Making Your Cannabis Smarter How Data and Tech are the Roots of the Cannabis Industry

Watch our full panel discussion with top cannabis industry experts on how data and technology are the roots of the industry.

Industry analysts project that the market value for cannabis in the US will be north of $50 billion by the year 2025. However, it feels like this will be an elusive number if the industry does not quickly adopt the use of data and technology to propel it forward. The doors have opened recently, and there seems to be a really swift move to incorporate technology at every level of the supply chain. Apple's recent decision to let iPhone apps process cannabis transactions have changed the industry forever, I believe. Within hours of that, companies like WeedMap saw exponential growth in their orders through their app.

Shortly, thereafter, Eaze announced that it was acquiring MSO Green Dragon, which would give us cannabis license in two states to start. Our own are currently here on MJ Freeways Cannabis Menu Management announces a new ordering platform and delivering options. [unintelligible 00:01:36] was able to double its market value in this latest round. Investors are now betting big on technology and traffic, and not so much on dispensaries and brick and mortar alone. We have an excellent panel here today joining us, industry experts and veterans, to chop it up a bit, and potentially give some good insights on the secular movement in the industry.

I'll introduce these guys. Actually, I have to get their short bios because their [unintelligible 00:02:04] are so big. My name, I'm John Gilstrap. I'm not Jerry Rice, by the way, and I'm sorry if I sold you a couple of autographs, but I'm not going to get it back. I'm John Gilstrap. I'm co-founder of Awaken Space, which is a CBD products company focused on Black women and families. To my left, we have here Jessica Billingsley. She's a founder of Akerna, and today serves as a CEO and Board Chair. She is an accomplished innovator, executive, and Board member in public and private international technology with over 20 years of experience.

She co-founded MJ Freeway in 2010, where she served as president till 2018 and later as a CEO until MJ Freeway was acquired by MTech to form Akerna. You guys mix me up here. To Jessica's left, we have Gary Allen. Gary joined New Frontier Data in 2017 as COO and now serves as the company's CEO. Gary is well known for his early accomplishments in marketing technology, including the creation of the first mobile banking app for ABN AMRO in 1998, building the market-leading bid management reporting tool for Performics, which was purchased by DoubleClick in 2004, and subsequently purchased by Google. Google purchased DoubleClick in 2007.

Now going down the line further we have Tim Daly, not the actor, but Tim Daly, the technologist. Tim is the co-founder and president of TruGreen Global. He works with global brands, governments, retailers, MSOs, dispensaries, and media companies to promote the benefits and advocate new use cases for NFC, were going to dig into what that is, and UHF RFID. Tim is well known globally as a thought leader in the IoT space. His vision led to the creation of the first SaaS platform for managing NFC IDs in the cloud. Going on down the line, I've never read this as much since my kids were little, but we're going to keep going here.

We have a Jesse Channon. Jesse joined Columbia Care in December 2019 as Chief Growth Officer. Jesse is an accomplished leader with over a decade of experience in digital marketing, consumer targeting, grassroots campaign, and social media. His advising work with some of the largest brands and agencies of the world, including Microsoft, AT&T, Honda, Starbucks, NBC, Red Bull, and others. Last but not least, Brian Vicente. Brian has been helping cannabis businesses obtain state and local licenses since the inception of the regulated cannabis industry.

He has also advised national, state, and local officials in the development of regulated cannabis markets across the country and around the world, including Uruguay, the first country in the world to legalize and regulate marijuana for adult use. Brian currently serves as president of the National Hispanic Cannabis Council, a purpose-driven not-for-profit he helped

found in 2021. Guys, let's get to business. I think we only have maybe 25, 30 minutes, but we probably should leave some time for Q&A at the end. I'm going to actually start off with Tim since you're in the middle there. Tim, tell us a little about TruGreen global and these RFID and UHF, which is deployed in TruGreen global, and how does that fit into this talk on data technology?

Tim Daly: First and foremost, thank you, John, and thank you, everybody, for being here on the panel.

John: I can give you my mic if you like.

Tim: Can we hear? Adam, that's actually not a good look. I'm just saying, but thank you. Can we hear now? Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you, John, and thank you for the incredible panelists. The view that we have of the world is that the physical world can be digitized. One of the most compelling ways to do so is using RFID, radiofrequency. Our view of that is to digitize cannabis products, to spin off incredible business intelligence. Where my products are, where it's work in progress, what do I have into my dispensary live in real-time to inform incredible live, real-time decision-making and then post cash register is if my product is digitized?

Why can I foster and enable a direct two-way conversation between the brand and the consumer? That's what we're doing through a digital package using technologies like John mentioned of UHF, RFID, and NFC, Near Field Communications.

John: Great, thank you. I'm going to switch over to Jessica as I think your businesses are somewhat related, and maybe feed off each other. Jessica, you've been in the business for maybe 10 to 12 years now. I started out with MJ Freeway and now you are running a publicly-traded company on the NASDAQ. Can you connect the dots for us on this journey from MJ Freeway to Akerna, and what your thinking is on the supply chain and the digital digitalization of that?

Jessica Billingsley: Sure. Thank you. At the end of the day, our original premise is still the premise we're pursuing today. We started out with the premise that traceability and accountability would matter, and that in order for us to bring this industry to a regulated, to a legal, to a compliance state, you would be able to-- You would have to be able to trace those compliance points to do it in an efficient manner and tax and regulate it like any other regulated substance.

Today, that's still what we do. We are the technology ecosystem for cannabis, enabling compliance, regulation, taxation. We are seed-to-sale, track-and-trace, compliance, payments, and we serve brands, operators, and governments.

John: Jesse, you're up now. Columbia Care, a company that I'm familiar with, I've worked with them in the past. They're one of the veterans in the RO space. They've been around for a while. You've been making a number of really key acquisitions lately. You've been tearing it up, Healing Center, G. Leaf, I believe, a project, Cann, Cannabis, is that what it is? Still,, Colombia Care embarked on this major rebrand and actually, that's what brought you in. What was the emphasis behind that? What was what's going on there?

Jesse Channon: I know we're talking about data-driven decisions, but there were some pretty easy observations to make in the beginning when it came to branding, and that was that Columbia Care, as an operator, was synonymous with medical markets. We were synonymous with research. It served the organization incredibly well since 2012 for creating that national footprint that we have with regards to building that trust in these medical ecosystems. As we continue to see markets move from medical to adult-use and recreational, we needed to think about our presence as an organization and how that more closely aligned with who we are today.

We spent a lot of time aggregating feedback and information from our team members, from our patients, and our customers in these markets. Where we ultimately landed was cannabis. It's very unapologetic. It's very obvious, what it is that we do. I think like everyone in this room, we believe in the solutions that we're providing, and so there's no reason to shy away from it. What we've really focused on, and to build on what Tim and Jessica were talking about, we've tried to build technology internally where needed to fill certain gaps that we saw.

Forage is a great example of that, where we built our own proprietary recommendation engine and product discovery tool. What it all comes back to is taking these terrestrial datasets and taking these engagements from our customers and our patients and bringing them into digital so that we can leverage that to create better insights. That goes everything from merchandising to product selection to garden planning, how we think about cultivation, in-markets as they move from medical to adult-use programs.

We have the pleasure of working with pretty much everyone on the panel as well as many other incredible teams here that are displaying, and data is at the core of everything that we do. It's the background that I come from. At the end of the day, we want to understand those things that are making that experience unique and try to create our retail experiences and products to complement those things.

John: Do u feel that there is a potential for a cannabis flower to be somewhat commoditized and prices will collapse, so, therefore, the focus will maybe data and tech is going to help mitigate that slide?

Jesse: I think, in short, anytime that you can take the guesswork out of decisions when it comes to things that are mission-critical to the business, that is absolutely the right direction to take. For us right now, in our industry, we're going to continue to see that downward pressure with regards to pricing on products, and wholesale, and all of those things. Brands and creating product forms and formats that closely align to the outcomes that people are looking for, and building that level of awareness around what makes those things unique, I think is incredibly important.

We have to invest in that from a cultivation manufacturing point of view, and we have to invest in that from a customer and branding point of view in order to be able to lead that conversation so that we're not hanging those operations teams out to drive. It really comes back on us to find those learnings and create those insights. We should have a passive relationship with our data, but an active relationship with insights. There are tones of data in the space, that's great.

The insights are what's important, and right now, for us, that's around, what's resonating with our customers and patients, and how can we help to steer them to trying new things that they can integrate into their life.

John: Great, thank you. Brian, I have a question for you. You've been operating and helping people businesses get started in these legal markets for I don't know maybe 10 to 12 years now all over the United States. I work with all out of emerging businesses. Everybody's out there, we got to sell, we got to grow, but there's another piece of that business that's critical for longevity, and that's maybe the compliance and regulatory stuff. Tell me how you see that fitting into this talk about data and smart technology.

Brian Vicente: Sure. I appreciate that, and I'll say it is a little bit of a pinch-me moment when I'm on panels like this, I've been doing this sort of work full-time since 2004. Let me just ask a question, who here has been working in the cannabis space for more than 10 years? What about more than 15 years? A couple of us right on. Fifteen years ago when I started doing this, you didn't track data. You did not want to track data. You didn't want to digitize anything. You wanted to keep it off the books because it was illegal, and guess what? It's still illegal federally, but it's legal in a lot of different states.

The fact that we are now having these individuals coming from the tech field in here, we're digitizing things, we're tracking data, we're making consumer experiences better. We're allowing business owners to run better businesses, hopefully democratizing information so small business owners can come in, is really, really exciting. For me, my introduction to cannabis and technology was about 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I would walk around for clients. I'm a lawyer, I would walk around their grows. Arguably illegal, what was going on, there weren't a lot of laws, but they'd say, "Hey, can you audit?

Can you make sure that I'm following whatever laws there are?" There's not many, but can you make sure I'm following them?" I'd walk around with literally a clipboard and a pen, and I would make marks about the ordinances. What are they doing, what are they doing right, what are they doing wrong? Frankly, we didn't want any more data than that. We didn't want a client to have his stuff seized. Then after a couple of years of doing that, it became clear to me like this is inefficient. This is becoming more mainstream, that clients deserve to have access to actual digital information.

We started a company, Simplify, which is now prominent in the cannabis space, helps people do audits, and basically streamlines a lot of this information that was required previously. We've come a long way, but really the foundation for all of this, and then I'll turn it back over, is compliance. The foundation for every business on this stage, the foundation for business for every business in this room, this gigantic room we're all in, is compliance. If you have cannabis businesses that are following the laws, following the rules, the system works.

If they get out of that, and they're not following the rules, they're going to get dinged. They may go to jail, they may have a civil fine, but they may also go to jail. That's the world we live in. The solutions that we're talking about today are a big part of helping those individuals walk the straight line. If they have the RFD tags, if do they have the compliance software, they can continue to operate functional businesses, and the system will keep on. We work with over a thousand cannabis businesses in my law firm, and the data leaps that we're seeing are just so excited, so excited to be part of it.

John: Great. Thank you. Gary, we haven't forgotten about you, Gary.

Gary Allen: I have nothing to say now.

John: [laughs] No, I'm sure you'll have plenty to say. I remember running into New Frontier at a Lift & Co Conference in Toronto back in 2017, 2018, and no one was really at the booth. Now you guys are like, I think, have exploded onto the scene. Tell us a little bit about what New Frontier does, and how did cannabis become the industry that you guys picked to start in?

Gary: Absolutely. Can you hear me? No. Let's try this one. There we go.

John: That's better than mine.

Gary: Like I said, I have nothing to say. Democratization of data, insights for the consumers, compliance, trace and track. New Frontier Data has been around since 2014 and cannabis, it wasn't a choice as far as we had a business. Cannabis was the business we were going into. When Giadha Aguirre de Carcer who founded the company in 2014 was asked by a consulting firm to go find market research for cannabis and guess what did not exist in 2014, market research for cannabis. Whether you're a legislator, an operator, a brand manufacturer, an ancillary business, data is at the core of how you enter a market.

How you understand the efficiencies of a market, how you connect with consumers, how you keep people compliant, or how you operate the actual business. Everybody who sits on this stage right now has a piece of New Frontier Data. Our charge is really to collect the data, vet the data, make the data professional, and then make it available to everybody who's sitting on this stage, as a matter of fact. We started as-- We used to call ourselves Bloomberg. We tracked a bunch of investments, and we tracked a bunch of financial indices.

We moved into Gartner research, where we started to really take that information and provide really actionable insights and market research for the industry. Over the last three and a half years, as with every major consumer-based or consumer-backed vertical market in the world, we had to start taking a look at the consumers. Like I said before, our job is to-- We are the nexus, in our opinion, we're the nexus of data. If there's data out there that people need, we'd like to provide that data. If there's data out there to collect, we're going to collect that data.

We're going to provide every one of our constituencies, again, our operators, legislators, product manufacturers, and then consumers, with information that makes the market or helps to enable the market to be more professional, more efficient. Our job is to shorten the learning curve, not reinvent the supply chain, but shorten the learning curve from all of the mature markets that we come from.

John: Great. Thank you. I want to get into some use cases in a minute, but first I want to go back to these municipalities and regulated markets. Maybe this is a question again for Brian and Gary. I spent a lot of time traveling around New York State, for example, talking to county officials, local electeds about what a cannabis market could look like in New York. They're making decisions whether they should opt out of a program. What I really realized is a lot of these guys who are making these decisions really don't understand how a cannabis market can impact their jurisdictions.

Maybe Gary and Brian-- Gary to-- Can the data you guys collect be flipped around to help jumpstart new cannabis markets?

Brian: I can speak to that. Two things, one you hit on is-a and this I feel like is when new individuals come to the cannabis space, new business owners, what have you. The fact that we have different municipalities with different laws, rules, regulations, different states with different laws, rules, regulations, different countries, it's quite overwhelming. I think this is something that new entrepreneurs perhaps don't see coming when they come from a federally-regulated industry or something where they're a single state operator. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

From these businesses that have been successful over the years, we're getting tons of data about job production, about economic production, about social services benefiting from this tax revenue. I am actually dealing with a series of cases in Oklahoma right now where individuals are suing their neighbors because they opened a marijuana business, it's totally legal, by the way, to open a marijuana business. They're suing because basically, they don't like marijuana. Their argument it's bringing down the home sale value, when, in fact, it's not.

We have hard data nationally about the fact that people want to live in neighborhoods that have cannabis businesses. Generally, there's a halo effect from that cannabis business. Gary, thoughts on what you're seeing from a data perspective?

Gary: Absolutely. Here's a piece of data for everybody. In 2020, the retail sales of the United States equaled about $20.3 billion. That represented 40.9 million consumers. That's great. We have about 167 million consumers identified in North America. If we're going to get to that $50 billion number, how many millions of consumers do we have to bring into the market, either from the illicit market or that just don't understand, and new entrants into the market. The original question being, can the data be turned and help inform the opening of a market legislatively? Absolutely.

Brian has been doing this for, I didn't count the number of years, found on the retail side and on the supply chain side, absolutely. Ancillary businesses, job creation, social economics. All of these things will be informed. Again, as I said earlier, helping the market entrants shorten their learning curve. We know there's a market. We know there are hundreds of millions of people within the market that want to be inside the market, and data will allow us to get to them quickly, understand what they're looking for, and provide them the education and the on-ramp they need to be successful in the industry.

John: I remember in our conversations about the panel, we were talking, it's possible to track where a person leaves a dispensary and know maybe where they go afterwards. Maybe they go to the movies or maybe they go to the park. If you are an economic developer you can use that data, say, well, maybe I need to augment these areas of the marketplace because I know this is the path, but be careful where you go after dispensary because somebody on this panel is tracking that information. Let's get to some use cases.

Jessica, you guys have been growing, Trellis, I think, is an acquisition recently, Ample Organics pre-pandemic. Let's say I'm one of these emerging or aspiring license holders in New York State, and I want to open up a cultivation operation, how can Akerna help me? How can I be great?

Jessica: Thank you for calling out our product acquisitions. I think what is, in addition to Trellis and Ample Organics, we've added Veridian Sciences, and most recently, 365 Cannabis to our portfolio. What's so exciting about that is we have solidified the ability to connect our compliance, which is table stakes for the industry, to connect that compliance, to connect our ecosystem with more than 80 integrations to anything you might want to use that's related to cannabis technology. We are now tied to every mainstream tax and financial system that you might want to use for your business as you grow.

Everything from spreadsheets to QuickBooks to Sage to NetSuite to SAP, and of course, most recently with 365, also Microsoft 365 dynamics. If you're a cultivator in New York, we're going to evaluate with you where you are today, where you want to grow. What other markets in which you want to operate. We're going to help you pick a financial system and provide the table-stakes compliance as well as the retail and data analytics tools to run your business from soup to nuts.

John: Are you finding that the capabilities of companies you come in contact with are all over the map? Some have good systems, some have bespoke systems. Is that a challenge for you going into a company or into a market?

Jessica: What's wonderful, and the challenge in this industry, so many things of two edges of a blade if you will, or two sides of a coin. We have clients who have started with us and done their first 100,000 in revenue with us. Today they've grown with us and they're doing hundreds of million in revenue. I think that's the difference. The difference is being able to serve you through the full life cycle as you grow. Cannabis, as an emerging industry, is still making these tech decisions.

We are still, and I would say that many many many of the operators with, of course, Columbia Care being a standout, who is looking at data and looking at it in a really smart way, many, many, many operators within the industry are not tracking all of the data points that matter for a very mature business in terms of ROI yields. What's your basket size? When did somebody come in? All of those things, as the industry continues to get more competitive, the more you can be on top of your data, the better you're going to be able to have your business perform.

At the end of the day, software data analytics, any of these tools, if you're picking something, it should provide many times over more value than it costs. That's the evaluation metric. "Hey, can you with your tools,"-- and a great example of this is a client of ours who the budtender was weighing heavy. This is standard practice for deli-style retailers in the industry. Their analytics showed that one budtender was weighing heavy to the tune of 20 grand a year.

In this case, it wasn't theft, he wasn't giving it to his friends. He was just very generous in every transaction, and they were able to adjust their tolerances to do something about that. That alone, that one thing, that one report paid for their software that year.

John: I'm going to be calling you later. Tim, talk a little bit about the TruGreen global products, and what's the power of that? What problem are you solving for people along the supply chain?

Tim: Microphone merry-go-round, sorry about that. I think, John, what you asked were some of the use cases from our perspective.

John: What problem is your product solving for a cultivator or distributor?

Tim: I think the use case and the problem we're solving for the MSO producer dispensary is obvious. Having a digital product that you can track in the supply chain, that you can authenticate at any time in near real-time to have a live inventory in your dispensary that is providing and spinning off data that is a value. If I have too much of something, I can perhaps inform a pricing decision or offer to my VIP clients. Having real-time data product-based inventories and work in progress is invaluable. It eliminates diversion, tampering, and all that good stuff.

On the consumer side, I think that there is a challenge creating connections that matter between the brands and the consumer. Oftentimes what I hear is that producers don't know who their customers truly are. If we can create a connection of value, of education, it's a great use case, is inform me, teach me more about dosing. What are the side effects? What is the product going to do? To understand better the certificate of analysis, where does it come from? Jessica, their company is spinning off rich data from seed to sale.

How do we use that data in a way that is informing a consumer decision and strengthening the bond between producer and consumer? A great use case is show me what I'm consuming. What is a Terpene, describe to me what the Terpene analysis is. What does a THC of this percent mean to me? The empowerment of the consumer is a really simple and valuable use case.

John: That is really important. If you look at the New Jersey regs, which came out a month ago, the labeling requirements alone on a product is the size of my sheet here. I know it all cannot fit on a product, but it's important that transparency and traceability is important. I guess if you can find a way I think your product you tap something and pops up a menu of data points on a particular product.

Tim: I think the secret sauce for us is there's a lot of disparate data islands that are floating around the cannabis ocean. What I like to try to think of what we do well is we create connections to these islands to provide useful and actionable intelligence to a business in the most simplistic sense.

John: Jessie, I was checking your vest out when you came in, it's very cool. It says Cannabar on it. I know there's a couple of cool new terms that Columbia care has on the marketplace like Cannabar and Cannabist, and I think that's part of the rebranding. What's that all about?

Jesse: Cannabist is the new retail platform that we've launched. Throughout the country, we've made a commitment to obviously moving a lot of our legacy infrastructure over to this concept. It's really more than just a rebranding. It is the culmination of all of those conversations and those observations of watching the way that people engage with dispensaries right now, and what we believe the future of the way that people will want to. Look, I think if you've never been to a dispensary before, it can be a bit intimidating. If you've ever brought a friend into one, sometimes it can be a bit intimidating. It can be a bit transactional.

It can feel like you rushed up to a counter and then you get there and they're looking at you like, "What do you want?" What we find is that more often than not people fall back on things that they've tried before, something that they just heard, somebody else order, and that's not what it should be. If we're going to welcome people into this industry-- You are quoting these numbers of 20 billion today, 50 billion tomorrow, I'd argue a hundred as we continue to see transition from illicit markets and expansion of that addressable market. That does not mean that our customers today are going to consume five times much cannabis.

That means that we don't know 80% of our customers right now. If that's the case, if you put the customer at the middle of every decision that you're making, and you truly believe that, then the engagement that we build inside of Cannabist or any other dispensary 3.0 or however you want to look at where we are from a phasing point of view, it's got to be focused on empathetic education. It's got to be focused on engagement, either passively through technology that can be done self-serve or collaboratively with the staff inside, and we have to leverage technologies that allow us to understand and own those data sets to make those decisions once they leave, our four walls.

We do know where people go after the dispensary, that is tracking, that's available. It's been available for years, and in other industries, that's commonplace. If you work for a big QSR or you work for a restaurant chain, you use that with your out-of-home provider every day. You know those mobile ID numbers and where they're landing in a parking lot geo-fenced off after they leave the dispensary, or what boards they've passed to get to you. I think that there is not to be too long-winded, but I started my career in social and building startups on the back end of social technologies and social media forms.

Our Chief Aid Officer and myself have this conversation all the time. There's a lot of similarities between those two ecosystems. When I started working with Facebook, incredibly nascent systems, not as many engineers as you guys would think, and a hundred million plus users, and that just continued to grow. I came to cannabis, and very early on, I recognized something that was an interesting phenomenon, incredible scale on one side. We're servicing a ton of patients and customers, we're growing a lot of plants. We're selling a lot of products.

We're still learning a lot about our industry when it comes to developing these systems and building these linkages between these disparate data to sets across our digital and terrestrial ecosystems. I think we're committed to doing that. We try to continue to stay out in front of that. We work with partners like Akerna and others to try to really think about where's the ball going? How are we going to service that? For us, this rebranding was all about putting the customer in the middle of it and saying, "If I was walking in with my mom or my brother into a dispensary for the first time, what would I want their moment to be like?

Do I want them to go through that experience and be like, 'this was a little bit much for me, I don't think I'm coming back?' Would I want them to say, 'this is pretty comfortable, this feels approachable. I feel like I can ask them questions and I can understand what's the best fit for me?'" I think that's how we breed real loyalty, not just to us as an operator, but as an industry to our customers as we continue to grow over the next three to four years.

John: Thank you. Gary, would you want to add something?

Gary: Yes, I think, Jesse, you're bringing up a really important point. As I said earlier, there are so many consumers that are going to come into the market that are not in the market right now. While we do sell a lot of products, and we have a lot of technologies, and there are a lot of capabilities that are inside the industry right now, again, shortening that learning curve between understanding what the consumer truly needs, because we're the experts we're in a new market where the consumer actually isn't the expert.

Obviously, in the retail market, the consumer's always right, let's make sure we understand what the performance of the consumer is, but we have a responsibility to listen to that data and collect the right data that allows us to educate that consumer and make it a safe experience and make it a positive experience. The alcohol industry went through this in the 30s, the tobacco industry went through this in the 50s and the 60s. We are new, we're new to this. We have all of this technology and all this data. We have to remember if we want this industry to grow the numbers that we all love to throw out, we have to take it seriously.

We have to use data to inform the way we inform the next generation of consumers and the generation after that and the generation after that. We are nowhere near mature enough yet to rest on performance reporting only. If Columbia Care, and obviously this better than anybody with the size of your systems, if I look at my retail location and I simply buy the inventory that I sold last month, I'm not going to grow. Understanding who lives around that dispensary, what the population looks like. What are their preferences? How do they like to be engaged with? What's their age? Where are they going? Where are they migrating to?

COVID hit and everybody talked in the business world about New York moving to Florida. Well, guess what? New York moved to Florida. We saw it in medical dispensaries in Florida. We saw it with products that were sold. We track actually the consumer migration and the movements. We have to take all of that information together and really commit, as an industry, to be safe, to be smart, but inform the person, the constituency that we're really trying to serve, and that's the consumer.

Jesse: John, if I could. I think Gary said something that's really important. One of the things that we recognize really early on, and the reason why we built Forage as a platform is that when you think about those decisions that you're making off data, we were making decisions off data in arear. People came in and they bought this product. What does that mean? In our industry, it means it was there. It doesn't mean it's what they wanted, it doesn't mean it's what they would've picked if every option was available to them. One of the things that we did with Forage is we actually look at all of those sessions.

Even if we don't show the best match because we're not carrying them in the inventory at the time, we're flashing that information on the backend. We can now go in and we can see, in an individual market,

what are people searching for? What are they matching with? If everything was available, all 6,000-plus strains that we have categorized in that system, if all things were equal and available, what would you have picked? What would you have matched with? Leveraging those data sets for doing dynamic planning and planning in our gardens and cultivation facilities.

Thinking about merchandise, third parties, and some of the brand partnerships that we launched moving forward, that was a missing data set for us that I think it's a missing data set for a lot of us in the industry, and we had to get to that.

John: I think you guys are making some really excellent points. I also spent a lot of time consulting in a diversity and inclusion space in the industry. What I'm learning from you guys, the right deployment or utilization of data can really, maybe even the playing field to emerging companies or women or minority-owned businesses that are getting into the space. Maybe you can shorten the learning curve getting into the marketplace or sourcing the right product. My company is focused on Black women and families. I use data to come up with formulations or actually communication strategies.

It's an underserved market because it's underserved because no one's talking to that market. I think the application of data is really important here. We're running short on time, and I wanted to maybe get to some questions. Does anybody have any predictions for the market, on 2022 and 2023? I have one prediction. I think that the OCMs and the Office of Cannabis Managements around the country are going to have a new position, Chief Data and Technology Officer, how about that? To understand what's going on in their market and the systems that are out there? That's my prediction.

Jessica: Well of course I'd love to put on my head hat, Chair of the United States Cannabis Council for a minute here and predict that we will have some movement toward federal change in '22, '21/'22. My wish for the industry is that, to your point, we, because it is good by every objective measure, we build in appropriate provisions for boutique, for cottage, for DEI, micro-business programs. Those are good for innovation. Those are good for the industry as a whole. I think if we approach it from that standpoint, we will ultimately build a better industry.

John: Great.

Gary: I'm going to steal something from one of our investors. Normalization has come way before legalization. My prediction for next year is that most of the brands, and you can actually see it at this show, most of the big multinational brands that have stayed away, either in media, in QSR, in insulator servicing, those that have stayed away because of it not being federally legal are going to say, "The hell with it," and come into the industry. We're seeing that. We're definitely seeing that in the fast-food industry right now. We're seeing it in the health and beauty industry right now.

I think I saw Paychex and another insurance company that's here. People are going to stop waiting for the federal government to give them permission. They're going to want access to the hundreds of millions of consumers that we have access to.

Tim: Certainly, I'm not going to try to say it better than my esteemed colleagues to my right, but I will say this to all of you. You guys made a good choice. If you're in this industry now or thinking about getting in it, this is the growth industry for America for the next 5 to 10 years. Great choice.

Jesse: I think I saw our Head of Government Affairs lurking around somewhere, so I'm not going to say anything on regulatory. I don't want to get in trouble for a crystal ball. I will say I think that with normalization, from a regulatory point of view, we will see more channels open up from marketing as far as inventories, publishers, OTT, maybe even television someday up for bid, which I think, get educational messages out more broadly to this consumer base that we're going to be welcoming into the industry which I think is incredibly important. It's very difficult for us to tell stories right now with the channels that we have to leverage.

I think those stories are important. I think that there's a lot of brands and companies around the country that we should be highlighting that have done a lot for the space. Until we have broader channels to be able to communicate with people, it's difficult to tell those stories.

Brian: I guess what I would add is I think we're going to see medical marijuana in places that we didn't think we'd see it for a while. The South, your Alabamas, your Mississippis, your North Carolinas. I think the next several years-- Some of those have already flipped, but they're going to be coming our way. I think that's really exciting. I wanted to make a quick point about medical marijuana patients, and this was referenced a little bit earlier, but so much of this movement and so much reason we're here is because of medical marijuana patients and how that opened the public's mind to the fact that marijuana is not this terrible drug.

I think that technology can really benefit those patients. If I'm a patient and I see a label, and this label tells me what's actually in that flower, and that it's the same thing that allowed me to sleep or that gets rid of my tremors last week, then that is so crucially important. For recreational consumers, maybe not as important yet, but if we can focus on getting medical patients real information about the products they're consuming, that will just be such a positive development.

John: Thank you. We actually have a couple of more minutes. Does anybody have any questions for the panel? Maybe one or two? I think you guys have answered every question. Let's give it up for these guys. Thank you so much. That was great.