How Blockchain Can Revolutionize Cannabis Traceability: Part 1

From seed to sale, traceability is critical for ensuring compliance and safety in the cannabis industry. Find out how blockchain technology can make it easier.

TLDR: This blog discusses how blockchain technology can revolutionize traceability in the cannabis industry, and introduces a project to build a system that can fetch data from Cantrak (a seed-to-sale system) and write it to the blockchain via an API. The objective of the project is to create a user-friendly interface for accessing and verifying data that is transparent, immutable, and secure. The use of blockchain technology can bring transparency and accountability to the cannabis supply chain, ensuring compliance with regulations and maintaining the safety and quality of the product.

The cannabis industry is rapidly expanding, and with that growth comes an increased need for reliable and effective traceability systems. Cantrak, a seed-to-sale system, is one solution that helps companies record, monitor, and track cultivation, harvesting, production, and sales. Additionally, Cantrak assists companies in achieving compliance with Good Agricultural and Collection Practices (GACP) and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) by linking tasks to assets, equipment, and supplies, and tracking stock levels of supplies used in the growing process. Despite these efforts, there is still room for improvement in traceability within the cannabis industry.

Blockchain technology is a promising solution for addressing this need for enhanced traceability in the cannabis industry. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger that securely records transactions, which can be validated by a network of users. This allows for transparent, tamper-proof tracking of product movement throughout the supply chain. In this project, we’ve chosen to use the Polygon blockchain, a high-performance, low-cost solution that can provide a reliable platform for tracking cannabis.

The objective of this project is to:

• Build a system that can fetch data from Cantrak using Streamlit, a Python library for building data apps.
• Write the data to the blockchain via an API.
• Create a user-friendly interface for accessing and verifying the data that is transparent, immutable, and secure.

Here’s an overview diagram of this project:

But what is traceability, and why is it so important in the cannabis industry? Traceability is the ability to track and trace a product’s journey from its origin to the end consumer. In the cannabis industry, traceability is vital for ensuring compliance with regulations and maintaining the safety and quality of the product. By having a reliable and transparent system for tracking cannabis from seed to sale, regulators can ensure that the product is being produced and distributed legally, and consumers can have confidence in the safety and quality of the products they’re buying.

By implementing a blockchain-based traceability system, every step of the cannabis supply chain can be recorded and tracked. This includes information such as cultivation conditions, harvest dates, processing methods, and sales transactions. These data points can be recorded on the blockchain, creating a secure, immutable record of the product’s journey from seed to sale.

The use of blockchain technology in the cannabis industry has the potential to revolutionize traceability and bring transparency and accountability to the supply chain. With this system in place, regulators can easily verify compliance, and consumers can have confidence in the safety and quality of the cannabis products they purchase.

In the upcoming posts of this series, we’ll dive deeper into the technical details of how our blockchain-based traceability system is built and how it leverages Polygon to make it fast, efficient, and cost-effective. We’ll also explore the challenges and opportunities of implementing such a system and examine its potential impact on the cannabis industry. Stay tuned for Part 2!