Rob McIntyre
, Salvation Botanicals - Compliance and Testing
[00:00:03] Rob McIntyre I'm the CEO with Salvation Botanicals. We have a dealer license under the Controlled Substances Act. That's being transitioned through the Cannabis Act to a processor and a testing facility. So under that license we are running a fully accredited Health Canada compliant testing facility for cannabis. We also have a hemp processor license. So we're involved in the sourcing and extraction of CBD from industrial hemp .There's a full suite of testing that's required to be compliant with the Health Canada regulations. So that includes heavy metals testing, Cannabinoid profile, what potency is the product ,what cannabinoids are present. Microbial testing is a very big part of it, to see what mould and bacteria might be present, or could grow from what's there. For an extractive product, there's also testing for residual solvents, so the solvents that are used to extract the cannabinoids sometimes at some left over, we need to make sure that they're below accepted levels. So the testing is key to the entire industry. We need to build confidence. First of all we need compliance. There are rules that we have to follow there's rules that we have to... the finished product has to be tested. But that's the starting point. The testing throughout the cultivation, can happen in a number of points to help the growers develop strains to help them maximize yields, to identify a fail as early as possible. So that just economic sense too if we're gonna fail, you want to stop work on that as soon as possible, not to put up a more cost into a product that's never going to pass.
[00:02:10][127.6]
[00:02:11] What we are seeing what we have seen these failures in the system. So we've seen I think seven independent recalls of products since October 17th. They might be for packaging, for mislabeled product. It might be ..there was an instance where THC product was put into the market and labeled as CBD. Huge problem. We've seen, pesticides in the market. We've seen mold. There's been seeing bugs in the cannabis. These are failures in the quality control system internally but there are things that could happen in the regulation that could minimize these things and that's where third party pesticide testing is the only test at the moment that's required to be done with third party. And it is certainly the history that we've seen with originally licensed producers only had to sign a stat dec to say that they've never used pesticides. We had failures in the system. Then it moved to a system where producers had to test their own product. We still had failures in the system.
[00:03:34][83.4]
[00:03:35] We had recalls that affected 25000 patients under the ACMPR regulations. Eventually the regulations moved to third party testing, and now we're not seeing those failures in pesticides. Hopefully we're not going to go down the same path with mold and bacteria. Especially as we come to edibles, when people are actually ingesting product., they're going to want to know that it's safe. And. Even in that perhaps the regulations will catch up and require third party testing. I think there's a big market therefore for a producer to step up and reach a higher level of credibility through requiring their own third party testing as part of their quality control process. Yesterday, the regulations for edibles and extracted products closed. So now received all of the feedback. Big questions is going to be what what happens with that feedback. How do they design and how do they work it into changes to the proposed regulation, if there is no change from the proposed regs. Then I think we'll need. We'll see consumer groups. So we'll be requiring at the moment right now it's a choke point as edibles come online. High potency products. These are the ones that do use the solvents that we need to do more testing for. We will see it explode. The requirement for testing through the production cycle is certainly higher. Craft growers coming online with the micro cultivate licenses. Pound for pound those guys need more testing they've got smaller batches, they maximize their cycles. The micro processor, the guys who are making smoking oils themselves. Again small batches but will require testing. The testing is, it's difficult. It's expensive and it takes a lot of a lot of time to develop the protocols around how to accurately test. [00:03:35][0.0]
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