis became fully legal in 2021. He even gave presentations about it at the American Culinary Federation’s National Culinary Federation. Convention in Phoenix last July.
The interest in culinary cannabis arose when Koscielski read feedback forms from graduating students and asked what the university could have done better. Some of them talked about how they moved to California, where cannabis was completely legal. They felt abandoned because they didn’t know how to use it properly.
It led to an epiphany, Koscielski: there needed to be a class to better educate students who find themselves in that situation.
“It’s important to stay ahead,” Koscielski said. “I want SUNY Niagara to be the best university possible. The way to do that is to be inventive, create new programs and not stick to the status quo.”
What started as the first lecture course on culinary cannabis became so popular that an additional laboratory class was created, also the first for SUNY. The lecture class has an average of 25 students per semester and the lab class has an average of 12 to 14.
While most people think of the psychoactive effects of using cannabis, Koscielski teaches how to incorporate compounds like CBD, CBG and CBN into food from a medicinal perspective. These compounds are best added to foods with high amounts of sugar, fat or alcohol.
The many different cannabis strains each have their own smell and taste, which is why he also learns how to best match different strains with different foods
SUNY Niagara also offers horticulture classes as part of its workforce development and has hosted the SUNY Cannabis Conference for the past two years, which it will do again this coming January. With this certificate program set to launch next year, Koscielski’s next goal is to make it a full two-year associate degree program.
“It’s something that puts SUNY Niagara on the map,” Koscielski said. “Not many schools can say that about one of their programs.”
