FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (July 1, 2020) -PRESS RELEASE- Kaycha Labs, a national cannabis and hemp testing technology company, is excited to announce that both their Davie and Gainesville, Flordia labs have been awarded the Florida Department of Health’s Certified Marijuana Testing Laboratory (CTML) status.

This is the first time the Florida Department of Health has awarded CMTL certifications and by doing so, it now means that state-mandated testing requirements will go into effect. These requirements specify that all retail products containing marijuana can be randomly sampled and tested.

“It’s a testament to our team that has worked so hard to get to where we are,” John Schwartz, chief operating officer of Kaycha Labs, said. “We are excited to receive this distinction in our home state. Our investment in people and technology has and will continue to serve the people of Florida.”  

Both the Davie and Gainesville labs are ISO 17025 accredited and perform marijuana and hemp product testing for clients to help ensure that Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers remain compliant with all state and federal regulations. Kaycha Labs provides fast and accurate full panel testing for potency, homogeneity, heavy metals, microbial contamination, mycotoxins, residual solvents, terpenes, pesticides, and more.

 Kaycha has the ability to implement over 500 procedures and methods to test cannabis and hemp products. These procedures and methods comply with standards set by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), International Standards Organization (ISO), United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Services, and Association of Analytical Communities (AOAC).

Even with a global pandemic shuttering municipal offices around the U.S., the team at Exclusive Brands found new ways to work with local officials to open an outdoor cultivation site in Arlington, Mich., in June.

Narmin Jarrous, executive vice president of business development and director of social equity at Exclusive Brands, says that the sudden whirlwind brought on by the coronavirus pandemic turned the prospects upside-down. But, like so many other twists in the cannabis industry, it helps to be nimble.

“You can plan and plan and plan and then you have things like COVID jump out at you, and you’re not really quite sure what to do,” Jarrous says. “We had to pivot our strategy.” The late June opening was only a few weeks off from the company’s original plans.

Most of the disconnect came from the springtime shuttering of municipal offices. Local inspections took longer to set up—and even then they happened virtually. The Exclusive team set up FaceTime calls to give inspectors a close look at the new outdoor site. That was a challenge for all the obvious reasons, but it also stuck a wrench in the company’s intent to form meaningful relationships with regulators off the bat.

“All of our employees know the state workers and the inspectors,” Jarrous says, “because we think the more transparent we are with them and the more familiar they are with us, the more comfortable they’ll be with the process.”

In Arlington, Exclusive has plans to make the most of six cultivation licenses (for a total of 9,000 plants across 30 acres). Jarrous points to flower sales remaining high throughout the strange 2020 sales year and also references rising edibles trends as more people stay at home. She says that adding an outdoor site like this one will help fortify an adult-use market that’s very much in the developing stages. Adult-use sales began in earnest in Michigan at the start of this year.

“We want to make sure that we have this good amount of biomass being cultivated, so that we can support the industry statewide,” she says. “The things that are grow here aren’t just going to be sold at Exclusive [retail] locations. We’ll process them in our processing centers and we’ll distribute them throughout the state.”

Caliper, a cannabidiol (CBD) product manufacturing company, rebuked a June 17 letter from consumer interest and public health groups that called for Congress to proceed with caution as it looks to mandate the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate CBD in supplements and food.

In the June 23 response, Caliper co-founder and CEO Justin Singer called out several allegedly misleading claims in the letter penned by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Consumer Reports, the Public Health Institute and the Consumer Federation of America.

For example, the CSPI letter advised Congress against “Forcing the FDA into rushed decisions and to prematurely implement major regulatory changes would result in an unsafe CBD market and distract the FDA from its current pandemic response and recovery efforts.” Singer, however, noted in his response that “This comment assumes that the CBD market today either (1) does not exist or (2) exists and is safe. Neither, of course, is true.

“The consumer CBD market exists because Congress legalized the production of CBD with the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills. The consumer CBD market is generally unsafe because the FDA refuses to regulate it,” he wrote. He also noted that the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) “imposed reasonable regulatory guidance for permissible CBD products within [six] months of being asked to do so while relying on FDA’s own data.”

Singer also noted that several of the negative outcomes highlighted in the CSPI letter have already come to pass. Notably, the CSPI letter warned that a rapid response to regulating CBD would lead to consumers wrongly believing that CBD products have been vetted by the FDA. According to the Consumer Brands Association, the nation’s largest food industry trade association, 51% of Americans already assume that CBD is regulated by the FDA.

While Singer disagreed with the ultimate conclusion that the CSPI letter made, namely that Congress should not “place undue political pressure” on the FDA’s process in regulating CBD, he supported certain proposed rule changes, including the creation of “a post-market testing program to monitor the quality of ‘high-risk’ categories of supplements known to be commonly adulterated, including CBD.” That said, he noted the FDA is not currently prevented from doing so today, but has chosen not to, nor is it prevented from building a public database of all products sold with FDA oversight, another point both groups agreed would be useful for CBD enforcement.

Singer highlighted three areas where Congress could enact legislation that:

“1. Requires the FDA to accept oversight responsibility for hemp-derived consumer CBD products and regulate them as foods or supplements, thus subjecting consumer CBD products to the same standards and requirements as all other food and supplement products.

2. Requires the FDA to ban and recall any CBD food or supplement products that the FDA can demonstrate to be injurious to health under the conditions of use recommended on the labeling;

3. Directs the FDA to issue rules within six months for hemp-derived CBD products covering quality, identity, purity, residual solvent/pesticide levels, and labeling issues specific to hemp-derived cannabinoids.”

“The FDA has all the authority it needs to effectuate all of the above,” Singer concluded, “but at this point Congress clearly needs to enact explicit direction for the FDA to actually accomplish them and, in so doing, protect consumer safety.”