California’s Cannabis Track-and-Trace (CCTT) Compliance Design Integrations

Keeping track of cannabis in all stages from “Seed to sales”, as it is usually expressed, is a mandatory requirement for all licensed cannabis businesses. Along with many other states, California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has contracted METRC for California’s Cannabis Track-and-Trace (CCTT) system and requires all permanent licensees to register with METRC.

Although businesses with temporary licenses aren’t required to be METRC compliant until they receive their permanent licenses, it is better to understand how METRC works and ensure your system is ready when finally, you will have to start using it.

METRC stands for Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting Compliance. METRC is a “regulatory compliance platform,” which serves to monitor cannabis production from start to its end user sale.

Those cannabis firms that are manually tracking their transactions, are going to find it very difficult when it comes time to comply with METRC. Manually entering all the transaction data is a massive project that could take many weeks to complete.

METRC is a web-based platform for end to end tracking of all cannabis products from licensed facilities. METRC was designed by regulators to create visibility for adherence to the established regulations and policies per state. METRC has been an extremely useful tool in maintaining compliance in this ever growing and changing industry.

Seeking for an effective platform to control unlawful production and dispensing of cannabis products, the state of Colorado established a relationship with Franwell, a tech company out of Florida, in 2013. Many other states followed the initiative and relied on METRC in the tracking of legal cannabis; including Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Alaska, and Oregon.

METRC utilizes Radio Identification Tags or RFID tags to track plants and products. These tags are attached to plants & cannabis packages. These tags are purchased directly from METRC. There are many useful information in METRC website including tutorials to help new users orient with system.

Since Track-and-Trace is an incessant part of cannabis business, lessons learnt has proven that it should be wisely incorporated in the design of the facility as early in the game as practically possible.

Many clients neglecting the need for properly accommodating appropriate spaces for computer stations, data entry points and data lines reached InnoDez for modifications and adjustments to the original floor plans and designs, since state authorities have withheld their business activities conditional to compliance with Track-and-Trace requirements. In that stage, making right adjustments prove to be challenging, tedious and in most cases encounter extra expenses avoidable if planned right in the first place.

These design niceties can be traced in all phases of industry from cultivation to processing and distribution and dispensary.

In grow environment as an example, it is much needed to deduce certain space to a weighing station, where the METRC, bar code scanning and a scale are interconnected to facilitate and automate weighing of colas and inputting the weight data in the METRC; often this need is overlooked.

In manufacturing environment, again, the technical and industrial aspects of design are most of the times prioritized and the data interring and Track-and-Trace as well as inventory best practices are not incorporated in the design as expected.

Dispensaries on the other hand are generally much better designed to facilitated interactions with METRC. One good reason is that if dispensaries want to meet the customers’ expectations, they have to optimize their performance and maximize automations.

We hope that this article has been helpful in your cannabis business.

Allow us to team with you as early in the design process, to ensure professional cannabis spaces wisely accommodating Track-and-Trace compliancy.