The vape-related lung injury crisis of 2019 may have drawn (mostly) to a close, but it’s made a permanent impact on the vaping market. Customers are starting to care a lot more about where they buy their cartridges, who made them, and whether they’re safe, so trustworthiness should be front-of-mind for any licensed cannabis producer.
The landscape of 510 cartridges can seem a little like the Wild West, but it doesn’t have to be. California-based cannabis technology and hardware company CRMC has come up with a way to encrypt your carts themselves—not just the packaging—so your entire production line is traceable, from seed to sale, plus a few extra goodies for the consumer.
“This technology is protective to consumers who are on the market to purchase the real products,” says Gerry Ning, Director of Marketing and Product Development at CRMC.
The concept comes down to a tamper-evident memory chip that stores every bit of data about the oil inside the cart, not just the producer and origin, but stats like THC and CBD content and terpenes. It can hook up to any 510-thread battery, or when connected to CRMC’s battery, it can be easily authenticated.
“There’s a chip in the cart and there’s a chip in the batteries,” explains Ning. “So when the battery connects to the cartridges, it will first make sure the carts are authentic. And then it’ll read all the information prewritten in the chip and make sure it has the best vaping settings.”
Security beyond the packaging
Some brands authenticate their products on packaging, but that only goes so far.
“People can put fake QR code on the package and you have no way to authenticate it,” says Ning. “We feel that this is the most secure way to store information, and also the most secure way to make sure your product is the real one. Basically, you can track the origin of the oil”
So no matter where your cartridge ends up, all the essential information is hard-wired: cultivation, extraction, distribution, even any relevant licensing information.
For an added layer of security, CRMC chooses the brands it works with carefully. Part of that is making sure the companies are trustworthy. They also need sophisticated testing not only to analyze the oil, but to see how it works with CRMC’s technology.
“We set a bar where we only work with premium oil producers,” explains Ning. “We can’t just sell to anyone, because when the product goes on the market, it’s going to be there. We have to make sure producers have a reputable background and are able to make sure it doesn’t go into the wrong hands.”
A better vaping experience—hands-on or plug-and-play
Safety is important, but so is a great session. When the cartridge communicates with the CRMC battery, it’s not only authenticating, it’s also communicating the best way to vape.
“For specific oils, the information was prewritten in the carts,” says Ning. “So the battery will read out the information and use the optimal setting for the oil. That’s what we call temperature control.”
This means there’s no guesswork in figuring out the right temperature for a specific kind of oil—you just pop the cartridge on and start vaping. But for those who like a bit more of a challenge or are a little pickier, there are a variety of customization options, too. You can either override the settings to choose from three standard temperatures, or you can get really wild on your PC with a corresponding app.
“You can manually adjust almost every setting on CRMC batteries—whatever we can do on a battery you can do as well,” says Ning. This goes for customizing the light indicator colors to writing preset vaping programs that change temperature over a set period of time. When building your own temperature program, intervals can even be less than a second.
Furthermore, CRMC is capable of memorizing your vaping habits for the benefit of conducting personal experiments or communicating your CBD intake with a health professional.
Are you a trustworthy producer?
CRMC is working with reputable, established producers that customers trust to bring a whole new level of safety and comfort to vaping. CRMC cartridges work with the majority of oils, CBD and THC alike. If you’re interested in what CRMC offers, just contact CRMC to start a conversation.
