Tracking cannabis from seed to manufacturing

The legalisation of cannabis comes with great risk and responsibility. By implementing seed-to-sale tracking, regulators worldwide are working to secure the legal cannabis supply chain. Like serialisation of pharmaceuticals, it increases transparency on all levels, benefits consumers and ensures accountability from all industry players.

Assisting the state and regional governmental departments to enforce regulations, collect taxes, and prevent illegal cannabis diversion and inversion, seed-to-manufacturing software can track every gram of legal cannabis throughout the production life cycle. Effective seed-to-sale tracking also benefits consumers since it increases transparency across all supply chain levels, ensuring accountability from growers, processors and product producers.

Tracking cannabis is not the only solution Mitas Corporation can offer commercial medicinal cannabis growers. Its Internet of Things precision farming management solution can increase the quality and quantity of cannabis products, by monitoring the entire farm. In turn, this can provide data in terms of pH-levels, moisture content and humidity levels, helping to reduce the amount of wasted plants processed during harvesting.

With the plant passport solution, a barcode can be printed directly onto individual seed trays

ENSURING TRACEABILITY

The company’s continuous inkjet (CIJ) plant passport solution can print a barcode directly onto the individual seed trays. With its udaFormaxx offline solution, a plant passport can be printed offline, easily and quickly, on stock cards, plant labels or cardboard labels.

Printing the barcode onto seedling trays gives traceability to the seed planted in the tray. This solution is easily integrated into the production line and shows the time and date when it was planted, the strain, how many seeds are in a tray, and the location of the tray.

Once the seedlings are ready to be transferred from the tray to the field, cannabis growers can use Mitas Corporation’s unique polypropylene RFID tags, which are specially designed for tree and plant inventory, maintenance and tracking. These tags are available in UHF, HF and NFC or with several customisations such as QR codes, barcodes, logos or serial numbers. The tags are linked to the plants in the tray and refer back to the specific strain that connects the individual plant to a particular row in a specific field – so different strains can be planted in one field.

A RFID tag attached to a plant

NEXT-LEVEL SOLUTIONS

During the harvesting process, traceability makes the cannabis easier to process without mixing strains. Strain information is also recorded by using a mobile handheld RFID reader to scan the RFID tags on the individual plants.

Mitas Corporation can also trace the produce and not the packaging by applying DNA barcodes during regular processing, providing the only on-food safety solution.

During the trimming and sorting of buds, size samples are taken for testing and anything under a specific weight becomes a retention sample.

Vacuum-sealed bags are weighed and coded by either labelling or using CIJ or thermal inkjet printers to print lot codes, ingredients etc. The products are then boxed.

Mitas Corporation can also assist with high level inventory and warehousing solutions.

If cannabis is processed into capsules, logos, a best-before date and any other alphanumerical codes can be engraved directly onto the capsules themselves. •

Mitas Corporation – www.mitascorp.com