The safety and quality demands of cannabis can be difficult to meet, but companies can make matters much easier by carrying out the right risk assessments beforehand.
“I don’t see folks even doing risk assessments, asking themselves, do I have a potential biological risk? Is there a physical risk involved? That basic exercise is so foundational, you’ve gotta ask the question,” David Vaillencourt, the CEO and Founder of the GMP Collective, told Rootwurks.
Vaillencourt’s answer came when asked to name the two most glaring shortcomings in quality assurance and safety in cannabis. Besides the failure to perform risk assessments, Vaillencourt cited sanitation failures as a glaring issue.
“I see SOPs (standard operating procedures) that say to sanitize the area but do you know that what you’re using is working? Have you checked if it’s overkill or underkill?”
Vaillencourt added "it’s about when you’ve got 40 hours a week of work, how are you making an impact? It’s not just a matter of firefighting or managing compliance, but actually improving the safety of products while keeping the top and bottom line growing appropriately.”
Vaillencourt also serves as Vice-Chair of Committee D37 on cannabis for ASTM international and is in the process of founding a new non-profit named S3 Collective (“Standards of Science and Safety). The organization he founded in 2018, the GMP Collective, is a team of experts that provides cannabis professionals with guidance on a wide variety of subjects ranging from compliance to quality assurance to product safety issues. As the company states, it is “writing the playbook for cannabis standards to build a market that doesn’t yet exist.”
Because cannabis is not federally legal, the industry does not have universal quality and safety standards to turn to. But there are some voluntary standards that can make a big difference.
In the food industry, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) guidelines play a significant role in ensuring product safety. But these same standards can be very effective in cannabis.
“HACCP is an excellent tried and true tool that has applications beyond just the food industry,” Vaillencourt said and described it as a set of protocols that can be applied in a variety of industries to help boost safety.
Part of why HACCP is applicable in cannabis is because the risks are very similar, especially when talking about cannabis edibles.
“If you’re adding cannabinoids as an oil or an isolate, it’s really just an ingredient. We’re just adding ingredients to a food product,” Vaillencourt said, adding “from a conceptual standpoint when we’re talking about risks, quality, and safety, it’s no different.”
One of the more challenging and frustrating aspects of quality assurance and safety in cannabis is that even if you cover all of your bases if there is a weak link in your supply chain or with your distributors and retailers, it can all be in vain.
Vaillencourt said that companies must assess the qualifications of their suppliers and have clear contracts for suppliers both upstream and downstream.
“If you care about the product integrity of your brand, then you need to require that of your distributors and the same with your retailers,” he stated.
Every measure to increase safety and quality has a far better chance of success when the workplace has a strong, well-established culture of safety and quality. And this culture has to begin at the top.
“I see it as foundational and it all starts at the top,” Vaillencourt said.
He described how such safety and quality measures require a serious investment of resources, money, and technology, so they must be sold to management as a net benefit to the company.
But there are also negative incentives when it comes to forging a culture of safety and quality.
In the event of a highly publicized compliance fine or recall, the damage can be immense.
“Forget the fines, the fines are trivial, it’s the branding,” Vaillencourt said.
Describing the fallout from a cannabis product recall or major compliance failure, he added “I always think about how many man hours [spent] within that company from the CEO down to the legal council and all the dollars that were spent on this. That’s how the saying goes - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure.”