 I have a feeling we'll have more people coming in as they wrap up lunch. So this panel is about data and how data can help build your brand and a lot of times you really don't really think of those two things together. Branding usually is something from the marketing department and from the art department and the people that help make pretty pictures. But really there's a lot that can be gleaned from data to help you make the right decisions about your brand. If you don't pay attention to the data you could make a decision that's going to cost you money. You may choose to brand your product in a way that maybe isn't what people are currently gravitating to or buying. So it really is something that you want to pay attention to. This panel is sponsored by Acerna. You may know them by their former name MJ Freeway. They recently went public this year. Had a really successful IPO. I'm going to be moderating this panel. Joining me is Jeannette Horton from MJ Freeway slash Acerna. I have the hardest time getting used to calling it Acerna. And Gordon Wade. Well, and of course I'm Jay Free. I'm sure you guys already know who they are. Seed to sale tracking. They work with dispensaries. They work with producers. So everyone really knows them very well. And then joining us is Gordon Wade from a company called Solo Sciences. And what his company does, and I'm sure he can give you a better description, but what his company does is basically assure the consumer that the product that they're buying is actually the product that they're buying. And I think it's really especially more important today than ever because again I think one of our earlier panels talked about the vaping issue that we've heard of with all the people getting sick and having so many problems. And a lot of what I've read is that it's been traced to products that weren't what people thought they were buying. And I know that I've heard there's a lot of counterfeit action going on in the market as well in cannabis. And so it's really more critical now than ever that consumers know that the package that they're buying is actually the package that they're buying. So without further ado, I think we'll start it off with really with you, Jeanette, as far as explaining to our audience what I was doing very awkwardly about the critical role of data for brands because you're on the front line. So you can tell them why it's so important. I mean, what you're doing with your data to help brands. Yeah. I'll start with what we're doing with our data to help brands and I'll just give you a sense of what kind of data we're talking about. So as a seed to sale tracking company, we collect data across the supply chain from seed to sale. And listening to the last panel and thinking about the conversational brands that we've had, I thought I'd narrow in on the kind of data we collect at retail. We also collect data at cultivation and we collect data from manufacturing that can give you a lot of interesting information about cost and margins and vendor performance and the right formulas to put into your machines and get that all dialed in. But we're going to focus on retail because I think that makes the most sense for the brands and for the dialogue that we've got today and have heard this morning. At retail, we collect data in two buckets. We collect or I like to think of it in kind of two categories. We collect product data and we collect consumer data. And that's unique for us as a seed to sell software. A Kurner Mj platform, the name of our brand, does collect a lot of consumer data, which is critical for brands to make good decisions about the kind of products they're going to bring to market, about how they're going to adjust their products to meet consumer need, to meet where the hockey puck is going, not where it is today. So product data that we collect, we collect brand information, we collect information about milligrams, we collect information about flavors, if it's chocolates or you know particular like get down to what chocolates are selling more than other chocolates, what flavors do better than other flavors. We collect that at the individual product level but also at the category level. We collect on consumers age, zip code, gender, we can track a consumer uniquely so we know how often they return, we know what they buy, when they buy it, how much they buy. You can tell you how profitable a certain consumer segment is over another segment. So there's a lot you can learn in that data. You get velocity and turns with product data. So what moves the fastest? What's got the best gross margin? There's so much to learn in that retail data and so much we concretely know versus are guessing at when we use the retail data. We've got about 10 years worth. It gives us a lot of history and we've got great coverage across the U.S. to really understand what's happening with consumers and what they're buying. And I would love to kick it to Gordon to actually answer the second part of your question, Deborah, which is how do brands use data? Just giving Gordon's background really working with brands outside of cannabis and helping them use data because I think that's where we're going. We don't use it enough in cannabis to make good data-driven decisions and Gordon can talk about kind of what's best practice outside of cannabis. My name is Gordon Wade. I am a consumer products expert. I created along with two other guys the principal process is used by every major retailer and every major manufacturer on a global basis. The process is called category management and my role was to assemble the data that was needed each step of the process to provide the metrics that people could utilize to build plans between manufacturers and retailers for any given category for any given retailer. And in the process I've accumulated a lot of knowledge about data. The entrepreneur who's the founder of Solar Sciences, Alex Shaw, who's here in the audience, and I worked together 25 years ago when we worked on this particular category management discipline I just mentioned, and Alex asked me to come back and help him in Solar Sciences in creating the sense of trust and the sense of credibility that you need about your brand. People, we've used the word brand a lot and nobody's at this point in time talked about what is a brand. A brand is basically a promise. It's a promise that you as a shopper, as a doctor, as a consumer is going to get the experience that you want, the experience physically, the experience emotionally that you want. This particular industry has, as we've discussed this morning, has suffered from counterfeiting. It's suffered from people not measuring up to that promise. And what Solar Sciences is determined to do is to take the kind of data that Jeanette was talking about, that MJ Freeway slash Akirna captures, and augment that with other data such that you will be able aspirationally to accumulate the data that is used in CPG. And without going into a long baffle gab about what that is, it's basically who buys the product, what are they buying, that is to say flavors, level of impact, level of power, where are they buying it, when are they buying it, why are they buying it, how are we influencing all those things that Jeanette was talking about. That creates a taxonomy for a product and the more that you have, the more you can use to build your brand. Data is to brand building what air is to the human body. You cannot build a brand without data. And the more of it you have, the more accurate you have, the better off you'll be. What Solar Sciences does in its collaboration with Akirna, and I would urge you to Google an article that was in the Salt Lake City Tribune about the collaboration between Akirna and Solar Sciences in medical marijuana in Utah. Because that really represents the future. You know what MJ Freeway slash Akirna does, which Jeanette just recited. What we at Solar Sciences do is we put on the package an icon, what we call a quasar, which has a code on it. The shopper or the consumer or the doctor or the retailer has an app, which they download on their cell phone. And using this app, the app has a single code on it by surfing over so that the app is pointed at the quasar. It will confirm that the product is what it says to be, it was manufactured, by who manufactured it under the conditions in which manufactured. In other words, it creates a sense of confidence and trust, which is really what a brand promise is about. We'll talk more about that as we go on. Do you have a specific case study of how data has been used to grow a brand? Sure. I'm going to use consumer product category. Most of you are familiar with it. It will be something, the little K cups that go into a curing machine and makes coffee. If you go into a store, or if you went into a store a number of years ago, what you would have seen is six or seven brands with multiple flavors with and without caffeine at various prices, with various what I might call brand heritage. Maxwell House had one, you're good friends in mind at Folgers and Proctor had one, and there were many other brands. What happened was that the more sophisticated brand builders began to capture the data so that they could understand much the same way that a young woman talked about here where she was talking about the amount of product that was bought, that the heavy users, so to speak. With that data, they were able to understand the level of loyalty to brands, to flavors, to other attributes. An attribute is something like a flavor, could be a brand, could be an ingredient or lack thereof, could be a particular level of power with the amount of caffeine in the product, etc. So what the brand builders were able to do was to ascertain who was loyal to what and why. They were able to ascertain who was exclusively loyal to a specific attribute, for example, and with that, they were able to go to the retailer and say, why are you carrying seven flavors of vanilla coffee, a K cup? You don't need seven flavors at the same price point. You only need one because the consumer will switch between this brand and this brand, that flavor and that flavor, but they will be loyal to XYZ. So if you have this particular attribute on the shelf, that's all you need that represents that particular attribute. So what happened was the retailers began to realize they didn't have to have hundreds of dollars invested in non-moving inventory with this particular characteristic or attribute that they could narrow their assortment, so to speak, and thereby reduce their inventory, increase their product turn. There's various mathematical, I'm your basic math nerd, so there's calculations you can do on velocity. One of the principal ones called Gemroy gross margin return on inventory investment. By the way, I'm going to be wandering around here, you know, helpless old man, so just come up to me afterwards and I'll try to explain some of this baffle cab I give you here because you're going to be drinking out of a fire hose here with me. So anyway, this Gemroy capability, Gemroy metric can be utilized to help the retailer turn his inventory and become much more profitable. So one way to build your brand is to know who is buying it, who the heavy users are buying, what's the attribute the heavy user is buying, and utilize that, leverage that to modify your own brand assortment and much importantly also, or as importantly, convey that information to the retailer so that the retailer can winnow their assortment to generate more profitability. That's what category management is, that's why Alex Shaw asked me to come back because we want to apply this to your business while we give the shopper the confidence that they are getting the product that they want with the level of functionality they desire, etc. If you don't mind me interjecting, I came from Coca-Cola, I can vouch for what Gordon is saying, I hadn't met him till recently, but those are the practices that we use, that's the science that we looked at when we analyzed data and we analyzed what we had on the shelf and how quickly it was turning and how profitable that was, and it really boils down to data comes back to the data, whatever math you apply to it, you have to start with your base of data, and I like to think of it as either a laser or a crystal ball, so in Gordon's examples you've got a crystal ball that tells you can look into the future and tells you what's happening, but then you've also got a laser that pinpoints what's not working and where do you have the most opportunity and you can in your head get guesses or have gut feelings or you've scaled to a place where you just don't have a line of sight into everything and so you've got the data that gives you the future predictions as well as the laser focus on what's happening now that you could fix or improve. I think sometimes what happens in the cannabis industry is so many companies begin as startups with people that have an idea and they just take it and run with it, maybe without doing some of that homework and doing a little bit of research first, I know someone that I knew had created this smoking accessory and had spent a ton of money on an industrial designer and because she just particularly liked this way of consuming cannabis and I remember when she was, I was having this conversation, I'm a journalist and I was getting pitched this story and I remember thinking in my head the whole time that this pitch is coming to me about this wonderful smoking accessory and how it was quite expensive, they had gotten this very fancy industrial designer and the whole time I'm thinking yeah but nobody really consumes cannabis that way, I know it's not just me but I'm sitting here thinking that's a crazy idea and it never went anywhere and I know she lost a ton of money and I can't help but think had she stopped and invested her time and money more in is this a really good market to go in versus spending all that time and money on that industrial designer, she would not have wasted so much of her investment dollars into a product that basically failed because she really didn't take the time and I wonder if that's maybe one of the issues that we have in the cannabis industry is companies are so many of them are bootstrapped that they feel like they don't have the money to pay for this type of thing but it could become a very expensive mistake to not invest that money right? Oh I'm sorry this industry is a big problem with fragmentation, I mean it doesn't, there'll be no charge for this consulting insight but this industry has to consolidate, you just can't continue at this selling county by county, I heard the one lady talk about selling a specific county late flash there are 3,200 counties in the United States that a lot of people out there you got to reach, it takes money and takes time. I wanted to go back to the issue of brand equity just briefly, there's a book written by a gentleman named Kevin Lane Keller, you can Google it and he talks about the issue of brand equity models, how do you build equity with a brand, what are the characteristics and what's a mathematical or characteristic model that you should use, there are many of these probably 10 to 15 models that exist and there are two or three that have been used for years, one of the most important ones is something called the brand asset evaluator that was developed by Young and Rubicom, the advertising agency named Young and Rubicom a million years ago all of these models in one way or another say the same thing, that brand equity is really built by uniqueness or distinctiveness that if you can create a distinctive product you win and there's even been a study done by Spencer Stewart which is an economic consulting outfit which compared the value of a brand in the marketplace to its brand equity as measured by the brand equity model and basically proved that the economic value added which is the Stern Stewart metric was directly tied to this whole sense of uniqueness, so uniqueness is what you're striving for as one of the several people up here in the previous panel mentioned how unique they were and how they tried to be unique and that's certainly the objective. And I would add to that uniqueness with a market, so Deborah gave the story of a woman's vape device that was obviously very unique, it's how she liked to smoke but it didn't align with any segment in the market and when we were listening to the past panel and they were talking about uniqueness I thought about that challenge especially with chocolates. DeFonce was up here and they were early to the market and that's lucky for them, it's a highly saturated market chocolate edibles and so how do you create something unique and for me the answer is if you're really interested in getting into chocolate edibles or gummy edibles or another category that's highly saturated find the growing market segment that's small but growing or find the small market segment that's still large enough to be profitable and again that's where data is and you see an example senior women is a fast growing and they're highly capitalized they've got a lot of income to spend market and I don't see a lot of products marketed to them so if you were interested in bringing a category of edible another subcategory of edible to the market and you're trying to find yourself to be unique perhaps that's a market maybe that's not your market maybe there's another fast growing market but that's something else you can do with data is figure out how do I make a unique product that still matches to a market and if you can find a market that's yet underserved data is that laser that shows you where to go oh I feel that there's some kernel of a kernel of nugget of information they're sorry thanks Deborah um so you know what I digress I have to take a moment here because um I had asked um Jessica Billingsley who's the CEO of a kernel I said you know you what's up with the name what I don't understand this and she had explained to me that kernel is a software term and Kern is a software term and so that's where a kernel came from I didn't know that I'm not a software geek I had no idea she is uh which is why she runs a software company but I just thought that was super interesting that little bit of information but to get back to this what you just kind of talked about something about a growing segment from from what you've been seeing what consumer segment is growing so senior women is growing seniors in general are growing but but senior women are growing what we see another growing segment that's interesting that grows right at the shift of the medical to the rec market as women so women increase in size in terms of the versus men when you shift to the rec market so if you're where we are California and the market is really still making that transition you've got an opportunity to pick up new entrants new consumers that are women we track new new entrants to the market it's been about nine percent a month this year and new is new to the legal cannabis market we track those entrants so the market is growing with new consumers and our data can tell you who that is where you live because it might be different in Oregon versus California um let me build on that with the kind of data that you can develop and that um solar sciences could enhance one of the things you could do is ask new buyers directly because if you have the if you use the solar science um icon of solar science technology uh you you can have a two-way conversation with the individuals and you could ask the individuals a number of questions about the trigger that caused them that finally tipped the scale to for them to come into the marketplace uh was it a conversation with x was it some experience was it uh some uh issue that they were having in their life what is the trigger that that caused the people how did they feel before and after uh enduring the the purchase experience those kinds of things uh can can help you position your brand and build your brand in consumer products for example for many products that are bought by uh women who who uh work exclusively in the home they're home makers one of the principal things that they're concerned about is assuring themselves that they're being a good mother so the question that's often asked is how do you feel about yourself when you serve this product well those kinds of experiences and those kinds of answers you can only get when you have your data uh augmented by solar sciences can do and that any skilled researcher can do if you have the data if you don't have the data you can't make this up uh the i'm not a big fan of the teacher's union but they have a great bumper sticker and the bumper sticker is if you think information and knowledge is expensive try ignorance there's nothing more expensive than ignorance okay and because you'll you'll lose as we say in kentucky your hat and your ass okay you this is not a good experience you know it's interesting because um when we get to the big traditional cpg companies you know they've got teams that protect their product um they can make sure that there's nobody selling fake frosted flakes or anything of that nature you know this has been um an issue that has come to my attention not long ago about counterfeiting and protecting your brand you know what's the best way to protect your brand now that we're starting to have um not only counterfeiting on the black market because i somebody told me that 80 of the black market is counterfeited products where they're actually uh taking um a cannabis brand and copying the labels and and copying that the product and and selling it as if it was that product you know what what can people do if they've got a brand and they're a small operation to protect it i'm going to give you a self serving answer that is uh uh put the solo image on your package because that's a way of saying to your shoppers we care about your buying what you think you're buying and this will assure that you are getting what you think you're getting so it's a self-serving answer but that's that's the best way you can are the dispensaries getting behind that because i feel like when you go into a dispensary there's no real you know support for them making sure that what i mean you assume that if you go in a harborside or amendment or whatever that the product that they've got on the shelf is the right thing um but do we know that yeah so this is really new technology in this partnership with um a kerna and and solo sciences and i think in terms of answering your direct question do the dispensaries want to do that are they doing that i think a good number of them want to do it um we've seen this across hemp and cannabis uh where people are really concerned as retailers to communicate to their um their audience that their products are authentic that their products are safe the products are coming from where they're coming from and so the um quasar the solo code that goes on the product that is a new new really new technology that in partnership that we're offering communicates to consumers more than what's on the testing label so if i buy some cannabis i've got a testing label that tells me what the state says it has to tell me or tells me what the um retailer has has paid for so the state requires some things that requires you know your mulegrams and it requires a few other things and then other brands decide i want to tell you more i want to get tested for terpenes and tell you about terpenes i want to tell you about some other things on this product and the beauty of this this quasar code is you can um those testing labels are limited in size limited in what you can put on it not very attractive so this code can be branded to to you know match your packaging to be the luxury experience you want it to be and then the consumer can scan it with the app and learn as many things as you'd like to tell them about the chain of custody of that product where it was grown when it was grown when new chins were used to grown it grow it who harvested it when it was processed into oil what solvents were used whether there were any cutting agents added to the solvents all the things you might want to know and you might want to communicate to your consumers to assure them as we get more and more of either the counterfeiting or concerns about i really want a transparency on on what i'm smoking what i'm consuming and i want you to give all that information to me how do you do that on a small package how would you do that on a joint package you can do that with this with the solo code and mj freeway mj platform integration i know with a lot of the vaping lately we've seen some of the bigger companies come out with a press move you know where they've issued a a press release saying you can be sure that what we've got in our vape cartridges there's no you kind of mentioned the word filler there's no added chemicals it's this that and the other and i felt that was really smart of them to get out front and ahead of it because i feel like you know we were seeing this on the six o'clock news and that's not a good thing because i can't imagine what that was going to do to sales of thc vapes where i know you know they're coming from some of these products are coming from organic farms and and i thought their message is going to get lost because people are just going to lump vape into you know all one big category um you know we kind of touched a little bit on the category of uh women of a certain age being in a more emerging consumer group um what really is the what are the products that are emerging i know for a while there was all microdose was the big thing you know is is there a new you know product trend that we're seeing vapes yeah so um we find older consumers are vaping a lot um so vapes we had actually took a look at the data with the recent news in vaping and have seen just a bit um no decline in vape sales um in the cannabis legal market so they've been growing steadily and really fast and there's been no no impact in sales with the recent news you know and i also kind of wonder if a lot of the vape troubles we were seeing were from kids that that suck on a jewel like every five minutes and then that's what's really hurting their lungs but then they kind of lumped the whole thc vape into the category and we don't know and differentiate it and that's part of the issue with you know a lot of these have been purchased on the illegal market there's no seed to sell tracking there's no compliance there's no way of knowing what's in those products and whether they're full of pesticides and that we don't know so purchased from a legal market and the what's special about cannabis that's surprising is the amount of transparency and accountability we're bringing to a consumer product good that's more than any other industry you don't know what's happening with your tomatoes or your lotion or any other products you're consuming down to the level that we know with cannabis i you know it's funny that you bring that up because i know um now once you kind of get in your head that you're thinking about these uh cannabis products that you're buying and down drilling down to the farm it's coming from and such uh you can go in the grocery store and buy all kinds of foods that we have no idea where it's coming from and when we had that whole equal i thing with the lettuce it took them weeks to figure out where that came from and then when you get into um pig farms most of the farmers won't even let you onto their farm they won't let the regulators onto the farm to to figure out what's going on so if you had that kind of data you keep that from happening or you if there is a problem you determine it really quickly but that also protects the brand because back to that point if you've got the data to support that behind your brand your brand has once again what Gordon was pointing to trust and i thought that that was a really amazing point that you made at the beginning was you know what is a brand which is seems like a basic question but it was being able to trust in that product and the think of the experience uh when you have one of these quasars on the package and you have your own cell phone so this is a level of trust and confidence because you've got your cell phone in your hand you've got the app on your phone you're not depending upon something printed on the package that may not be accurate uh that may not even be the package it was made once you see the um uh quasar and and you see it with the cell phone that you're holding in your own hand uh it has a level of reinforcement for trust and confidence that is hard to get from almost any other experience i'm curious have people um started down one road with a product and then started that you know of that then once they saw the data pivoted and went a different direction because i feel like maybe that that often happens that you fall in love with an idea um kind of the sample the the example i gave earlier you fall in love with an idea because it came from you so of course it has to be amazing um and and then sometimes i feel like maybe um company leaders even though they see the data they just don't want to believe it because it was telling them that their idea maybe wasn't the greatest idea um i feel like you know it may be hard sometimes for company leaders to get that data and and then actually follow it i mean it's important to get it in the beginning to get your data you we've all said that to collect that in the very beginning so you don't make those costly mistakes because building an operation a cannabis operation around an idea is really expensive proposition so if your idea wasn't the right idea the product wasn't the right product that's that's not going to work usually what most the time most the time people have the product right what we see people making tweaks around is pricing we see them making tweaks around formulations um we see them innovating and moving to a new a new way of producing their product so live resin um is the most popular kind of name for concentrates right now so if you're buying a concentrate and you're thinking about types of concentrates it's hard to kind of call what do you call live resin but if you're thinking about um what's popular with consumers among concentrates if that's in the name that's very popular so that gives you a data to say make tweaks to a product we see more tweaking to say you know what i'm gonna i'm producing a great concentrate from a great strain but i really want to be able to call it live resin so i'm gonna change the way i produce this product in order to produce that type of concentrate because it's gotten very popular can the data give you that i mean can the data drill you down into those types of words like live resin it can it can and so we we produced a guide around concentrates recently for seven ten live resin's the most popular uh type of concentrate people are buying but sauce whatever you think of its sauce because i you know you label it sauce and it might look one way it might look another way but it's growing people are very excited to buy what is sauce so it's a particular it's different so sauce is a saucier concentrate it's a little bit more liquidy and often it'll have diamonds or crystals in it mixed in with the sauce and this is crystals this has become very popular so are you still but do you would and forgive me if being ignorant i'm a personal fan when i'm not six months pregnant so so are you do you put the sauce in a in a dab yeah you can adapt you dab it like you would dab anything else any other concentrated it's just a slightly different kind of consistency essentially okay um and maybe there's other things probably concentrate you know people out there extraction artists who want to strangle me um but yeah and and that i could see where that could be kind of uh where again this data is giving you that brand information because when you get into that concentrate area and you got wax and crumble and shatter who how do you make yourself unique right in that world right and so i would tell you sauce people are in love with sauce right now so there there you go that's that's the way to to get something any i would also feel like you know what we've seen in cpg as well traditional cpg is is flavorings and and you know how those trend go in and out flavorings and packaging so in cpg for sure like established cpg think of coca-cola or um kinds people have started innovating with packaging how do you bring innovative packaging to the market something probably everyone has seen or the new if you could a Chick-fil-A they have those packets of catch up where you like open it this way you kind of pull it down and dip or you squeeze it's still just catch up but the packaging innovation turns out to be unique and interesting and that's really helpful and so we we capture packaging to understand what packages of joints sell better as a three pack a six pack a two pack um and then how do you innovate with packaging how do you change your milligram um your your up your milligrams or lower your milligrams and conveying a whole chocolate bar or small chocolate bar and there's so many things you can dial in to understand this is the right package size or the growing package size for this segment that same experience that jenette was talking about exists across numerous product categories the the issue of packaging uh and utilizing the right size uh take uh tied pods for example that is a function of the fact that women were not using women who did the mocha laundry were not using the proper amount of product and therefore they were getting a sub optimal result and and not uh significantly not making proctor and gamble enough money because the consumer wasn't using enough so this was a scene by proctor is that everybody wins we'll we'll put them in a pod and give them the precise amount of product uh it's in technical terms it's builder and surfactant there's two driving functions within a detergent we'll give them that and we'll we'll force them to use this they'll get a better result they'll be happier etc etc unfortunately children thought they were big candy and began to eat them which is not desirable and that gets to an issue of safety with uh with cannabis uh one of the things that we heard one of the ladies in the previous panel talk about negative experience at different levels of potency and um this is going to cause a problem i mean this is a litigious society in which we live in i'm sure that people are going to start suing everybody for everything and and one of the things one of the ways that you can help to avoid that is by using a system similar to uh what akirna uh is is using and the with the capabilities uh and the assurance that can be provided by something like the solo science uh situation because you can say well we we told you this this this was what we told you it was what we said it was and you know you have some responsibility for x y z so it's it's going to happen and it kind of reminds me of i had um interviewed a gentleman that ran a company that does these uh cartoon figurines and they come in a square box and whenever you go to comic con the biggest line on the floor is the people that are in line to get these limited edition figurines in these square boxes and he had told me when he took over the company um they were floundering they weren't doing very well and one of the things that he implemented was he changed the packaging of these figurines because so many of the people that bought them were collectors and he said and they often didn't open the box of the toy is very much like you know 40 year virgin and um and and so he designed the boxes so that you could see the number of what the figurine was in the box and the number was on the top the number was on the side and the he had it in specific spots so you could stack the boxes and still see him you could stack them another way and still see him and so the collectors were thrilled that they finally had what they had been looking for which and it was such a minor thing blew the sales out because he made this simple change because he knew again that the data had told him that this was what people wanted and they weren't getting it from that company um looking ahead you know um what's this going to look like you know as I mean you you mentioned that we're really just kind of getting started on using data with cannabis where are we going well we we we know what the future looks like I mean our objective is to create the the symphony of data and of metrics that exist in uh cpg today and we can do that we we know what that looks like what we have to do is begin to capture the data and and then create the metrics but we have the platonic idea of the of our aspiration we know what that is it's not new it's been around for 20 25 years I want to go back briefly because I talk briefly about health effects one of the positive things that's going to happen especially in Utah as people are given uh cannabis for medical reasons because they will have the solo app and the Akirna data we'll be able to create A and B panels test panels for cancer patients and know what level of of potency did what under what circumstances and put it into this in evolving set of data that's coming utilizing predictive analytics to understand things like the progress of breast cancer and whether how cannabis would interact with that etc etc so the this data has not only a recreational capability or function but a dramatic scientific function if you know A that is correct stuff and B you can assure that the individual the patient or the test participant actually used the product that he or she was supposed to use do we have any questions I think we'd love to see if anybody has any questions for our panels yep we have some questions some people are shy about asking questions because they think that it makes them stupid I'm a reasonably smart person and I ask a lot of questions because I don't know much of anything so feel free to ask questions I certainly won't consider evidence of stupidity I consider evidence of intelligence and if you don't want to talk about it here please come and see Jeanette and me we'll be roaming around here and please come and see us and ask anything you want to well we're here to help we want to advance the cause and and the best way we can do that to share the information experience we have far away when it comes to predictive or prescriptive data it's one thing to have the data in your stakeholders hand it's another for them to be able to extract the insight that it provides how do you go about educating your stakeholders to become more data literate so we have I'll answer that for MJ platform you're right it's one thing to collect data it's a whole nother thing to analyze the data and get insights out of the data that help you make good decisions those are miles apart from each other so we provide in platform a visualization tool that is a lot of calculations for you it gives you gross margin it gives you sales it gives you you know all the data you want about consumers tells you gender and age etc etc are all calculated for you so you don't have to go slice and then you can slice and dice it you can slice it by product you can slice that by category and get your analysis there and really easy visual representations it's not going to give you everything but you can build your own dashboards and tools and then you know at least have a one-time consultation with us to build it or anyone else and then have this data refreshed every 15 minutes for you to come back to and answer those key questions and I would also tell you start somewhere start with a couple of questions you want to answer and then build from there it can get overwhelming because there is so much data collected start with a couple of questions and go from there but we do provide visualizations that make it a lot easier to answer take data and turn it into insights the issue is what are the questions we people always worry about the answers but the answers you can only get the right answer if you ask the right question so it helps if you ask yourself what is the problem I am trying to solve what is the question I'm trying to answer or what question if answered would put jingles into my genes those are the that's where you start then we developed a concept called analytical pathways which is if the if the question you're trying to solve is this here are the here's the order of operations in math geek terms here's the order of operations you need to do to get you that answer we many years ago put these issues up in algorithms on the computers of information resources and nielson who are the two principal providers of pos data and other kinds of data in the consumer package industry so when a person asks a question they we already had the pathway to the answer in fact nielson called that product nielson answers another question so what are may personally I haven't come across any system that integrates fully with metric but what are things that a lot of the software systems relations with the regulatory systems what are you guys doing to it because I know there's a lot of information that the regulatory systems will not give and a lot of that information could be very helpful to the industry and I really definitely see that that would be a benefit to the software program so I'm trying to figure out like how are you guys relating with the the governments in the various different states in these regulatory systems so we're actually plug for us fully integrated into metric in nine states but I can't say that I don't think that's true for California yet that being said though what the state systems collect is much less data than what's usually collected by the seed to sell software so as the seed to sell software is going to be a better source for for data because there's going to be usually more data and richer data but I say I say usually and it might not be usually with our software it's much much richer we collect a lot of data it makes us someone asked me about what's the difference between your software and other software's earlier it makes us a little we're not as simple to use because we're asking you to enter more data but that data is so much more valuable to you you can answer so many more questions and you can with what's what's only required to be collected by metric is not going to answer your questions so that's your point you're pointing out you got to move over to a seed to sell software and then assess if you're really about the data assess which one of these systems collects the most data I can use that's the real value metric's going to make you track some stuff or wherever you are whatever state you're in that data is great great for them it tells them about taxes and it helps them come out when they inspect you you need a lot different data about cost of goods about your consumers that you're going to get out of a proper seed to sell software so circling back to brand uniqueness for a second you were saying that it's very important for the brand to be unique and to be authentic but you're also talking about pivoting a little bit and identifying a market share that hey you may need to go over here how do you square those things with your client if there's a conflict well I think it has to be squared you know you look at where the opportunity is and you say this works for us and for our brand or this doesn't that's what that's where the magic is we I would never tell you to not be authentic you've got to figure out this this growing segment makes sense for us as well we can do this well what else there there are less expensive research techniques you can use I mean I would be shocked if people hadn't been using something like a focus group where you can bring in users or non-users as a case may be of various products and simply ask them and ask them you know why they're doing x and why they're doing y you can even create products and throw them out on the on the table and ask the people what about this product here's what this product does how would you visualize that some people use quantitative scoring techniques after they have a focus group where they'll show people a particular product idea with various attributes and then score it and doesn't take much money to collect a bunch of folks and you don't need a whole a whole lot of people or respondents to get some idea it helps you more on what on getting rid of the bad ideas than finding the really super ideas but I've seen people literally find super ideas in focus groups one of them I can remember very specifically was in infant diapers but that's another story so there are there are simple less expensive research techniques that you can use all right well one more question I see someone back there when you're selling like do the same principles apply when you're selling raw materials to the manufacturer I would think so because I would think that there's you know whether there's trend is towards organic or certain strains I mean building an authentic brand is going to apply even I think to raw materials and there's what one material is it and I could tell you what data you could collect or use I mean it really depends but I bet there's some data we could give you that would be useful for you as well like biomass biomass and how okay yeah absolutely I mean what you're going to want to know it this is how where I would you're telling me you're selling biomass you're going to want to know my guess would be what what's it going to be used for what are the growing trends and the finished goods that your product would go into and that would help you figure out what's the right raw material to sell and pricing yeah yes and pricing so thank you Deborah because you want to be priced where it's attractive for them based on what their in retail prices and again there are cheap ways to evaluate pricing we can talk about them later are we almost done here I just want to thank you on behalf of solo sciences for tolerating us at least me and both Jeanette and I'll be here and be more than willing to answer any questions that you might feel more comfortable in asking in a one-on-one situation thank you very much yes thank you we actually have a fact sheet in your folder that you got with some other data tidbits like the nine percent new consumer entrance and that senior women are growing so if you're interested take a look at that all right we'll be queuing up our next panel bigger is not always better you know we've got we've had about 200 of yes