As regulations surrounding cannabis have increased so have consumer demands for transparency, accountability, and product quality. The state-based cannabis tracking requirements like seed-to-sale tracking do more than allow a cannabis business to comply, they create the blueprint for quality standards, transparency, trust, and ultimately operational efficiency. In a wholesale distribution model like Passion Farms, seed-to-sale tracking can help ensure compliance, while also carrying a business through the competitive and evolving cannabis landscape for sustainable growth opportunities.
Understanding the Essentials of Seed-to-Sale Cannabis
What Is Seed-to-Sale Cannabis Tracking?
Seed-to-sale tracking involves the entire journey of the cannabis product from seed in the ground to the final sale to the customer. This tracking system keeps logs of each step of the journey to make sure that the record is secure, auditable, & transparent. The critical points of tracking in this lifecycle includes:
- Cultivation: tracking plant growth stages with identifiers
- Harvesting and Processing: tracking handling and drying
- Testing and packaging: tracking lab results and packaging
- Distribution and sales: tracking inventory movement and sales
Tracking the life cycle of a product allows farms and distributors to have full visibility to the product through the life of the sale for regulatory compliance and they can avoid issues with state regulations.
Why Seed-to-Sale Systems Are Important
Regulatory Compliance and Accountability
The best part about seed-to-sale systems is that they make abiding by the cannabis regulations so much easier. By recording all of the detailed data, the companies are able to prove that they are behaving according to local laws and avoid legal trouble. These systems help support:
- Accurate tracking of plants and batches
- Tracking inventory in real time
- Sales reports for sales tax and auditÂ
- Facilitating recalls or state inspections quickly
- Without planting and tracking infrastructure, your business can be fined, lost, or shut down.
Product Quality, Consumer Protection
In the cannabis farming industry, quality control is a big deal. Data management across the stages of cannabis cultivation ensures that only tested or approved products go to market. This means you would be able to:
- Make a more accurate guess about where contamination came from if there is a concern about quality.Â
- Know if you are producing a product with a consistent potency and quality.
- Prove to consumers that your product is authentic.
- Improve the conditions for enhancing productivity
Passion Farms addresses these concerns to provide safe and reliable cannabis across its product lines.
Efficiency of Operations and Cost Control
The clarity of seed-to-sale systems creates efficiencies, by limiting user input, removing manual errors, and creating greater clarity when reporting. For cannabis distributors, this means:
- More intelligent re-stocking/re-ordering processes
- Improved and more accurate forecasting from sales data
- Automated compliance reports in real-time
- Cost reductions from decreased waste and lost time
Consumer Trust in the Marketplace
Today’s cannabis consumers want to trust that they are buying a safe/marketed to expectation product with transparency. Companies who have a seed-to-sale tracking system can create trust and ultimately build consumer credibility, especially when the tracking information is bundled with the product description pages/bookings. Some benefits of block chain inventories are as follows:
- Create more confidence in the product’s quality and testing
- Duration over time can build greater brand credibility/reputation based on quality
- Integrity/differentiation of cannabis business versus non-compliant business
Passion Farms can build fidelity/loyalty through traceability for its wholesale/retail partners’ products.
Creating Strategy to Manage Implementation Complexity
The overall adoption of the seed-to-sale system can increase complexity, but hopefully, by creating a strategy before implementation, the transition to a sophisticated/efficient organization can be simplified, if proper steps are followed to ensure success:
- Consider the staggered roll out of the system to ensure minimal disruption in service delivery
- Complete the training of staff members who will use the system and who may not have used a system like this before.
- Keep sensitive data safe by implementing encryption and compliance procedures.Â
These steps will also help to continue the daily operational processes with fewer interruptions.
Ready to Promote the Success of Your Cannabis Operation?
An evident seed-to-sale cannabis system is key to maintaining compliance, consistency, and credibility. Whether you are looking at product category pages, your product detail page or are ready to book online, Passion Farms is transparent through all levels of the process.
Have questions about cannabis farming or traceability solutions?
Contact us today and we can help you grow smarter and stay compliant.
