This year’s Cannabis Quality Conference is being held alongside the long-running Food Safety Consortium, bringing cannabis quality professionals into the same room as food safety experts and creating an overlap between the two industries as they work through many of the same quality, testing, traceability, and safety challenges.
That overlap is particularly relevant as cannabis moves toward a more medical and federally regulated framework. The industry will need to upgrade its operations to meet higher standards, and food safety has spent decades developing many of the systems cannabis is now being asked to build.
The cannabis industry has largely operated without required GMP or cGMP certification, as most state regulatory models do not mandate it. Federal policy is now pointing toward greater oversight. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice rescheduled marijuana as a Schedule III drug, a change expected to bring increased FDA involvement in setting standards and providing regulatory oversight.
The conference takes place October 21–23 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, alongside the 15th annual Food Safety Consortium, as the industry begins preparing for what greater federal oversight could mean for cannabis quality and manufacturing.
Building Quality Into the Manufacturing Process
Antoinette Duncan, CEO of Duncan Life Sciences, is the opening keynote speaker for this year’s Cannabis Quality Conference. Duncan has spent two decades working in quality systems across the pharmaceutical, medical device, and cannabis industries, including with MSOs such as Green Thumb Industries.
Her keynote, “Good Enough for Mom: Building a Culture of Quality in Cannabis Manufacturing,” focuses on helping employees see SOPs as part of their day-to-day work. The idea is to make the procedures second nature so employees can operate on autopilot, rather than treating SOPs as paperwork or as something the quality department checks after the fact.
That can be a challenge in cannabis, where many employees are coming into regulated manufacturing for the first time.
What’s on the Agenda
The Cannabis Quality track covers a lot of ground, with a strong lineup of industry experts covering quality systems, lab testing, certification, food-safety crossover, and safety science. Here’s a look at some of the sessions and the issues they’ll cover.
Two sessions look at quality management systems from different angles. Alex Hearding, founder of Red Wolf Risk, works with individual companies to identify their specific gaps and develop SOPs to address them, drawing on ISO 9001, GACP, and EU-GMP readiness concepts. Ron Potochar, of D.L. Newslow & Associates, takes a standards-based approach, outlining established standards such as GMP, HACCP, ISO 17025, and GLP, and showing how to apply them throughout a cannabis operation.
Lab testing dives into yeast and mold testing across six state cannabis markets. Graham Antoszewski, market data analyst for the Maryland Cannabis Administration, presents research showing that yeast and mold testing standards vary widely from state to state in action limits, testing protocols, and reporting practices. That raises questions about whether compliance results reflect actual contamination or inconsistent lab and regulatory practices.
His study benchmarks testing data from six state markets against a statistical model built on how microbial contamination naturally behaves. He finds that states with higher action limits tend to produce data that lines up with those natural patterns, while states with lower limits show signs of data censoring and other reporting artifacts. Overly strict thresholds can restrict cultivators and make the underlying test data harder to trust, undermining consumer protection.
New York’s laboratory oversight program gets its own session. Victoria Pretti, a research scientist and manager at the state’s Office of Cannabis Management, walks through how New York’s lab testing rules evolved as the state moved from medical cannabis in 2014 to adult-use legalization in 2021, and how the contaminants regulators worry about changed along the way. She covers how labs get permitted and renewed each year, how OCM inspects them, from record audits to multi-day on-site visits, and how the agency verifies a lab’s results back to the source, sometimes called “cradle-to-grave” traceability.
Darwin Millard, technical director at Cannabis Safety & Quality (CSQ), looks at certification and market access, including the certifications available to cannabis and hemp operators and what they can open up in markets like the EU. He covers the difference between process and product certifications, what operators should look for when evaluating certification bodies, and how certifications such as cGACP can help cannabinoid producers meet European market requirements. He also looks at dietary supplement certification and what it can mean for hemp-derived CBD products seeking access to major U.S. retailers.
Cannabinoids entering the food and supplement supply get their own panel, bringing together Vaughn Hartung, co-founder and CSO of FloraWorks, along with food-safety auditors and regulatory and quality leaders. The panel examines what it takes for a cannabinoid supplier to meet the same standards as any other food or dietary ingredient supplier. It also digs into whether existing GRAS and New Dietary Ingredient frameworks are enough to evaluate non-intoxicating cannabinoids, or whether more clarity or guidance is needed.
Nikki Sasher, M.S., M.B.A., PCQI, looks at air, an often-overlooked part of cultivation facilities. Her session covers how airborne particles and microorganisms move through grow spaces and how facility design, filtration, and monitoring can affect both plant health and compliance outcomes.
On the science and safety end, Shawna Vreeke, director of toxicology at True Terpenes, walks through how the company built the cannabis industry’s first in-house toxicology program and contributed to ASTM International’s safety standards for vape ingredients. More recently, the company brought in an independent inhalation toxicologist with FDA-regulated product experience to audit the program and stress-test the science behind how it evaluates ingredients.
Another session covers a biological potency assay from CannaMetrix. Chief scientific officer Kristofer Marsh presents a cell-based assay built on human endocannabinoid receptors that measures how cannabinoid and terpene compounds behave biologically, not just what a chemical composition test shows. He’ll walk through data on the assay’s specificity and reproducibility, and how it can be used in product development and strain selection.
Morgan Keefer, a senior laboratory accreditation professional specializing in cannabis testing compliance, quality management, and ISO/IEC 17025 standards, leads the Friday session “Breaking Silos for Cannabis, Learning from Food.” Food has struggled with disconnects between agencies like USDA, FDA, and CDC, the same disconnect cannabis faces with USDA, FDA, and DEA. Food addressed inconsistent lab testing accuracy through proficiency testing, a fix cannabis is now working through too. Worker safety improved in food over time, but Keefer notes it’s still a significant challenge in cannabis and hemp. The same recall and root-cause-analysis problems that show up in food are showing up in cannabis as well. The panel brings in perspectives from ASTM D37, CSQ, a compliance testing lab, a lab assessor, and a worker safety advocate.
Mary Lou Bosco, of AIM North America, looks at how a strong audit and compliance ecosystem, internal audits paired with independent third-party ones, helps cannabis operations catch gaps before regulators do and build trust with investors and consumers. She also looks at supplier management and how to hold suppliers to the same standards as the business itself. She sees audits as a way to strengthen the business rather than just satisfy regulators.
The Food Industry Has Been Working on This for Decades
The Food Safety Consortium brings decades of experience in risk management, corrective action, traceability, audits, and food-safety systems to the same event, making the crossover with Cannabis Quality valuable for both industries. Its program includes sessions on adaptive food-safety systems, FSMA traceability, root-cause analysis and CAPA, audit effectiveness, and the use of data and technology in food safety, along with training in areas such as FMEA and the FSPCA Food Traceability Rule.
Cannabis companies already have systems for cannabinoid potency, plant-derived contaminants, cultivation-to-manufacturing traceability, and rules that shift from state to state. What they don’t have is a food-safety regulatory framework built for a medically regulated world that complies with federal standards.
Food safety has spent decades working through many of the same issues cannabis is now facing. Having the two tracks together gives both industries a chance to see where they can learn from each other, where their systems can complement each other, and where they can work together.
Learn more about the Food Safety and Cannabis Quality Conference taking place in Washington, D.C this October.
