The Science of Standardization in Cannabis With Darwin Millard

Learn more about the science of standardization in cannabis with Darwin Millard, The Spock of Cannabis. Darwin Millard (aka The Spock of Cannabis) is a cannabis (marijuana and hemp) industry thought leader with over 14-years of hands-on extraction and product manufacturing experience. Darwin specializes in mechanical and solvent-based extraction methodologies for isolating highly volatile terpene phenolic secondary metabolites from botanicals. He is an Executive Committee Member of ASTM International’s Technical Committee D37 on Cannabis and serves as the Subcommittee Vice-chair for D37.04 on Processing and Handling and the Subcommittee Co-chair for D37.07 on Industrial Hemp.

Darwin uses his vast knowledge of the cannabis industry, international affairs, and regulatory frameworks along with his passion for phytocannabinoid preparations and the cannabis plant, in general, to help his clients make the complex, simple. Darwin Millard is the creative influence behind companies such as Millard Masonek Solutions, Plant Consulting Group, and Nutrawerx, and provides educational services, regulatory development guidance, and creative approaches to problem-solving.

Future-Proofing Environmental Sustainability in Cannabis

Learn more about future-proofing environmental sustainability in cannabis with Will Vizuete and David Vaillancourt today on NCIA’s Cannabis Industry.

Dr. William Vizuete, Ph.D., is Chief Scientific Officer, and co-leads the Byers Scientific Emissions Analysis division, and is a key member of the Byers Mitigation Technologies division product research and development team. Dr. Vizuete is also a radio DJ on WXYC 89.3 FM and specializes in Jazz and Jamaican Music.

David Vaillancourt, founder, and president of The GMP Collective — specializes in assisting cannabis and hemp businesses to ensure profitability and compliance through repeatable quality by design principles, formally known as Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs). David Chair’s the NCIA’s Facilities Design Committee.

We talk more about Future-Proofing, which is a topic many NCIA committees have been focused on and discussing across the board for months now, with lots of great blog content on our website to refer to. We dive into the basic idea behind what “future-proofing” means aside from simply preparing for the future. The cannabis industry is doing our own thing in a lot of ways and going above and beyond. We discuss where the crossover between what we’re doing on our own to future-proof versus what rules and regulations are out there that require or encourage this at the state or federal level, as well as preparing for federal legalization and what’s coming in the future.

How COVID has Changed Recruiting And Hiring in the Cannabis Industry

Learn more about how COVID has changed recruiting and hiring in the cannabis industry with Kara Bradford of Viridian Staffing, and Bryan Passman, Hunter + Esquire. Kara is Co-Founder and Chief Talent Officer of Viridian Staffing. Founded in 2013 as the first professional, full-service staffing, recruiting & HR consulting firm in the cannabis industry. Bryan is the Founder of cannabis industry talent acquisition firms Hunter + Esquire and The GIGG®.

Much has changed in the last year and a half or more. We talk about how the COVID pandemic has changed all of our lives, and this is true in the cannabis world as well, though we were considered an essential business during those lockdowns as well. Workers kept working in the cannabis industry, albeit a little differently.

There was a time when everyone wanted to work in the cannabis industry and hundreds of resumes were coming in. It’s a little different now, and we’re even seeing lower-wage jobs in non-cannabis companies offering much higher salaries/wages and benefits in order to attract employees. We dive into if it’s a candidate’s market now as well as what does that looks like now from the recruiting and hiring standpoint. Our industry sees the traditional cannabis enthusiast applying for jobs of course, but also individuals with advanced skills from other industries coming to cannabis in order to apply those skills from other industries to ours.

Standards in Cannabis Food Manufacturing

Learn more about Standards in Cannabis Food Manufacturing with Merril Gilbert and Rhiannon Woo. Merril Gilbert is the Co-founder and CEO of TraceTrust, a nationwide cannabis and hemp manufacturing compliance company advocating for safe consumer experiences through HACCP training and Good Manufacturing Process (GMP) Certifications. Merril has 25 years of experience working in the food and beverage industry and has been working in cannabis for over 6 years. Merril is the past chair of the NCIA’s Education Committee and a current member of the Risk Management and Insurance Committee. Rhiannon is the Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of TraceTrust. She is a sought-out leader in Food Safety development and protocol and is an expert in Good Agricultural Practices, Good Harvesting Practices, Good Manufacturing Practices, HACCP, and the Food Safety Modernization Act. She is the Secretary of NCIA’s Hemp Committee.

The cannabis industry considers itself a wellness industry, so when we’re consuming cannabis in any form, we always want to do good for our customers and not cause harm. Staying compliant and having a good understanding of these standards of food safety and GMPs is part of the solution here. Cannabis doesn’t have FDA oversight (YET!) but we as an industry are certainly looking to the future and getting our ducks in a row now. We talk about what other benefits would a cannabis manufacturer experiences, in your perspective, by embracing food safety, GMPs, and making their operations more sophisticated in this respect. This underscores the importance of collaboration and education, including NCIA’s committees which are really setting the stage for more sophistication, more education on these issues, through blogs and podcasts like this, and both of our guests are on an NCIA committee. Both guests talk a bit about their experiences collaborating in NCIA committees for the benefit of the whole industry, both operators and consumers.

Harnessing Celebrity Brands and Endorsements in Cannabis

Learn more about harnessing celebrity brands and endorsements in cannabis with Dan Shapiro. Dan is the Associate General Counsel at Greenlane Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: GNLN), one of the largest global sellers of premium cannabis accessories and CBD products. Prior to joining Greenlane, Dan worked at CAA in the Sports Business & Legal Affairs division. Dan is the Founder and Inaugural Chair of the Cannabis Division of the American Bar Association Forum on Entertainment and Sports Industries and a member of NCIA’s State Regulations Committee.

We are certainly seeing a lot in the news about athletes using cannabis. With the Olympics happening this summer as well, there’s debate about whether cannabis is “performance-enhancing” but others see it more as a pain recovery for injuries. We all remember Michael Phelps the Olympic swimmer getting in some trouble many years ago.

There’s the cannabis product itself, the flower, the pre-rolls, the extraction brands and so on that celebrities participate in. But the accessory space, in particular, is what Dan wrote about in the blog most recently, so this includes vaporizers and grinders. Celebrities endorse all kinds of products all the time, like make-up lines, face creams, perfume, so seeing them move into the cannabis endorsement space seems to be helping to normalize our industry. We dive into how this is evolving going forward as we see the expansion of legalization across the country, state by state, and preparing hopefully for federal legalization.

How Cannabis Operators Can Avoid A Lawsuit

Tune in to learn How Cannabis Operators Can Avoid A Lawsuit with Adam Patt and Ian Stewart of NCIA’s Risk Management and Insurance Committee, which promotes the interests of the cannabis industry’s risk management and insurance sectors, developing strategies for their responsible advancement.

Ian is founder and co-chair of the Cannabis and Hemp Law practice at Wilson Elser, an AmLaw 200 law firm with 850 attorneys in 37 offices in the United States and London. Ian leads a national multi-disciplinary team of lawyers who serve all aspects of the cannabis and hemp industries, as well as financial institutions and insurance companies that service those industries.

Since 2008, Adam Patt has served in leadership roles as President for both ICANN Insure, LLC and Maxam Assurance Agency. With over 20 years of experience, Adam’s industry knowledge and attention to detail have earned his agencies multiple insurance awards for Best-Practices and Best-In-Class. His strong background in risk management, safety programs, and IT solutions supports their continued success. Both serve on NCIA’s Risk Management Committee.

Emerging Markets and Data Compliance with Chad Bronstein

Learn more about Emerging Markets and Data Compliance with Chad Bronstein of Fyllo. Chad Bronstein is the founder of Fyllo and brings expertise gained during a career leading the sales and marketing teams of some of the largest businesses in advertising, media, and technology. His experience leading large-scale acquisitions, venture fundraising, strategic partnerships, and corporate exits has resulted in the scaling of several startups into national leaders. Under Chad’s leadership, Fyllo has revolutionized marketing technology for highly regulated industries, allowing the most ambitious cannabis, CBD, and consumer brands to overcome the complexities of compliance at scale.

Since founding Fyllo in 2019, Chad has overseen the product development, marketing, capital raising, and M&A deals that have uniquely positioned Fyllo to solve the challenges of these fragmented and inefficient markets. The Fyllo Compliance Cloud is a suite of software and services built to overcome the complexities of highly regulated industries.

With Fyllo based in New York with offices all over, we start by chatting about some new states coming online on the east coast, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut recently as well. It’s great seeing these smaller states and Northeastern states moving toward cannabis legalization, so we talk about what Chad is seeing there. Each state is its own unique world of laws and regulations, and the demographics of the customers in California are going to be considerably different from the customer demographics of people from New York. As they say, data is king, so we dive into the world of customer demographics and much more.

Harnessing the Ecosystem of Business Partnerships in Cannabis

Learn more about Harnessing the Ecosystem of Business Partnerships in Cannabis today on NCIA’s Cannabis Industry Voice. John Shearman is Vice President of Marketing and Cannabis Business Lead at Applied DNA Sciences and has over 30 years of deep enterprise and advertising agency experience across all marketing, sales, and IT disciplines. John spearheads the Applied DNA Sciences cannabis vertical leading the vision, strategy, and product development for this emerging market. John also oversees the marketing for the entire company driving the marketing strategy for its other core verticals.

In the cannabis industry, we’re harnessing technology to improve how we run our businesses, which are highly regulated and ever-changing. The systems in place need to actually make life easier for the operators, not more difficult. But there’s Seed to Sale compliance, inventory, quality management systems, laboratory information management, it goes on and on. We talk about what other kinds of technology systems are seeing cannabis operators implementing. As part of this sophistication of our industry, we don’t have to wear 20 hats on a single person anymore. We’re expanding, we’re delegating, we’re getting more done, and we’re working smarter, not harder. That means harnessing partnerships across the industry as well, what are some of these partnerships that are crucial to expanding one’s business.

Construction Laws and Regulations in Cannabis

Tune in to this episode to learn more about Grow America Builders with David Fettner. David is a managing partner of Grow America Builders and has been one of Chicago’s premier general contractors for over two decades. As a third-generation builder, David’s expertise in high-end retail and commercial construction provided a seamless transition to the cannabis construction industry. Grow America Builders is a national design-build construction firm specializing in the cannabis industry, dispensaries, labs, extraction, grow houses, and greenhouses. Grow America Builders is all about serving the cannabis industry, building and upgrading facilities, which can be an exciting time for their clients.

We hear David share some stories about the complexities and roadblocks of our industry which is riddled with many regulations and compliance issues. We know you can’t build a dispensary within a certain number of feet of a public school or church, for example, but David dives more into the details of these regulations. We talk all the time about the fractured state-to-state regulations, and even within the state. This means getting into specific construction laws which are totally separate from seed-to-sale compliance. We discuss the complexities and nuances in construction law when you’re dealing with one state versus another. All that and much more on Grow America Builders with David Fettner on NCIA’s Cannabis Industry Voice only on Cannabis Radio.

The State of Security in Cannabis with Scott Thomas of Genetec

Learn more about the state of security in cannabis with Scott Thomas of Genetec Inc. Scott Thomas is Genetec’s National Director of Sales for Signature Brands in the United States. Genetec Inc. is an innovative technology company with a broad solutions portfolio that encompasses security, intelligence, and operations. In this role, Scott and his team are responsible for Sales to the Retail, Financial, Hospitality, Gaming, and Cannabis vertical markets via Genetec’s network of system integration partners. Genetec was founded in 1997, and headquartered in Montreal, Canada, and serves customers in over 80 countries.

Today we talk about the current state of the security industry from Scott’s perspective as it relates to cannabis which includes retail stores, cultivation facilities, and so on. We dive into what we consider the lay of the land these days in the cannabis industry. Our industry is certainly evolving and we are seeing more multi-state operators, or MSO’s, emerging. We discuss trends and designs that Scott sees at it relates to MSOs who have footprints in multiple states.

Advertising and Earned Media in Cannabis with Kathee Brewer

Learn more about mg Magazine and Incunabulum Inc. with Kathee Brewer. Kathee Brewer is the editorial director for Incunabulum Inc., including award-winning publications including mg Magazine and CBD Today. Kathee is an award-winning journalist, author, and Air Force veteran, and has covered everything from dog shows to airline disasters and political corruption. mg Magazine is the premier trade publication for the legal cannabis industry. Dubbed “weed’s hybrid of Forbes and Inc.,” each month mg analyzes and demystifies the people, plants, processes, and products fueling an economic engine rapidly expanding across the globe.

Cannabis has a lot of advertising restrictions, but we’re a strong industry with a lot to say. So we talk about how people in the industry who are looking for media attention go about doing that in a compliant way. We gotta stay compliant though, have some etiquette, and there’s some DOs and DONTs when it comes to pitching the media. We dive into the certain common mistakes that people might make in trying to do this. It seems like the narrative has changed and evolved over the years. Now we’re looking at canna-wives and canna-moms and a more mainstream storyline. We discuss what are our guests are seeing there and much more!

Product Safety In Cannabis with Carlos Perea

Tune in to this episode to learn more about product safety in cannabis with Terra Vera CEO and Co-founder, Carlos Perea. Terra Vera is an agricultural technology company offering innovative solutions to replace conventional pesticides and increase product safety and consumer confidence within the agriculture industry. Carlos is a serial entrepreneur with a focus on the intersection of technology and social impact. Carlos has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico.

We start by chatting about product safety, as we all remember back in late 2019 when mostly unregulated cannabis vaping products hit the market with vitamin E acetate. We called it the “vaping crisis” or “vape gate” at the time and NCIA published a paper about it as well. So now that’s behind us, we talk about what are we still discussing when it comes to product safety. Of course, we don’t want cannabis products to harm people because of toxins or pesticides or mold issues, for example, particularly because we see it as a wellness product, but these issues aren’t unique to cannabis. We learned something new about cannabis recently – cannabis flower is being irradiated in certain cases, and there’s no way the consumer would know this. So we discuss what irradiating cannabis does, and why should there be concerns about it.

The Nomenclature Project With Jacob Enslein and Paul Coble

Learn more about NCIA’s Cannabis Manufacturing Committee’s nomenclature project with Jacob Enslein from AJ Cannabis Consulting, and Paul Coble at Thalo Technologies. We dive into their subcommittee, Cannabis Nomenclature, and talk about the purpose of the subcommittee. We have seen tons of value in having shared language in our industry. So we talk about the difference between terminology, jargon, and nomenclature — many of us know the basics like cannabinoid or terpene, but there’s a lot more, so we get into the purpose and expected outcome of the nomenclature project.

Jacob Enslein is a knowledgeable occupational safety and compliance expert with real-world experience in cannabis manufacturing. He graduated from Pitzer College with a mathematics degree in 2016 and has seven years of experience in cannabis manufacturing. In 2013, Jacob co-started and ran a prop 215 extraction company and designed and operated closed-loop extraction systems, and helped develop processes for distillation. Consulting since 2013, Jacob co-started AJ Cannabis Consulting LLC in 2019 and has been designing and commissioning hydrocarbon and ethanol cannabis extraction facilities around the country. Jacob is currently NCIA’s cannabis manufacturing committee organizer.

Paul Coble is an intellectual property attorney and cannabis software executive with a deep background in science and technology. He is a registered patent attorney and has litigated complex intellectual property cases across the country. After a decade of practicing law, Paul decided to enter the cannabis industry and launched a startup, Thalo Technologies, to develop software to help cannabis and hemp manufacturers better capture and interpret their lab data to make more profitable decisions. He is currently serving as Vice-Chair of the Cannabis Manufacturing Committee and sitting by designation on the Policy Council.