Ball Family Farms Bets a License on Hoodbaby’s Seed

Zak Alkatib’s Invader Zim reached California shelves in June 2025 as the first Rare Breeds strain from Ball Family Farms. The test run had sold out in 24 hours. Alkatib, known as Hoodbaby, hunted the cut from a home grow after an accidental self-pollination left him with one keeper seed.

Chris Ball, founder and CEO, sold Rare Breeds as a way to put self-taught breeders on licensed benches. The jar held. A second public graduate of the program has not appeared by name.

One Joint Moved a Home Grow Onto a License

Ball did not find Alkatib on a job board. Oscar Figueroa, cultivation facility manager at Ball Family Farms, already knew the kid from Project Cannabis, where Figueroa had run the rooms and pulled Alkatib off a trim line. They smoked together at a connected event, and Ball wanted the person everyone else in the room already knew.

Alkatib said he got to be himself in that session, and that Ball liked exactly who he was. Figueroa, an aircraft mechanic by training, is still the person Alkatib calls when a room problem needs a simpler map. Alkatib calls him a life mentor. Rare Breeds was built around that handshake, then announced as a scout-and-launch desk for home growers and licensed workers who already had cuts and no storefront.

This is about giving real growers a lane. For too long, the people who built this culture have been left out of the legal game. Rare Breeds is how we change that, by putting legacy talent front and center and creating real opportunities from the ground up.

Chris Ball, founder and CEO, April 16, 2025 announcement

Ball’s giving real growers a lane line did the political work. The commercial work was simpler: take a loud home-grow jar, run it in a licensed facility, and see if the terps survived the scale-up.

Three Mature Seeds, Then a Single Keeper

Invader Zim did not come from a branded breeding catalog with a waiting list. Alkatib has said the genetics started as Seed Junkie gear that self-pollinated. A friend grew the seed out. Alkatib hunted the pack. Only three seeds were fully mature, and only one popped. That plant became the cut.

He found the seed in 2022 and spent the next three years learning how it ate, how it stretched, and which medium kept the Z terp from getting buried. The name is a joke about that fight: the Z aroma gets invaded by candy, citrus, and cookie gas, and the mix is the point. He has compared watching the plant in a real facility to watching a kid hit new stages, and said he could not have pictured the licensed version two or three years earlier.

THE CUT’S PATH INTO A LICENSE

1. 2018: Ball Family Farms takes a Los Angeles social equity license and starts selling in-house flower.
2. 2022: Alkatib finds the Invader Zim seed and begins hunting keepers from the pack.
3. December 2024: Oakland Oranges, an in-house selection Alkatib made at the farm, takes top prize at The Connect’s Las Vegas Candy Battle.
4. April 16, 2025: Ball Family Farms announces Rare Breeds with Alkatib as the first participant and Invader Zim as the first release.
5. May 30, 2025: Alkatib posts a June list that puts Invader Zim beside four other Hoodbaby cuts.
6. June 2025: The official Invader Zim drop hits California retail after the test run sold out in 24 hours.
7. August 2025: A living-soil batch is reviewed in print, and the farm had said contest rules for the next Rare Breeder would land that month.
8. April 7, 2026: Invader Zim lands at No. 21 on a 2025 nugshot ranking still circulating the cut.

The Candy Battle trophy matters because it is not Invader Zim. Ball has said Rare Breeds also handed him his first trophy and a pile of genetics, which is another way of saying the hire paid the farm before the debut jar even landed.

How a Chicago Cook Landed in a Legal Veg Room

Alkatib’s path is not a branding myth so much as a job ladder that kept moving him closer to rooms. He cooked for five years and opened a restaurant in Chicago, then decided 18-hour kitchen shifts were something he could stand, not something he loved. Cannabis was the thing he already loved, so he took a trim job at Project Cannabis and kept chef work on the side until the farm moved him into cultivation two weeks later.

Figueroa was in that building. Alkatib wanted the mechanical side of a room, the part a home grower does not get from a tent, and Figueroa taught it. The home hunts continued anyway. He has described the mindset as losing now to win later, popping runs that might give him nothing, then handing jars to people he calls industry giants until they started asking what was in them.

What he wanted from Invader Zim was a different touch on Zkittlez. He has said Zkittlez had been on shelves for more than a decade with a taste people liked and an effect some people found light, while Runtz was still a top seller and Animal Cookies was the Bay Area smoke he grew up on. The cross was supposed to keep the candy and add weight. He says the finished flower gets people high for two to three hours and tastes clean from the first pull to the last.

His own X bio now lists him as veg manager and head of genetics at Ball Family Farms, and as CEO of Hoodbaby Cult. That is the Rare Breeds bet in a job title. The underground hunter did not only get a guest drop. He got the veg bench.

The Farm That Could Carry the Cut

Ball Family Farms is a Los Angeles indoor grow that took its license in 2018 through the city’s social equity track, a lane written to open commercial cannabis to people hurt by older drug enforcement. Ball has said he applied even though he did not expect to get in, then built a family-run company with his brother Charles as chief financial officer. The current farm site still describes the operation as Black-owned, vertically integrated, and built without outside investors.

The Los Angeles social equity cannabis ordinance was supposed to turn that history into licenses. Plenty of applicants never got rooms that actually ship. Ball did, which is why a home-grow cut could become a mylar bag with a barcode. Rare Breeds is the farm using that license as a door for people who still cannot get one.

Launch copy said the program would pick standout strain creators, from garage grows or legal facilities, and back them with cultivation, branding, and retail help. A later version of the pitch said California would get one selected creator a year, with facility access, a three-medium grow system, packaging help, and shelf work. Sign-ups were pointed at the farm’s site, with official contest details promised in August 2025.

That is a talent desk, not a one-off collab. It also needs new names on a cadence to look like a desk. The farm’s homepage still mentions Rare Breeds as the way it mentors underground growers. The public record still circles back to Alkatib.

Candy Gas That Settled Into Living Soil

The farm’s own strain page lists Invader Zim as an indica-dominant hybrid built on Runtz x Zkittles x Animal Cookies S1, with sweet, citrus, and gas on the nose and a relaxing, euphoric, balanced effect. The copy calls it the first release from Hoodbaby’s stash under the Ball Family Farms umbrella. Retail menus in California were still carrying that same lineage language into 2026, including 4-gram bags.

Getting there was ugly. Cocoa and rockwool both made decent flower, Alkatib has said, but living soil is what finally locked the expression. Structure and aroma swung with the medium, and early scale-up batches were inconsistent until soil became the permanent home. The first living-soil drop tested at 3.5% terpenes. The cultivar has tested as high as 32% THC. A reviewed batch sat at 20.4% THC and still hit hard, which is a useful reminder that the loudest number on a label is not always the batch you want.

INVADER ZIM ON PAPER

Zkittlez itself is a pain to grow, which is why the market is flooded with Z crosses that try to keep the flavor on a plant that does not sulk. Asked if Invader Zim is as fussy as the original, Alkatib said no, that this one is more vigorous, less finicky, and will still produce if you throw a wrench at it. Ball has called it a pleasant cultivar to run, which from a licensed operator is the difference between a guest-star cut and a house plant.

It’s like watching your kid grow. You see it develop in different stages. Just to see what this seed, my baby, has turned into. It blows my mind. I couldn’t have imagined this two, three years ago, that this would be here at all.

Zak Alkatib, Hoodbaby, on taking Invader Zim into Ball Family Farms rooms

He has also said he is not done with the line. He is sitting on a vault of elite cuts to hunt Invader Zim pairings inside the same program, which is the opposite of a closed, never-again drop.

June Carried More Than One Jar

The launch language around Invader Zim sounded like a single relic. Alkatib’s own June preview did not. On May 30, 2025, weeks before the official shelf date, he posted that June was about to be flooded with Hoodbaby drops and named five cuts, with more flavors pending. That list is the clearest record of what Rare Breeds looked like in practice: not one sacred jar, a month of his palate running through the farm’s rooms.

HOODBABY CUTS NAMED FOR JUNE 2025

• Pink Pineapples: Listed first on Alkatib’s June flood post, before the debut strain.
• Gastopia: A second named flavor in the same licensed window.
• Invader Zim: The Rare Breeds debut and the cut the press release sold.
• Now and Laters: A fourth Hoodbaby name in the same month.
• Oakland Oranges: The Candy Battle winner, already a farm selection, not a street-only rumor.

The one-shot story was always a bad fit for a grower who had just been handed veg. If you hire the hunter as head of genetics, you do not retire the hunt after one mylar run. You run the vault.

June bout to be flooded with Hoodbaby drops

Pink Pineapples
Gastopia
Invader Zim
Now & Laters
Oakland Oranges

Pending a few more flavors

— baby goat 🐐 (@L3gendaryZak) May 30, 2025

People who actually bought the flower kept treating it as a living SKU, not a museum piece. Into 2026, smokers were still matching other Zim-named jars against the Ball Family Farms cut and calling the original gassy. That is a boring, useful verdict. The bet was whether a tent keeper could taste like itself after a licensed dry, cure, and bag. It could.

Rare Breeds Still Has One Public Name

The product half of Ball’s wager is easy to score. Invader Zim shipped. It sold through a test in a day. It took living soil, then held a terp number that craft buyers chase. In April 2026 it was still pretty enough to sit at No. 21 on a 2025 nugshot list, which is not a press-release echo so much as a picture of the buds a year after the hype calendar had moved on.

🔥 Top 100 Nugshots of 2025 🔥

#21 — Invader Zim

📸 Ball Family Farms x Hoodbaby pic.twitter.com/7LJGNxevQX

— High Times (@HIGH_TIMES_Mag) April 7, 2026

The pipeline half is thinner. Rare Breeds was pitched as an annual pick, a contest, a way to repeat the Hoodbaby story with new California breeders. August 2025 was supposed to bring the rules. Through the next year the farm kept using the Rare Breeds name, and the public-facing graduate list stayed at one. That does not prove the desk is dead. It does mean the only street-to-shelf story the program has fully told is still Alkatib’s.

Ball has compared the arrangement to a machine that mints solo artists, people who come from the house and still get their own shine. Alkatib got the shine, the veg job, and a cut that did not vanish after June. The next Rare Breed, if there is one on a shelf, has not been introduced the way Invader Zim was.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a commercial cannabis brand, a licensed grow, and a retail strain. It is informational only and is not medical, legal, or purchasing advice. Cannabis rules, tests, and effects vary by place and by batch, so readers should talk with a licensed clinician, read the current label, and confirm local law before using any cannabis product. Lab figures, job titles, and program details reflect company statements and published notes for the dates named above and may change.