Software companies want in on emerging marijuana business

Global Business

Medical marijuana has been legalized in 23 U.S. states, with Colorado and Washington allowing recreational use. This led to a profit windfall for some trailblazing pot entrepreneurs. CCTV America’s Nitza Soledad Perez reported from Miami how one startup is using technology to cash in on the industry.

“We develop software that it is specific to marijuana,” Patrick Vo, chief operating officer of BioTrack THC, said.

Sean Phillips is the owner of The Grove, a medical and recreational marijuana dispensary in Colorado. He incorporated software into his technology company about a year and a half ago.

“We tag the plant with a bar code from the time they are brought up from clone. That tag follows it all the way through completion or harvest,” Phillips said. “That tag gets rolled into a package tag that ends up in a store, in the form of raw marijuana or trim, and it’s all integrated in the system.”

BioTrack THC has monitoring systems operating across 12 states, Washington, D.C., and Canada. It recently won the Washington state contract to develop what it claims will be the first state cannabis seed-to-sale real-time monitoring system in the United States.

“That gives the Washington state board real time visibility into every plant and every fraction of a gram of a plant, material in the product life cycle, in their state,” Vo said. “At any point in time, they can see where every plant is at, how many plants there are, where all the inventory is at, what is on the road, what has been tested and who is selling what.”

When a new plant is created, the system generates a globally unique 16-digit identifier that will stay with that plant.

The company said businesses were happy with the software and looking forward to the next step in the pot industry revolution.

“We don’t have banking right now, which I’m sure the nation knows about, but having the level of detail that BioTrack THC, supports or supplies, is actually helping us develop some banking relationships,” Philips said.

BioTrack THC said its system provides a legal process to selling marijuana. The next hurdle for the Florida-based company is waiting to see whether Florida voters will approve a medicinal marijuana referendum in the state’s November election.