How to Prioritize Cannabis Compliance in your Business
Cannabis business owners are seemingly monitored under a magnifying glass where cannabis compliance is concerned.
That’s why keeping abreast of the changing regulatory topography and acting accordingly has become absolutely essential to businesses operating in it.
Dispensary
For dispensaries, there are a wide variety of possible infractions that can place your company in jeopardy, including failure to validate each customer’s age and providing customers with more cannabis than they are legally allowed to purchase. Here are a few key ways for your company to incorporate strong compliance measures into its core operations:
Use Technology
Tracking cannabis products from seed to sale is essential for cooperation with authorities in the event of a breach or theft, for instance, but the actual process of doing so is incredibly complex. Supply chain tracking tools can drastically simplify such things.
Similarly, processing IDs at the point of purchase can prove tiresome as sales volume swells. Not to mention that manual ID checks are prone to human error, allowing sophisticated fakes and fraudulent purchases to pass through the cracks. Solutions, like Intellicheck’s suite of ID validation, dramatically simplify ID checking, while minimizing risk as well.
Conduct Frequent Audits
Completing relevant checks as needed and following the correct processes for producing, transporting, storing, selling, and delivering cannabis can reduce much of the liability inherent to the industry.
Regular compliance audits (as well as accounting audits, inventory audits, etc.) help unite your team leaders in dealing with deficiencies in your existing processes and infrastructure well before any serious events make such measures a must.
Online Sales
Managing online sales can be especially tricky for companies aiming to be mindful of compliance concerns within the cannabis industry. Stopping underage purchasers from completing transactions is one of the most pressing issues in these types of operations as fines and even jail time await those who overlook it.
Here are a couple ways that cannabis companies can market and sell their products online without tripping any compliance alarms in the process:
- Integrate identity validation steps directly into your online order processing procedures to ensure all customers are vetted for legitimacy before orders are actually placed.It is key to ensure that purchasers don’t need any special equipment to validate their identity.
- Offer hemp products with low enough levels of THC (.3% or less) to avoid cannabis shipping restrictions, especially when offering items to purchasers located in other states.
Delivery
Validating the identity of the person placing each purchase and ensuring they are the same person receiving the delivery on arrival are critical components of a compliant cannabis delivery service.
To enable this, companies need technology that can work using the delivery driver’s phone. A technology that is fast and easy to use will ensure that drivers can properly validate delivery recipients while ensuring that recipients don’t get impatient while and that delivery schedules are met.
The Solution for Cannabis Compliance
From procurement to each individual sale, cannabis compliance needs must be accounted for to avoid fines and business interruptions. Even with the propersteps worked into your daily operations, simple gaps and errors can bring about disaster if left untreated. The solution? Purpose-built technology you can count on–technology like Intellicheck.
Law enforcement around the US depend on it. That is in part because it works on a mobile phone, is easy to use and returns fast results (in under a second). For retail operations it can be integrated with existing POS scanners for smooth operations.
Intellicheck goes beyond mere scanning of customers’ IDs, parsing the security features embedded in each identity document to assess its legitimacy. As needed, facial match and liveness are captured in a selfie to ensure the person submitting their ID is the same person on the ID.
Cannabis compliance can be complex and worrisome, but it doesn’t have to be.
