Cherry Fade is Connected Cannabis Co.'s hybrid from Red Pop x Apples and Bananas #20. Sun-ripened cherry sits over raw earth, and the arc runs serene relaxation first, brighter energy on the back half. Fruit-forward without being weightless — sweet red fruit riding on a heavier dessert-genetics base.
Where It Comes From
Connected sells Cherry Fade as a house catalog item rather than a limited drop, and runs it across indoor flower and live resin. The brand identifies it by the numbered selection: Apples & Bananas #20.
The number is the point. A hunted phenotype can finish nothing like its siblings out of the same pack, which is why brands that care publish the digit instead of the strain name alone. Leave it off and you have handed someone a cross while hiding the actual plant.
Connected breeds, grows and sells through its own dispensaries, and most of its catalog gets built exactly this way: take two strong cuts, run the population out, keep the one plant that earns it, then put the number on the jar so the next person knows which one they are getting.
The Cross
Connected takes brand and release credit and classifies Cherry Fade as a hybrid. The parents come from two different houses, which is less common than it sounds in a market where most brands cross inside their own library.
Red Pop is an Exotic Genetix cultivar, a strawberry-candy line. Apples & Bananas is a Compound Genetics release — Christopher Lynch, the San Jose breeder whose earlier project Tiger Trees became Compound — and it landed in 2019 as one of the strains that put that label on the map.
So Cherry Fade sits between candy fruit on one side and the layered fruit, earth and spice of Apples & Bananas on the other. Connected lists beta-myrcene, alpha-pinene and beta-caryophyllene as the prominent terpenes here, which is the house profile rather than a per-jar guarantee — ranking moves batch to batch and always will.
Branded flower is presented dense, green-and-purple, orange-pistilled and heavily frosted. Buy on package date where you can. The bright cherry edge fades before the earth underneath it does, so a tired jar reads flatter and darker than a fresh one.
What It Left Behind
No trophy sits behind this one. Its footprint is distribution: Connected pushes it through California and out-of-state partner menus in flower, live resin disposables and all-in-one carts, which is how modern brands build a cultivar's name without ever entering a contest circuit.
That reach is also why you can find Cherry Fade in three formats and get three different versions of it. Flower and extract come off the same genetics but not the same process, and the extract will always push harder on the fruit.
The High Rise Take
Cherry Fade is Connected's Red Pop x Apples & Bananas #20 — ripe cherry over earth and pepper, with a body-first, head-later arc. Follow Apples and Bananas back to hear where the layered fruit comes from.