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Before anything else: the word does not have a fixed meaning, and that is the single most useful thing to know before you spend money on it.

Four different products are sold as caviar

This is not pedantry. Two shops can both list caviar at wildly different prices and both be describing their product accurately, because they mean different things.

What a menu might mean by “caviar”
Flower coated in concentrate. A nug dipped or brushed in distillate or hash oil, then dried. No kief. This is the original and narrowest use.
Flower coated in concentrate and rolled in kief. Add the outer dusting and most people would call the result moon rocks. Plenty of shops still call it caviar.
A sugared concentrate, no flower at all. A sauce or sugar-textured extract named for its beaded look. Completely different product, priced per gram like a concentrate.
A strain literally named Caviar. An indica-dominant hybrid. Nothing coated, nothing added, just a flower whose name collides with the category.

The overlap between the first two is where the argument lives. Some sources say caviar never gets the kief step and that all moon rocks are caviar but not all caviar is moon rock. Others define caviar as the full three-layer build and use the two words interchangeably. Both usages are in circulation right now on major cannabis publications, so there is no authority to appeal to.

The practical consequence: ask what is in it rather than what it is called. A one-line question about the coating and whether it is kief-rolled tells you more than any product name will.

The four decisions a producer makes

Caviar is assembled, not grown. Someone made four choices, and each one is visible in the finished nug if you know what to look at. This is what actually separates a good jar from an expensive disappointment.

1. What flower went in the middle

The core sets the ceiling. Coating cannot rescue poor flower, it only hides it, and hiding it is exactly why cheap caviar exists. Trim and shake get used here far more often than anyone advertises.

How to tellLook for nug structure under the kief. You should be able to see that it was a whole bud. If it reads as a compressed lump with no bud shape, it was built from shake.

2. What the coating was

The biggest single variable and the one that changes the experience most. Distillate is cheap, nearly odourless and very high in THC, so it lifts the number on the label and flattens the flavour. Live resin or rosin costs the producer far more, carries the terpenes, and tastes like the plant it came from.

How to tellSmell it. Distillate-coated caviar smells faintly of the flower underneath and not much else. Live resin coating is loud before you light it. Price usually follows, and a very cheap gram is almost always distillate.

3. How much kief and where it came from

Dry-sift kief from good material is pale gold and dusty. Darker, greener kief means more plant matter came through the screen with it, which burns harsher and tastes of vegetation.

How to tellColour. Pale blond to light gold is what you want. Green-tinged means low-grade sift.

4. Whether it was properly dried after coating

The step producers skip when they are in a hurry, and it is the one that ruins the product. A nug coated in oil needs time to set. Rushed caviar stays damp, refuses to hold a light, and tastes wet.

How to tellIt should be sticky but firm. If it smears on your fingers or leaves them wet rather than tacky, it went out too early.

What it should cost, and why the range is so wide

US dispensary menus commonly list caviar around $50 to $60 a gram, which puts an ounce near $1,400. Canadian grey-market pricing sits far below that. Ours is $220 for 28g.

That spread is not a quality ranking, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. Most of it is structural: licensed US retail carries excise tax, testing costs, packaging compliance and dispensary margin that an ounce bought here simply does not. The rest is the four decisions above, particularly the coating, since a distillate coat costs a fraction of a live resin coat.

What the range should tell you is that price alone identifies nothing in this category. A cheap gram might be distillate on shake. An expensive gram might also be distillate on shake, sold in a nicer jar. The questions in the section above are what separate them.

Handling it without throwing money away

Caviar punishes the habits that work fine for flower, and the losses are not small.

Do not put it in a grinder. The coating smears across the teeth and the kief comes off on the walls. You will leave a meaningful share of what you paid for inside the grinder, and it will not come out. Break it with your fingers, or cut it with scissors if it is too sticky to pull apart.

Beyond that, three things matter. Use glass, not paper. The oil content makes it burn unevenly in a joint and it will run down one side. If you want it in a joint, break it small and lay it alongside regular flower rather than rolling it on its own.

Light the edge, gently. Concentrate flares if you hit it with a full flame and you lose it to the air before it reaches you. A corner of the bowl, low heat, is the whole technique.

Pack less than feels right. This is the advice people ignore and then regret. You have added concentrate and kief to a bud, so a normal-looking bowl is not a normal bowl. Layering a small amount on top of regular flower gets you the effect, makes the jar last, and keeps a first experience from being unpleasant.

Expect it to gum up a piece faster than flower does. That is the coating behaving exactly as intended, not a sign of anything wrong.

Deciding whether it is for you

Caviar makes sense if you want a slow, strong, heavy bowl and you will treat it as something you add to a session rather than the whole session. It makes very little sense if your routine is grinding a bud into a joint, because the format fights you at every step and you lose the premium you paid before it is lit.

If you have not had it before, a single gram of moon rocks answers the question cheaply. If you already know you like it, the caviar ounces are where the per-gram price actually lands, and the rest of the concentrates range covers the components that go into building it.