There’s still a learning curve that cannabis growers, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers must master if they are to avoid the pitfalls of inefficient practice.

To grease the wheels of progress, a Palo Alto, California, company called Confident Cannabis is revolutionizing the way the cannabis industry functions. They’ve used their technical expertise to engineer software solutions that will centralize and unify the wholesale cannabis trade, which has been stuck in ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ mode for too long.

Confident Cannabis Has the Answers

Confident Cannabis is a proactive, solution-oriented company.

“In your business, you deal with this problem,” says Confident Cannabis VP of Marketing Brad Bogus, unveiling his company’s approach as it recruits a hypothetical client. “This is a problem because of X, Y, and Z. Here’s what you can use and know about how things are changing, how the industry is growing, and what we’re doing to address it that can help you solve this problem.”

What cannabis has lacked, explains Bogus, is an easily accessed online platform where growers, manufacturers, and retailers can come together to find business partners and complete mutually beneficial transactions.

“We’re trying to solve the wholesale cannabis B2B trade problem,” he says. “Business-to-business trade in cannabis is disjointed; it’s not centralized and is usually done on a one-on-one basis. It’s a very offline, very slow, and inefficient way of doing trade.”

To replace this outdated system, Confident Cannabis has created two online platforms that facilitate a more rational and transparent approach to trade. The first is an expansive, catalog-style wholesale marketplace site, where producers, manufacturers, and retailers can communicate and complete transactions smoothly and swiftly. The second is a scientific data site, where marketplace buyers can find test results revealing the contents of the products they’re interested in purchasing. These results are posted directly by the laboratories, using a type of software known as a laboratory information management system (LIMS).

Wholesale Cannabis Trading Made Easy

Confident Cannabis’s online marketplace is a bustling forum where growers can find manufacturers seeking the proper ingredients to create specialized cannabis products, and where manufacturers can connect with dispensaries and shops licensed to sell their wares.

Cannabis manufacturing companies “don’t know how to source bulk cannabis very well,” Bogus explains. “They probably have a few suppliers they work with. But they need new providers as their scale of operations grows.”

Previously, cannabis companies participating in the wholesale market had to initiate and maintain relationships on the supply chain through phone calls, emails, text messages, Instagram contacts, and face-to-face visits. Such activity is time-consuming, eats up resources that could be better spent elsewhere, and limits the geographical range within which partnerships can be realistically formed. This approach can be especially frustrating and futile if manufacturers are looking for cannabis products with unique chemical profiles, which their regular suppliers might not be able to supply.

“We can provide a space where they can source bulk across the state,” Bogus elaborates. “They can search for a particular grade of material. They can further filter by test results.”

Manufacturers aren’t the only ones using the Confident Cannabis wholesale marketplace. It also provides an ideal outlet for retailers seeking high-quality products to sell in their stores or dispensaries. Retailers need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff since they’re constantly besieged with pitches from eager self-promoters selling the “Next Big Thing” that will transform the cannabis industry forever.

“Retailers have an influx of noise” is how Brad Bogus describes the challenge. “If they spend 15 to 30 minutes with every one of these vendors, their whole day is completely taken up.”

For dispensary and shop owners, the Confident Cannabis website eliminates the guesswork. They can thoroughly and carefully evaluate everything that’s out there, check test reports to verify contents and make heady purchases that will diversify their product offerings without diminishing their quality.

To facilitate free and fair trade, Confident Cannabis compiles a new Market Report each month, which they supplement with daily real-time data that tracks pricing trends for cannabis in general and also for specific strains, extracts, and chemical characteristics. These reports allow sellers to price their products appropriately, and to make adjustments in their production strategies if doing so will enable them to reap more profits.

The marketing website also offers simple and convenient order tracking services, removing even more unpredictability and uncertainty from the purchasing process. For Confident Cannabis, transparency and reliability aren’t just buzzwords but are synonymous with their business model.

Certified Results Produce Satisfied Customers

Whenever a grower or manufacturer puts a batch of flowers, concentrates, or edibles up for sale with Confident Cannabis, they must sanction the release of a certified testing report from a licensed cannabis laboratory. This information is then made available to potential customers on the Confident Cannabis lab testing platform, which can be easily accessed from the marketplace site.

Under current law, these products must be tested to determine their THC and/or CBD content, their moisture content, their contamination levels (i.e., heavy metals, pesticides, insecticides), and in some cases, their terpene content. Only government-approved labs have the authority to perform these tests, and their certified results are guaranteed to be comprehensive and accurate.

When clients check the menu of products available on the Confident Cannabis marketplace website, they can download testing data simultaneously. The raw data is made available, along with Confident Cannabis explanations of how that data should be interpreted. Confident Cannabis clients can broaden their search for business partners on the marketplace website, and at the same time, receive verification that the products they purchase come precisely as advertised.

In this system, no tomfoolery or fakery is possible. Test results cannot be altered or hidden, and Confident Cannabis will not work with vendors who attempt to obfuscate in any way.

Test results are made available to manufacturers or retailers in the form of a QR code that can be scanned. If they so choose, manufacturers can download copies of this QR code and attach them directly to their products before shipping them to retailers. Once they’re on display in stores, customers can scan the QR codes with their phones, to confirm the contents of what they’re purchasing.

“More and more consumers want to see this information and see that the products they’re consuming are safe,” Bogus says. He points out that this is especially useful for people who want to buy CBD products, where quality control and regulation are notoriously lacking.

“This is a minefield right now,” Bogus explains. “I’m holding my breath, hoping that nothing really bad happens that sets us back as an industry, but it very well could.”  

Not if Confident Cannabis can help it. Even though end-of-the-line consumers are not their target customers, Confident Cannabis can make the purchasing process more transparent for them as well. All and all, their software creates a win-win situation for everyone.

The Simplest Concepts Can Bring the Biggest Profits

The concept behind Confident Cannabis’s software platforms is a simple one, and its benefits seem so obvious it’s surprising it hasn’t been done before. Bogus refers to his company’s innovations as “a monumental shift in the way cannabis businesses buy and sell from one another,” and it would be hard to find fault with that statement.

The Confident Cannabis websites are currently available only to supply chain actors in the states of Oregon and California. But the rationale for such a system is so strong that it seems only a matter of time before Confident Cannabis is operating coast to coast. Their capacity to connect buyers and sellers from anywhere could be especially handy if cannabis is ever legalized at the federal level, which would let loose the forces of interstate commerce for a popular and in-demand product.