How to Legally Produce & Profit Off of Your Edible Marijuana Product in MA

How to Legally Produce & Profit Off of Your Edible Marijuana Product in MA

Everyone knows someone—a friend, a friend of a friend, or perhaps even you—who claims to make the “best” edible marijuana product. Well, now that recreational cannabis is legal in Massachusetts for Adult Use, you could—and should—legally profit off of your edible product. In order to do this, however, you must follow Massachusetts’ regulations set forth by the Cannabis Control Commission (“CCC”). For those that are interested in reading through the regulations, I have provided the link to the CCC in the footnotes. However, for those that are looking for an overly simplified outline to see if it’s even worth pursuing, I am going to address below some of the major regulation requirements for those that want to legally produce and profit off of their edible marijuana product in the state of Massachusetts for Adult Use. This blog post is not all encompassing, rather its purpose is to guide potential producers in the right direction so that they can legally profit off of their edible marijuana product by selling it to licensed retailers.

Dosing Limitations

First and foremost, before you begin to produce your product, you have to ensure that you are abiding by the CCC’s dosing limitations. As a marijuana product manufacturer, you cannot prepare an edible marijuana product with potency levels that exceed the CCC’s milligram (“MG”) threshold for Tetrahydrocannabinol (“THC” or “∆9-THC”). For a single serving of an edible marijuana product, you cannot exceed 5.5 MG of active THC. For a single package of multiple edible marijuana product, you cannot have more than 20 servings or 110 MG of active THC.

This is where things can get tricky because in order to abide by the CCC’s regulations for these dosing limitations, you as the product manufacturer must also ensure that the THC content in your edible marijuana product is homogenous. That is, your THC content has to be evenly distributed throughout the product. For example, if you have 20 servings of an edible marijuana product in a single package, the active THC cannot exceed 5.5 MG in each single serving. For those of you who want to try and dodge this dosing limitation requirement, do not do it because you will get caught—the CCC requires each product to be tested by an independent marijuana testing facility before it can be sold to a licensed marijuana retailer. Although this process may seem overbearing, if your product is good, the profit will be worth your patience in the long run.

Production

With dosing limitations now understood, the next order of business is to ensure your edible marijuana product does not violate the CCC’s production requirements. In short, any edible marijuana product that is made to resemble a typical food or beverage product must be packaged and labeled, at a minimum, in compliance with the CCC. Further, your product must comply with the consumer product safety commission standards. Moreover, your product must be both child-proof—meaning the packaging must be certified child-resistant and resealable—and, the product’s design cannot appeal to minors.

In order to prevent your product from appealing to minors, your product cannot make use of bright colors, or be produced in the shape of a human, animal, fruit, or a shape that bears the likeness or contains characteristics of a realistic or fictional human, animal, or fruit—including artistic, caricature, or cartoon renderings. However, there is a fine line where you can get creative as a producer; for example, although you cannot produce your product in the shape of an apple, you can have a product that tastes like an apple produced in the form of a geometric shape.

A few other key requirements to be aware of, among others, is (1) each single serving must be easily identifiable and separable by consumers, (2) your packaging design must be plain, and (3) your product packaging cannot imitate/infringe in any way on any existing branded consumer products that do not contain marijuana.

Other Key Requirements

Assuming that you plan to sell your edible marijuana product to a licensed Massachusetts marijuana retailer who will then label and package the product on their own, you should still let the retailer know: (1) the exact date that your product was produced, (2) whether your product is perishable or time and temperature controlled with the specified required temperature, and, (3) the serving size number in MG, along with the total amount of active THC.

TLDR:

In conclusion, now that recreational cannabis is legal in Massachusetts for Adult Use, you should legally profit off of your edible marijuana product. If you are serious about your marijuana product, follow Massachusetts’ regulations set forth by the CCC. Although it may not seem like it now with multiple dispensaries located throughout the state, the recreational marijuana industry in Massachusetts is still incredibly novel and there is A LOT of money that could be made if you follow the regulations. If you believe in your marijuana edible product, now is the time to take a chance and legally profit off of it by selling it to licensed marijuana retailers!