Getting what you need, not what you want

In my role as Chief Science Officer for Kaycha Labs (currently with 10 labs in nine states), I interact with hundreds of cannabis and hemp businesses on a weekly basis. Many of these companies are sincerely interested in cultivating, manufacturing, distributing and selling the cleanest and safest products possible. Others are not.

In many ways, the products on sale today are the cleanest and safest products to have been sold at any time in modern history (including all black-market sales). As we continue the transition from basement crops to big business, we must alter our approach to testing and our relationships with testing facilities.

Previous relationships between testing facilities and growers, manufacturers and dispensaries were often based on three criteria:

1. The speed of testing
2. The cost of testing
3. The likelihood of receiving a pass result.

The only possible outcome of these types of relationships was to incentivise testing facilities to become efficient both in workflow design and financial margin optimisation, or to cheat. Unfortunately, some testing labs (albeit a minority) chose to cheat, placing both end users and the manufacturers at risk of recalls and product liability litigation. Thus, finding a laboratory that doesn’t give you what you want, but what you need is the best way to avoid these risks.