As cannabis legalization has gone recreational, the demand for more regulation and oversight has grown significantly. In Washington State as well as other markets, authorities have stipulated that plants produced under the regulated market need to be tracked from the individual seed all the way to the point of purchase, to ensure that no black market products are being sold. This process has become known as “Seed-To-Sale Tracking.”
Ganjapreneur, a website which launched in July and has since published a large body of original news articles, videos, podcasts, and interviews related to the business side of cannabis, recently published their newest interview featuring Steven Siegel, the CEO of BioTrackTHC, one of the world’s leading providers of seed-to-sale tracking software.
BioTrackTHC, which earned the Washington State Liquor Control Board’s contract for Washington’s legal market, is also used in several other states and countries to track both medical and recreational cannabis production, processing, and retail sales. The interview with Siegel covered a wide variety of topics.
Describing the process of moving from well-established industries to the legally ambiguous marijuana industry, Siegel says the word he would use is “Frightening. Normally, there’s data that you can research, even in a ditch market, to try to minimize risk and become an educated entrepreneur. With cannabis there was no data and it was just a gut feeling that me and my partner had. I also knew there was plenty of opportunity to provide leadership to help create an industry that works the right way and follows best practices. This industry is under particular scrutiny because of the differences between federal and state laws, so it was incumbent on those of us who were early in the sector to hold ourselves and each other to very high standards.”
Siegel was also asked about what he envisions the future of the cannabis industry will look like. “A federal law to legalize will of course hasten the process, but even if that has not occurred five years from now there will be many other legal states and the business in current states will have matured and provided tremendous economic and job growth for those regions. There will also be many real life stories of people being helped by cannabis, which will be tremendously beneficial to the industry.”
The full interview is available on Ganjapreneur’s website, and via their app for Android devices. Ganjapreneur has announced that their app will be available in the Apple App Store soon, and also recently launched an open-source slang dictionary, a business service provider directory for “ganjapreneurs,” and a marijuana industry “Freelancer’s Network” that will cater to independent professionals who wish to offer their services to cannabis businesses.