Tracking cannabis around your facility from seed to sale can be hard. And while seed-to-sale software certainly makes this job easier, the job would be much harder if it wasn’t for hardware integrations.
We strongly recommend mapping out a seed-to-sale implementation floor plan – it only takes about one hour to complete and can save thousands of dollars in renovation costs or application amendment wait times. From there, you can more easily identify what hardware you need – and where you need to put it in your facility – to maximize efficiency and save costs.
Something we have found to always be true is that nobody likes doing renovations on a brand new facility, and no one likes waiting for a cannabis license any longer than they have to.
Although a floor plan is not a legal requirement, it’s a smart business decision that will reduce a lot of the stress that naturally comes with starting a cannabis production facility.
Creating a floor plan is a crucial step to take when preparing for the implementation of your seed-to-sale solution. The goals of this floor plan are to map out which hardware pieces will go into which rooms, to minimize unnecessary time spent sharing hardware between rooms, and to estimate how much hardware you will need based on your facility size. It’s best to do your floor plan before you complete the construction of a new facility so that you can plan for environmental and technical requirements, including the provision of ethernet ports, electrical outlets, and space.
Under Health Canada regulations, you must have designated rooms in your facility for specific cannabis production activities. Each of these rooms requires its own hardware, or access to hardware from a nearby location.
While hardware can be shared between rooms to minimize spending, it could easily cost you more in the long term if employees are having to walk far distances throughout the day just to retrieve a scanner or pick up a label from the printer. You also don’t want to store expensive hardware in rooms where temperature and humidity can fluctuate often, such as the grow room and dry room. Doing so will result in hardware malfunctions or inaccuracies, and will likely need to be replaced well before its shelf-life is over.
The amount of hardware you will require for seed-to-sale implementation almost entirely depends on your facility size and expected production output. A micro-cultivator can have everything in one room, while a standard licence holder will need hardware present in several rooms.
The following is our hardware estimation for an average size standard licence holder, based on what we have seen with our own customers after more than 100 seed-to-sale implementations.
Location: Mother room.
Description: Prints plant loop labels to be wrapped around individual plants.
Location(s): Harvest room, Shipping/Receiving area.
Description: Prints user tags, inventory tags, batch tags, room and location tags and plant stickers.
Location: Shipping/Receiving area.
Description: Prints case labels and shipping labels for wholesale orders.
Location(s): Mother room and Packaging room.
Description: Scanners make it easy to record and report on a plant’s movement throughout a facility by scanning barcodes that will update that plant’s data in your seed-to-sale software application. It can also be used to scan bottles, rooms, user IDs, scales, and customer orders.
Location(s): Harvest room and Packaging room.
Description: A precision scale must be able to accurately weigh products to .01 of a gram. Typically, the more volume a scale can measure at a single time, the more expensive the scale will be.
Location: Destruction room.
Description: Used to weigh material that will be destroyed at least once per month.
Once you have a good understanding of the application of printers, scales and scanners, it’s time to map out how many you will need.
It’s important to determine how much you’re willing to spend on hardware before jumping into your floor plan. This will help you strategically place certain hardware pieces in rooms where it can be quickly accessed if your budget does not allow for unlimited hardware. Next, list out which hardware pieces you think will work best for your facility and budget.
Using a file editing tool, such as a PDF editor, take your facility’s floor plan, and make annotations on where each piece of hardware will be stationed. If your facility is still under construction, this is a crucial time to make sure your rooms will have enough ethernet ports and electrical outlets.
Now that you can visualize where your hardware will be stationed, run through your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) or alternative operational guidelines for your cultivation, processing and packaging processes. If you have the option, physically move between rooms and perform seed-to-sale activities like tagging individual plants, creating batches, and packaging a mock customer order.
After completing the walk-through, evaluate how much time could be saved if you didn’t have to walk to and from rooms just to use a piece of hardware. After that, you can use a simple cost/benefit analysis, based on hardware and labour costs, to determine if adding more hardware is worth the investment from long-term savings. It’s also possible that you won’t need as much hardware as you initially thought. We’ve seen both scenarios happen while working with our clients.
If you have not yet submitted an application, it’s also possible to switch rooms around to make for a more seamless workflow between rooms. However, if you have already submitted your application, making application amendments for your rooms may put you to the back of the licensing queue.
The best time to do a seed-to-sale implementation floor plan is around halfway through your facility’s construction phase. This timing allows you to have a clear blueprint for where rooms will be located, but also allows enough time to make changes to rooms if need be (assuming you have not submitted your Health Canada application yet).
It’s also important to note that you should not move scales around. Each time you move a scale, you will need to re-calibrate it, which can take up to thirty minutes for each calibration.
Even if you have already planned for everything we mentioned above, a floor plan will still improve your seed-to-sale software implementation process. Your staff will have a document outlining where each hardware piece should go and the role each piece plays in tracking and reporting, leading to greater institutional knowledge efficiency.
Like any major software purchase, evaluating seed-to-sale software vendors for a cannabis facility can be complicated. While you need a tool that solves your unique problems, you’re also going to be choosing which company you trust the most with critical business data. Balancing these two tasks is where it can turn from complicated to confusing, as no seed-to-sale provider is perfect for every cannabis facility. Some providers may claim to have flashy features and integrations, but lack the proven experience of operating in a highly regulated market. Other vendors may check all the boxes, but it can be difficult to tell if you’re overpaying for features you may not need.
To help you get started, we compiled the 12 questions to ask seed-to-sale vendors when considering a purchase. The answers to these questions will help uncover more about each vendor than their website, marketing materials, and demos could ever show.
Not only will many different employees use seed-to-sale software, you’ll definitely have some power users in the tool on a daily basis. With that in mind, you will want the platform you select to be easy to learn and use. This will result in less training time required, less time dealing with support calls and tickets, and overall more productive and happy employees.
Some providers’ software is only designed for specific states or country regulations. It’s important to make sure that the provider is not only compliant in your current operating territory, but also in the territories in which you want to expand. This will save thousands of dollars in switching costs later on if your provider prevents you from entering new markets.
All seed-to-sale providers facilitate the tracking of a plant’s movement within a cannabis facility, but not all automatically generate compliance reports. This leaves too much room for human error, which can ultimately result in a license suspension or termination. Choose a provider that automatically generates compliance reports based on your tracking data and you will significantly reduce the likelihood of human error affecting your reports.
Imagine signing a software contract for a great price, only to find out it can’t integrate with your printers, scales or scanners. It’s basically a glorified version of excel at that point, as you would have to push laptops around your facility on a cart, while manually inputting data. If you want to avoid this, make sure the vendor can integrate with the proper tracking hardware.
To learn more about hardware integrations, read How to Optimize Seed-to-Sale Implementation for Your Cannabis Facility [link to floorplan blog]
When regulations change, and new revenue opportunities are created, will your seed-to-sale provider be ready? You want your business to grow, and your provider should too. That’s why it’s important to ask if your provider updates their software according to regulatory changes and can scale with you as you grow.
No matter which vendor you select, your team will have questions, encounter challenges, and need some help along the way to get the most out of the seed-to-sale platform. Waiting for tickets to be solved, or waiting for the support team to call you back can greatly slow down your operation. This is why a strong customer support team is one of the most important factors to consider when evaluating providers. To find vendors support and customer service reputations, you can look at software review sites, ask vendors during demos what their support offerings are, or ask peers within the cannabis industry what their experience has been like.
Beyond typical data security, any company dealing with medical cannabis patient information must take the furthest possible security measures. Ignoring data security could result in massive losses in trust from competitors or legal action from customers and government bodies. If there has been a data-breach in the past, look into how the company handled it. Did they act fast and compensate customers, or were they left to deal with the damages on their own? This is why you will want to research each vendor’s security history, and specifically ask how they will protect your data.
If you plan on selling to medical cannabis patients (in Canada specifically, as other countries have different systems), you will need an eCommerce website that is integrated with your patient database. This is to ensure patients don’t order above their monthly prescriptions and to stay on top of reporting requirements. There are additional complexities introduced at this stage, such as shipping, fulfilment and payment processing. This means that you have to set up each of these functions individually or use an eCommerce store builder that can integrate with seed-to-sale software. To simplify this integration, certain seed-to-sale providers offer eCommerce features as a part of their offering.
Hardware calibrations, user-permission setup, and training for specific roles are just a few of the activities you need to complete during seed-to-sale implementation. Having a designated account manager visit your facility will make implementation run much more smoothly, and will empower your employees to use the software quickly.
Listening to customers and acting on their insights should always be a top priority for software providers. An easy way to find out if your provider does this is by asking to see version release notes, and software update history. There’s also a major difference in fixing bugs vs. improving the user experience of the software by building new features and simplifying routine tasks. You can uncover this by asking the provider to give examples of major upgrades they have made over the past couple of years. Are they making major improvements and benefiting their customers, or just addressing symptoms of problems with fake fixes?
While there are more and more seed-to-sale vendors entering the market each year, it can be hard to distinguish the difference between them based on websites and demos alone. Sometimes social proof is the best proof. Look at the customer logos and testimonials from each provider to help form your opinions on their reputations. Better yet, ask industry peers what their experience has been like with their seed-to-sale vendor. There is certainly value in knowing that others are succeeding and enjoying their experience with a seed-to-sale vendor you are considering using.
Ample Organics builds technology that helps companies compete in the highly regulated cannabis industry. Our seed-to-sale software has been powering cannabis facilities like Aurora, Aphria, and Organigram for more than five years, and we now service over 100 standard cannabis licence holder sites within Canada.
We’re known for our experienced team of cannabis experts, data security, and white glove customer support. We also work with licence holder applicants by providing support documentation that can be used in your Health Canada application.
If you’re ready to learn more about seed-to-sale software and how we help power cannabis companies just like yours, book a demo in the box below.
The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to leave Canadian cannabis consumers sheltered at home. While some consumers continue to choose retail stores as their go-to source, many have switched to ordering cannabis online.
Ordering cannabis directly to your home is a safer practice during COVID-19 and consumers are enjoying the benefits of eCommerce, such as no waiting in line, no commute to the store, and more product selections available.
At the same time, reopening strategies are being realized province to province, and new sales trends have emerged that continue to reshape cannabis purchasing behaviours. In March, Canadian license holders quickly pivoted their strategies to prioritize operational efficiencies and explore the various new sales channels required to service their customer communities.
The pandemic has also changed the amount of money consumers are spending on cannabis, as the industry experienced a sales boom near the start of lockdowns. Now that the stockpile-effect is wearing off, sales are balancing out, and we’re returning to normalcy — or a new version of it.
The Canadian cannabis industry adapted quickly and new technologies were employed to facilitate digital sales channels, enable direct-to-consumer delivery, and curbside pickup—a wave of change that, like social distancing, may just remain a new long-term normal.
While there is a lot of uncertainty today, one thing can be noted: consumer sentiments may have shifted permanently. License holders and retailers who don’t focus on building an eCommerce platform with the ability to reconcile inventory quickly may fall short on revenue if they’re forced to rely on retail store traffic.
The importance of having a seed-to-sale software solution in place with built-in, easy to configure, user-friendly eCommerce capabilities has never been greater. Today, new data reports, including one issued by the Ontario Cannabis Store, are proving that online sales are soaring, with medical cannabis and edibles sales volumes still on the rise.
To meet the increased demand of eCommerce sales, licence holders may look to acquire a medical sales licence, or focus more on growing their current medical sales program. But how do you do that if your current seed-to-sale software doesn’t facilitate medical sales tracking, an online store, shipping, payments, and everything else that comes with eCommerce, combined with the complexities of Health Canada regulations?
Read our article on the three most common cannabis eCommerce platforms and find the best fit for your business.
Whether you’re waiting for your sales licence, or have just received it, it’s important to know your eCommerce options, how they can integrate with your seed-to-sale software, and the implementation work that will be required.
These tips can help your business become part of the new cannabis retail landscape and avoid getting stuck in the old one.
Below, we cover the three most common options licence holders have when starting an eCommerce store, and medical sales program.
Certain seed-to-sale vendors, like Ample Organics, offer integrated eCommerce platforms with their software packages. The value of an integrated solution is that Health Canada’s required tracking, as well as the eCommerce store, can be managed on the same system. This makes the flow of data easy and accurate when it comes to medical patient information, and tracking sales data.
There are also cost-savings included with seed-to-sale vendors that provide eCommerce platforms. Rather than paying for medical sales functionality from your seed-to-sale vendor, plus all of the eCommerce store and integration costs, our platform comes with a turn-key eCommerce site. The site can be easily custom-branded and automatically feeds data into the Ample Organics platform.
Current eCommerce providers involved in the cannabis industry, such as Shopify, are sometimes used for cannabis eCommerce stores. This option will likely require some custom development work to allow your eCommerce store to “speak” with your seed-to-sale software in order to pass on patient data, such as prescription verification and limits. The eCommerce store will also need to pass sales data to the central tracking location to be used later in compliance reports.
The difficult parts of managing an eCommerce store will be handled by the third-party vendor, but it comes at a cost. Typically the cheapest platforms start at $500/month for hosting, take 2-3% sales commission, and run a high compliance risk considering the platforms are not built to handle the nuances of online cannabis sales.
The least common and least recommended eCommerce option is creating a self-hosted solution. It’s important to note that even if you take this DIY approach, you will almost certainly still need to use third-party tools and services to assist with aspects like building/designing the site, hosting fees, custom development work to integrate your seed-to-sale platform, and payment processing tools. These costs can add up quickly, and the more you try to hack together yourself, the more compliance risk you are exposed to.
Retailers and license holders who succeed throughout the remainder of 2020, won’t be able to attribute their success solely to the creation of beautiful storefronts prime for foot traffic, or relying on front and center brand exposure. Instead, ensure you have eCommerce capabilities with a variety of payment options, a user experience designed to drive conversion, and seamless integration with your inventory management system.
What can you do to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 in your cannabis facilities and retail stores? We’ve compiled some of the processes that have been adopted by Canadian companies managing employee and public safety while supporting an increased sales volume as Canadians stock up on cannabis. We’ve also included resources and key takeaways from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Government of Canada, and the World Health Organization (WHO) that can help keep you and your employees safe.
Infrastructure, an excerpt from Canada.ca:
Government of Canada
Cleaning guidelines
CDC
How to Protect Yourself
Handwashing tips
Coughing and sneezing etiquette
Government of Canada
Risk-informed decision-making guidelines for workplaces and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic
Resources for Canadian Businesses
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Prevention and risks
WHO
Getting Your Workplace Ready for COVID-19
Canadian Cannabis Regulations require that cannabis is tested for microbial and chemical contaminants, ensuring that the cannabis consumers receive is safe for consumption.
As a result of strict standard operating procedures that include the regular use of personal protective equipment, cannabis producers are in a good position to protect their employees. Some companies, including Hexo Corp., are donating N95 masks and personal protective equipment to Canadian healthcare workers, while Organigram “has committed to donate 500L of ethanol from [their] production production facility to be repurposed into hand sanitizer for distribution within [their] local health care network in New Brunswick.” Industry leaders like John Slaughter of High North Laboratories, Daniel Sax of Sensi Properties, and George Smitherman of the Cannabis Council of Canada, are actively reaching out to the government to highlight the potential of cannabis facilities and laboratories to assist with combating the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this time of anxiety and hardship, it is easy to see the strength of our community. We hope that you all stay healthy and stay hopeful.
Have you ever wondered how cannabis travels through the supply chain? “Seed-to-sale tracking” plays an important role in this process, but do you know what it means, or how it works?
For cannabis regulators like Health Canada, supply chain information is crucial to maintaining a safe, compliant, and competitive cannabis industry. This supply chain data is provided to Health Canada by every cannabis licence holder that is operational in the country, thanks to the help of “seed-to-sale” software.
“Seed-to-sale” is a term unique to the cannabis industry and refers to the tracking and reporting activities that cannabis licence holders are required to follow in order to maintain compliance and stay licensed. Among other things, these requirements help to prevent cannabis from moving between the “black” (or “legacy”) market and the legal market.
Seed-to-sale software is also commonly referred to as cannabis track and trace software or simply cannabis software.
In short, seed-to-sale software helps cannabis companies ensure they stay licensed. From a high-level, this is accomplished by tracking the lifecycle of every gram of cannabis produced and/or processed in a facility, to the point where it is sold, either to a vendor or directly to a medical patient.
Most cannabis regulations only allow you to do specific activities in specific rooms, for example, growing, drying, trimming, and packaging. Considering there are typically thousands of different cannabis plants in a single facility growing at different stages, you may be wondering how it’s possible to track each plant’s movement throughout a single cannabis facility. This is why seed-to-sale software integrates with hardware devices that make the job much easier, like mobile scanning guns, scales, and printers. These hardware integrations, in conjunction with barcodes and tags, make it easy to record and update all related data in a licence holder’s seed-to-sale application.
In addition to improving efficiency, seed-to-sale software is designed to help cannabis businesses easily generate compliance reports for regulatory bodies.
Once all the tracking and sales data is passed to the seed-to-sale application, it’s easy to see an overview of:
Even though the primary purpose of seed-to-sale software is to create reports to keep compliance with cannabis regulations, it captures valuable data that business owners can use to make informed decisions.
Cannabis licence holders are the primary audience for seed-to-sale software. This includes standard and micro licence classes for cultivation, processing, medical sales, or a combination of the three. Depending on the software provider, they might only have one version of their software that will cover you from seed to sale, or modular versions of their software that do only what you need them to for your licence type.
For example, some licence holders may only want to grow fresh cannabis and let others handle the processing and selling. For this use case, you do not need to worry about processing, packaging, shipping, or eCommerce, so why would you want to pay for unnecessary software features? This is where modular seed-to-sale software packages can help you get the best business value.
The use of seed-to-sale software is not required by most cannabis regulators, leaving the cannabis licence holder to decide how they would like to satisfy the strict and complicated reporting requirements. So what are the other options available?
Although we haven’t seen this method used for quite some time, it was one of the original ways to capture tracking data before seed-to-sale software existed. Cultivation staff would physically push laptops on metal carts through the grow room as they manually updated a myriad of excel spreadsheets. This manual method was not ideal and is certainly not sustainable now, as many cannabis licence holders continue have scaled their facilities to upwards of one million square feet.
Custom-made seed-to-sale software is something we have only seen implemented at a few licence holder facilities because building them requires an incredibly large upfront investment — typically at least six figures. For most new licence holders, it would be difficult to justify this investment.
The benefits of custom software include:
Given the extremities of both seed-to-sale software alternatives listed above, almost all cannabis licence holders choose to adopt a seed-to-sale software partner from the start.
But not all software is created equally. Going with a less expensive seed-to-sale software provider with a small implementation fee may seem wise at first, but if employees don’t know how to use it or can’t properly use the platform due to glitches or bugs, you will end up spending much more to switch platforms later on.
The other important aspects of strong seed-to-sale software are security and data accuracy. The former is crucial for protecting private medical patient data, while the latter is key to keeping your licence. It’s not enough to simply use seed-to-sale software. It must be used responsibly and accurately, or your reports could risk having inaccurate data and result in a suspended or terminated licence.
Like almost any enterprise business software, seed-to-sale software requires extensive employee training and onboarding time to ensure employees are using it properly and efficiently. While the platforms are not difficult to use, per se, there are many required regulatory steps that introduce complexities that employees need to manage.
There’s a major difference between seed-to-sale software and typical CRM programs or other enterprise technologies. Seed-to-sale software is a fairly new concept, meaning there’s a huge shortage of properly trained cannabis employees that know how to use it effectively. Chances are you will need to train almost all new hires on how to use your seed-to-sale software of choice.
Thankfully, training methodologies from other software can apply to seed to sale. We’ve outlined the most common methods of seed-to-sale training that we have observed over the past few years, and have noted the things to consider with each option.
How it works: Have each new employee follow another employee around for a period of time (from days to weeks) as they both complete their duties. This will allow the new employees to watch regular daily tasks completed and ask questions. Since the new employee will get a general snapshot of what their days will look like, this will allow them a chance to think in more detail about the skills they will need to thrive in a cannabis workspace.
Things to consider: Job shadowing will help new employees form friendships and connections with coworkers, and help to develop the social culture in your company as well.
After the initial job shadowing experience, new employees can re-shadow another employee, or the same one, for a short period to ensure that all the skills they were shown are learned more extensively.
How it works: Hire consultants or instructors to come into your workplace and run training courses for your employees. Try to group the employees by their job function so that instructors can focus their time on the job functions relevant to the employees in the room.
Things to consider: Figuring out who needs to know what. There’s little value in having your finance team sit through training on how to grow and process cannabis plants when all they really need to see are the reporting features. While this type of training may be much shorter than job shadowing, it’s unfortunate that it takes your workforce off the production floor.
How it works: Some colleges and job training institutions have picked up on the career opportunities that the cannabis industry has created and have developed cannabis education courses. These courses often include the use of seed-to-sale software solutions. Ample Organics, for example, has partnered with a number of colleges, universities, and organizations across the country, including KPU, Niagara College, AAPS, and Cannabis at Work, to assist with this, and have provided these schools and students with access to our seed-to-sale platform and training programs.
Things to consider: It’s best to carefully plan your recruiting efforts to align with the graduation times for these programs. Most of the programs range from four months to one year, so if you need to hire a lot of people in a short period , you will want to ensure that it is not at the start of the semester if you want to pursue this option.
How it works: AmpleLearn is a dynamic education platform hosted in an online Learning Management System (LMS) that teaches users how to apply their skills to the Ample Organics seed-to-sale solution. Since the courses are hosted online, employees can complete them at their own pace and time.
The curriculum is based on real-life scenarios and challenges that a cannabis facility employee would need to know how to navigate using seed-to-sale software.
Things to consider: AmpleLearn offers certifications for five learning paths: Cultivation, Client Services, Quality Assurance, Inventory Management, and Administration. Students who are up to the challenge of completing all five certifications can opt to pursue the Ample Champion Teal Certification.
How it works: Using a sandbox environment of your seed-to-sale solution, come up with management-approved tasks and have new hires complete the tasks as if they were working within the facility. Grade your employees on their accuracy and speed. Correct any mistakes and send them back to do it all over again.
Ensure that the employees have a record of the task, such as a digital or printed task sheet. Having employees complete virtual tasks will help to generate sample data for your reporting teams to use for their own training, so that you wind up with a more realistic sandbox environment.
Things to consider: The caveat for this training method is that sandbox environments almost always require an additional fee due to hosting costs, usually between $500 to $1,000 per month.
How it works: Let new employees get to work. If they have questions or make mistakes, you can have more senior employees make corrections on the go.
Things to consider: Be careful to ensure that new employees do not try changing anything that might breach regulatory requirements or CRA reporting. This option would inevitably drive up support costs due to data-correction requirements if mistakes were made.
Some software options are more user-friendly than others, so you want to ensure that all of your employees are properly trained to use it. This way, you’ll stay compliant and can gain operational efficiencies by fully understanding the data that is being collected. Your employees will also be happier and work more confidently if they are properly trained.
Considering the time and financial investment that you will be making with a seed-to-sale software implementation, it can go a long way to spend a little extra money on training resources.
TORONTO, Dec. 5, 2019 /CNW/ – Ample Organics Inc. and the Medicinal Cannabis Authority (“MCA”) in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, together, are proud to announce their partnership to strengthen the medicinal cannabis industry in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines by activating AmpleCentral™ — the world’s first national Cannabis Tracking System built for regulators.
Leveraging its extensive cannabis industry domain expertise at the federally regulated level, Ample Organics will be providing sound industry-wide advice to the MCA as the medicinal cannabis industry emerges in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Together, a two-phase approach will be established to facilitate the rapid rollout of the new medicinal cannabis program. Initially, the Ample Organics seed-to-sale software platform will be deployed to empower the MCA, along with physicians and pharmacists, to register and service medicinal cannabis patients. This software platform is the trusted solution serving the world’s largest cannabis companies and over 70% of Canadian License Holders. Concurrently, Ample Organics will be working closely with the MCA and stakeholders to customize and deploy AmpleCentral™ specifically for St. Vincent and the Grenadines. A first-of-its-kind jurisdictional track-and-trace database, AmpleCentral™ is designed for governments to facilitate sophisticated reporting and to assist regulators with ensuring compliance, verifying product quantity and quality, taxation, and preventing diversion and inversion. This technology connects data points across the national cannabis supply chain, providing regulators with the information necessary to assure public, product, and patient safety.
“We believe that this is a hugely important milestone,” says John Prentice, President and CEO of Ample Organics. “It will be the very first implementation of a true national tracking system within the cannabis industry anywhere in the world, and it has allowed us the opportunity to engage with government agencies across the globe as new markets arise. With the support of the Government of Canada, we are building AmpleCentral™ to empower other federal governments to regulate, monitor, and monetize their cannabis industries effectively. This public-private partnership enables the MCA to leverage our unique and extensive expertise operating compliance systems on a national scale. St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ well-thought-out and comprehensive regulatory framework, should, and will, serve as a model for the CARICOM nations and any other national jurisdiction considering a forward-thinking cannabis program.”
“We are establishing this industry with the mantra that a ‘Medicinal Cannabis Industry begins with Science and Technology,'” says Dr. Jerrol Thompson, CEO of the Medicinal Cannabis Authority. “That is why we are taking this bold lead to invest, and an early stage, in a Central Inventory Management Traceability system that will: (1) eliminate diversion; (2) facilitate real-time supply chain reporting; (3) support our banking solution and compliance regime; (4) and provide a safety net for product recall.”
Over the past few months, as part of a government mandate, the MCA has rolled out an innovative country-wide education program providing theoretical and practical training to indoor and outdoor cultivators, including industry best-practices and Good Agricultural and Collection Practices (GACP). Ample Organics is dedicated to sharing the responsibility to foster an educated and informed cannabis industry, and therefore, will provide AmpleLearn™ as a way to administer education programs to enhance the training and education available.
“One of the reasons we have chosen to work with the Medicinal Cannabis Authority in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is their commitment to ensuring a successful cannabis industry through education,” says Tom Ritchie, VP of Accounts & Education at Ample Organics. “It is vital to us that traditional cultivators have proper educational tools available to them so that they, too, can thrive in a regulated cannabis industry. As the first in the world to develop a certification program for seed-to-sale software operators, we have the know-how to help administer education and training programs by leveraging AmpleLearn™, our online Learning Management System. We are committed to supporting the initiatives that the MCA is launching and look forward to the future.”
About Ample Organics:
Founded in 2014, Ample Organics is adopted by more Canadian Licensed Holders than any other cannabis software solution. A complete ecosystem for cannabis businesses, the technology platform makes compliance easy by tracking individual plants from seed to consumer and reporting every detail of the growth, production, and sales processes. Our team of cannabis industry and technology experts designed the platform to facilitate compliance and transparency, while enhancing overall business efficiency and operational intelligence. The software continues to be the most trusted solution for cannabis producers, manufacturers, distributors, physicians, clinics, laboratories, retailers, and educators.
Visit AmpleOrganics.com.
About the Medicinal Cannabis Authority:
The Medicinal Cannabis Authority was established through the Medicinal Cannabis Industry Act, 2018. It is a body corporate with a mandate to regulate the cultivation, supply, possession, production and use of cannabis for medicinal purposes. This mandate forms part of the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ vision to establish a well-regulated export-oriented medicinal cannabis industry.
Visit MCA.VC.
For further information: please contact Amy Prentice, Director of PR & Communication, E: amy.prentice@ampledev.wpengine.com or P: 647.460.0557
The Canadian cannabis industry experienced tremendous growth in 2019. Once stigmatized, the industry quickly became a part of one of the biggest economic booms Canada has seen in years. Multinational corporations like Constellation Brands and Altria Group taking major investment stakes in cannabis companies shifted public perception of the industry from a hype-driven frenzy into something that’s here to stay and only getting started.
But even with the major strides the industry has made in the past year, many elements of operating a cannabis business remain more difficult than they should be. One of the most notable areas is cannabis payments, which has limited innovation despite the industry’s overall growth.
With the exception of Bank of Montreal (BMO) and a handful of credit unions, the major Canadian banks have decided to watch the cannabis industry from the sidelines and not get involved, even a year after legalization. This makes things like credit cards, investment accounts, and lines of credit — services nearly any business in Canada can access —nearly impossible for large cannabis producers to get.
It’s unclear exactly what has caused the financial institution’s hesitation to join the industry, but we have a few ideas.
One is that cannabis is still a Schedule 1 drug in the United States (illegal at the Federal level), where the major Canadian banks do a lot of business. Even though medical cannabis is legalized throughout more than half of the country, it’s still a sensitive topic between the federal and state governments. As a result, conservative banks may see cannabis as too risky right now despite the potential upside.
Another reason is that there is still a stigma around cannabis, even in Canada, that the banks don’t want to associate with just yet.
It could also simply be that the Canadian banks don’t believe in the long term viability of the individual cannabis Licensed Producers (LP’s), or “licence holders”. It’s hard for anyone to believe that the industry won’t grow as a whole, but banks don’t take on an entire industry as their client, they take individual businesses, each with a unique risk profile.
All of these licence holders are in the early stages of competing with each other and lots are making aggressive acquisitions, so for the banks, it makes more sense for the dust to settle and see who comes out on top before opening up to the cannabis industry.
Another major challenge of dealing with cannabis payments is knowing what the options are. With the banks unlikely to lend you any help, your options are to work with a consultant, use your own service, use third party vendors (for example, Ample Organics has AmplePayments), or do your own research into accepting payments differently.
Cannabis consultants tend to be very expensive and often want to help with the entire cannabis license application process, not just set up cannabis payments.
When doing your own research, you will probably find there’s very little information available to help guide you through your options. This is simply because the cannabis industry is so new and there are very few services that are dedicated to cannabis payments.
Understanding payments and payment processing can be confusing enough, so when you add the complexity of cannabis regulations and the resistance of financial institutions to help, it’s nearly impossible to navigate on your own. One of the main regulations that affect payments, for example, is age verification. Currently, the majority of medical cannabis in Canada is sold online, so it’s essential to have strict age-verification processes in place. Most traditional payment providers don’t support this and it’s just one of the examples of the extra complexity cannabis regulations add to payment processing. Another notable example is prescription limits, where a patient’s order must not be authorized if they try to order above their monthly prescription limit.
If you’re finding it difficult to navigate the complex landscape of cannabis payments on your own, you can book a time with us to learn how AmplePayments can set you up for cannabis payments success.
