Technology Companies Partner for Cannabis Track and Trace

Mar 21, 2022Hashish intelligent packaging business  TrueGreen is partnering with RFID technological know-how organization  Identiv to provide a solution that can keep track of cannabis merchandise from the level of packaging to dispensaries, though delivering customers with articles, item authentication and tamper detection about products even after they have taken them property. The answer is composed of TrueGreen’s cloud-based mostly software program and software, as effectively as Identiv’s hybrid ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) and Close to Discipline Conversation (NFC) tag and customized HF-NFC visitors. In result the companies say, the program digitizes hashish packaging.

The hybrid RFID tag can be attached to merchandise packaging as the units are sealed, with mounted audience capturing tag reads on conveyors, and dispensaries applying handheld viewers to keep stock up to date. “Budtenders” and their customers can then entry data and verify solutions are reliable and have not been tampered with. The alternative has been three years in the generating, even though TrueGreen was launched in Delaware extra than 18 months ago, and it is made to remedy some of the exceptional problems dealing with the cannabis industry.

At the very least one particular large cannabis corporation is now in the approach of adopting the alternative, claims Tim Daly, TrueGreen’s president and cofounder. TrueGreen was introduced after Daly expended many a long time working with Identiv to develop a electronic answer for the expanding cannabis industry, 1st in Canada and then in the United States. Jointly, Daly and Identiv created NFC-enabled Canadian hashish excise stamps. Just before that, he had a extended background in the RFID industry as an NFC evangelist for  NXP Semiconductors, and he was a cofounder of NFC know-how corporation  Thinaire.

The hashish business is poised to achieve from NFC and RFID tracking methods, Daly explains, but it also offers exceptional troubles for the know-how. The extremely regulated setting in which hashish is manufactured and offered, as properly as its higher chance for theft or counterfeiting, tends to make automatic source chain and dispensary tracking worthwhile. Having said that, he provides, the large volume of product moving by a elaborate and segmented offer chain will make a conventional RFID process inadequate.

Tim Daly

“Folks see hashish as commodity [raw material] mainly because they glimpse at the volume of manufacturing,” says Amir Khoshniyati, the VP and general manager of Identiv’s transponder company, “but there’s actually a wonderful deal of complexity behind it.” Regulators and producers have to have secure, precise knowledge with regards to the solution from seed to retail outlet. “They are on the lookout for supply chain transfer currency, and they want to have an understanding of merchandise provenance.” This can include details about a product’s seed, along with how it was developed, handled, transported through the offer chain and then dispensed.

Concern about gray- and black-market place revenue is substantial, Daly suggests, and tamper protection ensures that a consumer doesn’t buy a products that has been altered or counterfeited. With an RFID procedure in location to track and trace solutions, he explains, “You’re synergizing lots of distinctive benefit props into just one.” There are a few stakeholders that the technologies requirements to serve, he says—producers, shoppers and regulators—and the resolution is aimed at all 3. To commence with, he notes, the application merchants the unique ID number of just about every solution unit and all relevant info driving it. “We are digitizing each and every package deal with its seed to sale data provenance nested in the cloud.”

The option is made up of Identiv’s and TrueGreen’s tailor made-designed hybrid labels with constructed-in NXP NFC and UHF chips, integrated into the banknote grade, security and security seal that is placed on every cannabis offer. The tag’s NFC chip arrives with a actual physical and electronic tamper-evidence function, which not only confirms whether or not a product has been opened in the offer chain, but also helps prevent the UHF operation from remaining accessed as soon as a shopper opens that package deal, for privateness purposes.

Amir Khoshniyati

Normally, a security seal tag is utilized to just about every solitary-device offer of hashish that is stuffed at the producer’s web site, as aspect of the packaging seal. It is then study by Identiv’s custom-built 13.56 MHz HF-NFC RFID conveyor reader. The solutions are upcoming packed in cartons for shipping. The tags can be interrogated yet again making use of a handheld HF-NFC reader, without employees obtaining to open up the carton at the stage of shipping and delivery, then when the merchandise is received at the dispensary, and at any other time it is in the dispensary prior to sale.

For occasion, Daly claims, when products is obtained at the dispensary, a handheld reader can capture information indicating what has been acquired, devoid of necessitating a barcode scan of just about every item inside of the carton. That data is then current in the TrueGreen program system. That approach alone, he adds, saves a substantial amount of money of time for dispensary personnel and lessens the incidence of human error or out-of-stock events.

The next price the UHF RFID tag presents in the dispensary is the ability for rapid stock counts. The stores’ “bud tenders” commonly shell out a important sum of their work shift examining inventory in buy to stop decline or theft. That could include as a great deal as a few or 4 hours each individual working day just doing bodily stock counts, Daly states. With barcodes, he states, “You’ve got acquired to shift stuff all around on the cabinets. You’ve obtained to physically line up the barcode and scanner.” With RFID, on the other hand, this can be accomplished in just a subject of minutes rather than hours. “If there is certainly one thing missing, the technique will spit out an exception report to the proper people today.”

Customers at the dispensary could obtain the NFC tag data ahead of making a purchase. “It also normally takes friction out of the dispensary knowledge,” Daly suggests, simply because shoppers could learn about solutions by tapping their cellphone versus labels. The details they could achieve could contain how a unique plant was grown, its cannabidiol (CBD) or tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) ranges, and how the products should really be used. Mainly because solutions are commonly secured out of the palms of customers until finally they make their invest in, outlets could put a single products on show so customers could access the electronic info as very well.

When an individual buys a products, its NFC tag can be interrogated via a smartphone. TrueGreen’s software package one-way links to most place-of-sale systems by way of an application programming interface. In that way, the product’s status can be up-to-date as getting been bought, while the NFC tag read also confirms the product’s authenticity. The UHF RFID tag is rendered inoperable as soon as the package deal seal is broken. That attribute, the organizations explain, not only confirms that a products has not been tampered with, but also provides a privateness purpose by ensuring that no 1 has a merchandise that could be detected with an HF-NFC reader soon after they make a invest in and open the packaging.

The NFC tag continues to give information for customers when they get goods dwelling. End users could access a digital ecosystem that gives facts about a myriad of genetic strains accessible, as effectively as the health and fitness consequences of employing all those items. This facts could charm to a new demographic of hashish customers as properly, these kinds of as all those sampling it for health care needs. These kinds of buyers, Daly suggests, are primarily interested in information and facts about products’ relative overall health rewards or effects.

Identiv visitors applied for this solution can be tuned strategically, Khoshniyati states, so that they will get the job done on a company’s precise producing strains. Visitors are altered to accommodate the throughput concentrations that every single producing internet site takes advantage of. The reader is built to run in multi-conveyor environments, he points out, at substantial velocity and quantity and with unpredictable tag orientation. Eventually, the procedure is supposed to make small business efficiencies by monitoring get the job done-in-course of action, delivering authentic-time digital inventories at storage web sites and at dispensaries, along with transparency by means of to conclude buyers (people) so that they know their product or service is protected.

The gathered details can assist regulators be certain that products and solutions are getting safely and securely taken care of, tracked and offered, and that they are not being diverted into the black sector. “This has been a sizeable engineering training, both equally digitally and bodily,” Daly states. “It truly is incredibly interesting to be going ahead with Identiv in this business right after three a long time of enhancement.” TrueGreen claims it intends to roll out the resolution for the significant U.S.-dependent hashish business in the next 90 times.