An incorrect weight, unreadable container label, or missing inventory record may seem minor during a dry-room transfer, but unnoticed errors can cause problems throughout production and further down the supply chain. A clear standard operating procedure (SOP) can help employees catch and resolve these issues before [...]

In commercial cannabis cultivation, deciding to enrich with CO₂ is often straightforward. The key challenge is maintaining the intended concentration consistently without wasting gas, disrupting humidity control, or creating worker-safety risks. CO₂ enrichment works as part of an environmental system. Light intensity, leaf temperature, irrigation, air [...]

Micah Anderson has spent nearly three decades in California cannabis, beginning as a cultivator in Mendocino County and eventually becoming CEO of publicly traded LEEF Brands. Today, the company is focused on building a large-scale cannabis supply chain that combines outdoor cultivation with concentrate manufacturing. Its [...]

A dispensary’s point-of-sale system keeps the most complete record in the building. It knows the SKU, price, discount, time of day, the budtender who rang it up, and, if the customer is enrolled in loyalty, who they are and how often they return. For inventory, reorders, [...]

Cannabis flower sold in regulated markets across the country is routinely being dried below an existing national standard, according to a new analysis of nearly 145,000 laboratory samples. The report, produced by the American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp (ATACH) with FTI Consulting, analyzed samples [...]

Maryland regulators are taking direct aim at potency manipulation with a new state audit program designed to identify inflated THC numbers and enforce label accuracy. Starting this October, the Maryland Cannabis Administration (MCA) is launching a cross-testing pilot alongside Cannabis Safety & Quality (CSQ), an accredited [...]

Medical cannabis companies developing a new product or redesigning packaging for an existing one may want to look beyond today’s cannabis packaging requirements and consider what could be required in the years ahead. Pharmaceutical packaging has spent decades addressing many of the same issues medical cannabis [...]

The cannabinoid industry has historically focused heavily on manufacturing compliance: GMPs, certificates of analysis, potency testing, contaminant testing, traceability, and state licensing. Those systems are important, and Floraworks has invested significantly in them. But when you begin evaluating an ingredient through established food and dietary supplement [...]

For years, California’s licensed cannabis operators have tagged plants, scanned packages, reconciled inventory, and paid for the privilege, on the understanding that Sacramento was using the data to identify diversion. On August 4, an Orange County Superior Court judgment confirmed what many operators complained about for [...]

Georgia has captured national attention by allowing medical cannabis to be sold through independent pharmacies. Utah has spent the past six years developing another version of the pharmacy model, one designed specifically for cannabis. Utah’s medical cannabis pharmacies do not dispense conventional prescription drugs. They sell [...]

How do you win back customers who drifted away? You know the type: they used to come into your dispensary regularly, then just stopped. No complaint, no goodbye. They found a shorter line, a better deal, or a store closer to home. Competition is fierce, but [...]

On April 23, 2026, the Department of Justice placed FDA-approved marijuana products and marijuana products subject to qualifying state medical licenses into Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. But the bigger hurdle- whether recreational marijuana should move from Schedule I to Schedule III- is still [...]

This year’s Cannabis Quality Conference is being held alongside the long-running Food Safety Consortium, bringing cannabis quality professionals into the same room as food safety experts and creating an overlap between the two industries as they work through many of the same quality, testing, traceability, and [...]

For years, much of the conversation around cannabis quality has focused on what goes into the product: potency, pesticides, solvents, microbial contamination, terpene profiles, and certificates of analysis. That scrutiny is necessary, but it stops one step too soon. Cannabis is burned in a pipe, heated [...]

An Orange County Superior Court judge has ordered California’s Department of Cannabis Control to take steps to bring the state’s cannabis track-and-trace system into compliance with California law, concluding that the system does not currently flag irregular transactions for investigation. The August 4, 2026, final judgment [...]

Cannabis brands often approve a cartridge sample and then place a production order based solely on the product description. That shortcut leaves the filling partner, packaging team, and vape supplier to resolve important details after the purchase order has been submitted. A “controlled specification packet” must [...]

Cannabis federal reform has finally reached a historic moment. Medical cannabis is moving through the rescheduling process after decades under federal prohibition, marking one of the biggest developments in the industry’s history. The final outcome could determine how companies expand, whether cannabis can move across state [...]

New research from Abstrax suggests that extraction temperature may be one of the most important process controls for producing cleaner hydrocarbon cannabis extracts. The peer-reviewed study found that colder butane extraction significantly reduced the levels of wax-derived hydrocarbons in the final concentrate while preserving cannabinoids and [...]

The cannabis industry has spent years waiting for this moment. As federal rescheduling moves forward, so do the opportunities to develop cannabinoid-based supplements and medicines backed by more rigorous scientific research. For some companies, this isn’t a new direction. It’s the payoff from years of work [...]

Pre-roll complaints do not always show up the way other product issues do. A failed device may come back to the store. A vape problem may create a clearer return path. A broken package or hardware issue is easier to document. Pre-rolls are different. They are [...]

Technology is a major expense for cannabis businesses today. But with shrinking margins and heavy competition, operators cannot afford to waste money on software that doesn’t perform. The big question for leadership is no longer about adopting technology; it is about ensuring that technology solves real [...]

Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Senate rejected SB 49, Sen. Dan Laughlin’s Cannabis Control Board bill, on a 27-23 floor vote. Then, within the same session, lawmakers filed a motion to reconsider, and it passed 29-21. The bill lives, for now, in a kind of legislative purgatory. If [...]

“Everybody who came here today, and not giving up and saying that we’re going to continue to fight for this category, thank you, give yourself a round of applause, please,” were the fighting words of Christopher Lackner, President of the Hemp Beverage Alliance (HBA), as he [...]

On April 22, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order placing state-licensed medical marijuana into Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. The cannabis industry declared it a turning point. In certain respects, it is. But turning points are not endpoints. And for California [...]

For much of the cannabinoid supply market, the model has been simple: make the molecule, test the batch, sell the material. If the product meets basic specifications, passes third-party testing, and can be produced at a competitive price, it is considered ready for market. That model [...]

For years, cannabis operators have accepted labeling inefficiencies as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Yet, many facilities still rely on fragmented, manual workflows that require employees to export spreadsheets, copy cannabinoid results, and rekey intricate terpene data into static label templates. This traditional approach actively [...]

Every conversation about cannabis risk follows the same script: Regulatory uncertainty, 280E, capital access, and maybe interstate commerce, depending on the room. None of that is wrong, and operators dealing with those pressures daily don’t need me to tell them they’re real. But after more than [...]

LeafLink’s Wholesale Cannabis Pricing Guide, drawing on over 400,000 SKUs and billions of dollars in transaction data across 18 U.S. markets throughout 2025, paints a picture of the wholesale cannabis pricing continuing its downward march as markets mature and supply expands — with each market and [...]

The April 2026 Department of Justice rescheduling order landed with the weight of a decade of advocacy behind it. For an industry that has watched every other legal sector deduct its rent, payroll, and marketing costs while cannabis operators paid taxes on money they never made, [...]

Pre-rolls generated $4 billion in sales in 2025 and are projected to grow faster than any other top cannabis category, at a 10% compound annual growth rate, according to BDSA retail tracking data. Infused formats now account for 43% of the segment, and the category has [...]

SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index analyzed more than 350,000 business locations across 2,751 brands and found a gap every dispensary operator should take seriously. ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of those locations. Perplexity recommends 7.4%. Gemini reaches 11%. Google’s local 3-pack surfaces 35.9% of the same locations. That [...]

Packing is meant to provide protection and preservation for the contents, but some products require an additional layer of safety. Just like cannabis related products, they can’t be packed in unreliable packaging that poses the risk of degradation of the quality. In this article, we’ll explore [...]

Choosing between glass and plastic packaging for cannabis concentrates is a strategic decision with downstream consequences for product integrity, compliance, consumer perception, margins, and brand positioning. This article compares the two materials across five dimensions and offers a decision framework for operators to match packaging to [...]

Cannabis cultivation is, at its core, a controlled environment business, and air quality remains one of the most consistently underestimated variables in the operation. Contaminated batches, worker health complaints, and odor violations affecting neighboring communities can all be traced back to air-handling decisions made early in [...]

Most cannabis operators have a banking problem. For many, that means limited access to financial services, forcing the business to operate largely in cash and be unable to use the standard banking rails every other industry takes for granted. The banking conversation in this industry almost [...]

Legalization has been framed as a turning point for cannabis safety, transparency, and adoption for years, but now, over a decade since recreational cannabis sales began, American consumers are taking a closer look and asking tougher questions about whether the industry is living up to that [...]

As U.S. cannabis rescheduling moves forward and export opportunities to the European Union become available, a new certification tool to help producers prove their products meet EU standards and fight back against supply chain fraud is now available. CSQ (Cannabis Safety & Quality), the first ANAB-accredited [...]

The U.S. cannabis industry generated more than $30 billion in regulated sales in 2025, yet profitability has become harder to predict. According to a recent national index report by Cannabis Benchmarks, wholesale pricing remains volatile, recently fluctuating between approximately $987 and $1,007 per pound. In an [...]

As cannabis becomes a globally traded medical commodity, cGMP compliance is reshaping how it is grown, handled, and transported. For operators working with imported biomass, controlling contamination and ensuring consistency across supply chains has become a defining challenge. That challenge was a central focus at the [...]

Picture the moment a cannabis company’s compliance team gets copied on an email from a banking partner’s risk officer. The subject line says “Questions re: public materials.” Attached is a spreadsheet. On one side, language from the company’s Florida medical dispensary website. On the other, language [...]

Cannabis packaging decisions have downstream consequences for compliance, operations, customer perception, and margins. This article offers a practical framework for evaluating packaging suppliers across five dimensions: compliance, product quality, operational fit, customization, and partnership reliability. It closes with a pre-commitment checklist that operators can use before [...]

Driven by innovation and convenience, pre-roll sales in 2025 not only had the strongest growth of any major category, topping $3.6 billion in sales and moving 383 million units, but supplanted flower as the most units sold for the first time in the industry’s history, according [...]

As federal policymakers move toward restricting hemp-derived cannabinoid products, a new state-level effort in Colorado is taking the opposite approach by moving to integrate low-dose THC beverages into mainstream hospitality. A coalition led by Colorado-based attorney Brian Vicente, partner at Vicente LLP, has formed the Colorado [...]

As the U.S. hemp industry braces for potential federal disruption later this year, a new bipartisan bill aims to give states a way to maintain control over intoxicating hemp products and potentially keep the category alive. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Joni Ernst [...]