Recently the Marketplace has had an uptick in inquiries from those of you seeking guidance for best testing practices.
If you are a cultivator don’t bother with a full compliance test on your products as they will be fully tested by the Distribution Center pushing your products to retail. Cultivators should, however, conduct what is called an R&D test through an accredited cannabis testing laboratory for Pesticides and Potency. R&D tests will give you the basic information you need to provide potential buyers. Without an R&D test, it is difficult to market your products as you have no proof its clean of pesticides and no THC potency levels to show.
If you are a Manufacturer doing microextraction tests on large quantities of trim make sure you mix it up well and pull a bit from each bag you are working with to compile the material for your microextraction test. The test is useless if you pull your sample from only one bag and others are dirty. Again unless you are pushing to retail stick with the far less expensive R&D test. The Distro pushing to retail will take care of the final compliance test.
With over 20% of products failing Quality Assurance testing if California everyone is still learning how to navigate the system and build in fair protections for all parties doing transactions. New innovative methods are coming into play such as quarantining product on site in tamper-proof bags or mobile lock boxes accompanied with live stream video feeds while it is in for testing. Also more and more cannabis businesses are utilizing escrow services and contracts to secure transactions.
Remember if you do end up with some dirty flower, trim or crude don’t it away. There are remediation processes in which it can still be processed and refined into a clean form depending on pesticide levels. You will lose more mass but in most cases, many products can be refined into a useable form.