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What’s the biggest challenge facing the cannabis industry right now, and how are you and/or your company addressing it?
The biggest challenge is that growers and brands can’t reliably guarantee their customers the same product every time. Companies build their legacy on proprietary strains, and those lines can decline over time from issues like HLVd, forcing expensive rounds of testing and tissue culture cleanup, or abandoning the line altogether. Separately, even a healthy line can vary in yield and quality from one batch to the next due to cultivation practices. When consumers can’t rely on a product showing up the same way every time, it creates real problems for individual brands and for the sector’s credibility as a whole. We provide diagnostic tools grounded in science that other agricultural sectors have relied on for decades, to support clean, consistent cultivation. We also help new product lines get to market faster through marker-assisted breeding tools like sex determination, so growers aren’t burning a season’s worth of space and labor finding out what they’re working with.
Where do you see the most exciting opportunity for growth and innovation in cannabis?
Marker-assisted breeding, genomic sequencing tools that let breeders identify a strain’s true genetic identity and register it against a reference database, and tissue culture for faster, more consistent propagation. These tools let growers move from “hope this batch turns out like the last one” to actually engineering for consistency, protecting their genetic IP, and breeding for specific traits like disease resistance or cannabinoid profile. Cannabis is just now catching up to where other crops have been for years, and that gap is where the real opportunity sits.
What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to break into the cannabis industry?
Learn systems, protocols, and SOPs from established, successful industries, these concepts aren’t unique to cannabis. Understanding how rigorous process and quality control work in other sectors, and knowing how to apply that thinking to a cannabis brand, is what separates operations that scale from ones that stay stuck reinventing the wheel.
What is the most important thing you have learned from your experiences in the cannabis industry?
Not all cannabis grows are equal, just like not all cannabis plants are equal. We’ve worked with thousands of farmers across every level of financial backing and every cultivation style: organic, synthetic, indoor, outdoor, homegrow, small warehouse, acres of field. Learning what each of them actually needs is a lot like learning the specific inputs your favorite strain wants. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, and the labs and companies that pretend otherwise don’t last.
What do you want your legacy to be as it relates to the cannabis industry?
We pioneered direct-to-consumer plant DNA testing in cannabis. Instead of “call for pricing” and the overly detailed, prohibitive paperwork and license requirements that used to gatekeep this kind of service, we built a model where a grower could go to our website, order tests, submit samples, and get results without any BS. We offered flexible payment systems because we understood cannabis brands often have real banking issues. And we communicated complex science to a group of people who often had no scientific background, making our tests understandable and genuinely usable, not just accurate on paper. When we started, sex testing was something most cultivators had never heard of. Now it’s something practically every cannabis cultivation operation uses. If Farmer Freeman’s name is remembered for anything, I want it to be for turning that into standard practice.