Are you ready for inspections?

Within the last 2 months, several of our customers have had inspections of their facility randomly thrust upon them by the BCC.

 With federal legalization on the horizon, and other states looking to California’s cannabis market as the model example, government organizations are beginning to crack down on cannabis cultivation and processing facilities to make sure that all compliance guidelines are followed. To make sure that your facility isn’t hit with fines or licensure suspension, we’ve put together this list of suggestions to keep your facility as compliant as possible.

• Keep daily green waste logs.
• Record flowering plants the minute they’re tagged.
• Record dead plants within 24 hours.
• Record plant moves daily.
• Record harvests within 24 hours.
• Record harvest waste immediately (remember evaporation loss is not recordable waste)
• Package and record your harvest as soon as it’s dry.

While these tasks may seem daunting, there are simple solutions that you can implement to keep these numerous actions from becoming overwhelming. Picking and using a software that allows you to capture METRC related actions in the moment is essential to managing your operations compliance, and keeping your head on straight.

Make information gathering easy and efficient.

As the cannabis market has been booming since state legalization, we no longer have to adapt existing compliance operations to a brand new market. Plenty of SOP’s have popped up in the market, with varying degrees of accuracy and ease of use.  One thing has become evidently apparent, using a mobile device an easy way to turn your cultivation team into compliance gathering assets. 

Entrinsia Cortex comes with built in guided workflows that are easy for anyone to follow.  Whether it’s tagging plants, feeding plants, or changing their grow phase, creating readily available information is as easy as pulling out your phone, scanning the appropriate tag, and selecting the applicable information.  From here, the reportable information is stored in your cloud based system, and uploaded to METRC. 

Document, Document, Document.

When it comes to this federally controlled substance, documenting every action made is a necessity for these inspections.  Picture this, a room of yours has contracted Hop Latent, yet a few of your plants show the signs of no infection.  You move these plants to a completely sanitized room, and allow them to grow.  The next thing you know, the BCC orders an inspection on your facility. Due to your stress over the health of your plants, you completely forget to update the room placement of those healthy plants.  This scenario brings a number of fines and wrist slaps from the government, and despite your best efforts to recoup potential losses, you end up in the red anyways.  

So how do you combat these unplanned speedbumps? Using a system with constant compliance checks (like mentioned above) will allow you to have a full historical record of which actions have been done to which plants.  Simply scan the plant tags as the plants are being moved, and Entrinsia Cortex keeps an automatic record of the room it is moved into.  When the inspectors come, simply show them your integrated dashboard, which provides a full historical timeline of each plant’s individual actions.

Integrate yourself with your business.

One of our customers had a friend in the business who, by all means, was a successful cultivation site, producing high quality products at a consistent rate and selling to multiple dispensaries and wholesale customers.  Looking to get their compliance operations in order, they asked us to do a full audit of their business to make sure they were operating as efficiently as possible.  It turns out that in their fast paced environment, they had neglected to date a large portion of their trimmed product in one of their store rooms, and when going through their existing products with them, we realized that those products were approaching the one year mark since they had been tested.  This caused them to invest in expensive recertification testing for these products, causing a large chunk of potential revenue to be lost.  

It’s extremely important to date every product, within your system and physically, to ensure that you are not wasting potential gains.  Putting in a huge amount of effort to get your product grown to its full potential, and then losing out on the potential money to reinvest into your business can cause cash flow issues, and motivational problems.  

Entrinsia Cortex allows you to set intelligent notifications for your items within the database. In this example, if you have correctly documented the date that your product has been tested, the AI within the database will alert you as the product is about to expire.  These automatic notifications allow you to keep track of your product and potential revenue, but can be extended even further.  With integrated sensors, the AI system can alert you to anomalies in your grow room.  Whether the temperature is rising rapidly, or oxygen levels aren’t optimal, receive instant notifications directly to your phone to ensure your plants are happy and healthy. 

Treat each plant as an individual.

One of the most frequent issues we run into when working with new facilities, is getting the business owners to treat each plant individually. And quite frankly, we understand why.  When you’re dealing with grow rooms of thousands on thousands of plants, the idea of keeping an individual record of each plant easily becomes overwhelming.  We’ve had potential customers who try to keep these records on paper, or try to complete the compliance recording afterwards, but these efforts often lead to plants falling through the cracks, resulting in an incomplete picture of your operation.  

Inspectors will often come in and demand to see an individual plant based on your given METRC tags.  If your plants are organized into trays and tables, yet the plant tags are attached to the trellising rather than the plant, that is an automatic penalty.  This means that tagging your plants becomes a pivotal action that must be completed in order to remain fully compliant.  

Our customers using Entrinsia Cortex absolutely love the bulk tag workflow.  It allows you to tag up to 100 plants at once, which when placed on each individual plant, makes the process of treating them individually so much easier.  Once the initial hurdle is cleared, plant management for individuals is as easy as scanning the tag, and selecting the appropriate action.  This applies to harvest time as well, as the state of California dictates that each plant must be weighed individually to assure no product is syphoned off to the side.  Luckily, Entrinsia Cortex is able to integrate with state approved scales, making the burdensome task of weighing each plant as simple as cutting, scanning, and saving the weights.  Using this process, our clients on average save 3-4 hours spent on harvests, while losing no relevant information needed by the government.  

These are a few ways to prepare yourself for the oncoming inspections, but if you feel that your facility needs a thorough look through, there are certain services that will bring METRC experts to your facility in order to look for anomalies or issues at your place of business.  If you’re in the California area, don’t hesitate to reach out to Cortex and their team of experts to come and tour your facility.  We will make the trip out, and suggest a couple of changes that will ultimately make your facility fully compliant.