Paper work, contamination, liability, etc. how do you deal as an extractor?

Hey guys. So the closer i get to picking up and processing material for people the more i see all the potential liability.
Ive come up with a chain of custody form. figured that was important

Do you guys have clients sign anything? concerning liabilities? what if you fuck up a batch? what if a batch gets stolen? confiscated? or otherwise fucked up by the processor or processing company?

What about if the material you got was contaminated? How do you guys deal with that?

Do you have testing guidelines about when the material was tested compared to when you receive it?

This is all based on getting the material on front from growers then processing, testing, packaging, labeling, branding, and then selling the extracts and splitting the resulting profits with the grower.

any advice would be greatly appreciated. i wanted to get your real world experience before talking to my lawyer about this.

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I’m working on a solution for some of these issues. Should be good to go in a few weeks.

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id love to hear more.

Why wouldn’t you treat it like any other business with liability? Talk to a lawyer and get your contracts in order.

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Lots of “paperwork” even if it is all electronic.

You need to keep track of everything. Inventory, what comes in, what is going out. I use a custom Ninox database.

There is insurance for everything if you are willing to pay for it.

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Always test your incoming material, if not for potency, at least for pesticides and mold. That way you can save yourself the trouble of extracting stuff that wasn’t worth the time to do it OR the time to meticulously clean your equipment afterwards.

It’s worth having a contract stating that you won’t extract material that fails testing, and that they owe you for the test if it fails, or not, and just don’t work with them again.

I test every single batch of material that comes in. Unless it’s ND across the board, they take it right back. Sometimes they request a retest at their expense, it always fails again.

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do you ever have an issue with the concentrate failing after the starting material passed a test? ive heard there can be residual compounds on flower or trim that pass testing but it builds up with extraction and the extract fails… i was thinking of running a small test batch of oil instead of testing the material because of that possibility.

Nope, although the lab tests in the ppb range so I would imagine they would detect anything that would pop up in the extract.

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Would love for you to share parts of this document when its done.

Material always has to be testing prior to extraction for heavy metals and pesticides. Sometimes material will show a PASS for pesticide but you need to look at the LOQs. You can have stuff pass pesticide, hit for an LOQ, and then you will fail once you extract and concentrate the pesticide. Typically we see a 10x concentration from the material to final oil.

Figure out who covers testing and transportation. Who pays for packaging, or is it just a split on the back end.

I think if something is stolen or screwed up it would be on the processing center since its in your custody.

Just a few things off the top of my head.

whats loQ?

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Limit of Quantification. You can also see LOD (Limit of Detection) used on COAs.

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