Automation in the Cannabis Industry
Sarah stared at the wall of monitors in her cultivation facility's control room, each screen displaying a different piece of the regulatory puzzle. Temperature and humidity sensors fed data to the state's seed-to-sale tracking system, while security cameras live streamed to compliance officers hundreds of miles away. Her tablet buzzed with another notification, this time from the lab management system, requesting batch testing documentation that needed to sync with three separate regulatory databases before the day's harvest could be legally processed.
What should have been a simple morning check on her cannabis plants had become a complex orchestration of interconnected systems, each demanding real-time data, perfect documentation, and seamless integration. One failed API call or misaligned timestamp could halt operations entirely, turning a thriving business into a compliance nightmare overnight.
As Sarah reached for her third cup of coffee before 9 AM, she reflected on how the cannabis industry's unique regulatory landscape had created an integration challenge not found in any other industry. Unlike traditional agriculture or pharmaceuticals, cannabis operators must navigate a patchwork of state and local regulations while maintaining federal compliance standards, all while ensuring their control systems can communicate effectively across multiple platforms that were never designed to work together.
This is the daily reality for cannabis businesses across the country: operating at the intersection of cutting-edge agricultural technology and some of the most complex regulatory requirements in any industry. The question isn't whether integration challenges exist—it's how to solve them without sacrificing efficiency, compliance, or sanity.
The Roots of Cannabis Automation
Corso System’s roots are in Nevada. While Nevada wasn’t the first state to adopt cannabis legalization, Corso Systems was working in Reno at a REALLY HUGE BUILDING the day it became legal. The news was dominated by the stories of how the State’s Tax Assessor declared a state of emergency to expedite processing of retail location applications to get more of that sweet tax revenue. Fast forward a few years to now, where cannabis is legal in 41 states and Washington DC, with frequent discussions about legalization at the Federal level happening in Congress as we speak.
With the advent of federal legalization and some projections saying cannabis will be a $100 billion dollar industry by 2026, it’s time to start taking it seriously, in terms of its impact on day to day life, and how automation technology can be used to speed up production.
At Corso Systems, this means we have started thinking about how we can play a role in this next industry revolution, and we have some ideas.
Food and Beverage Similarities
From an automation perspective many cannabis products on the market are no different than any other food and beverage products, it simply has an extra added ingredient.
Walking into a cannabis manufacturing facility is similar to any other food and beverage manufacturing plant, OEM equipment to manufacture and package finished products, including seltzer filling and canning lines, gummy forming machines, and various oil extraction machines spread throughout. The only difference between say a Blommer Chocolate facility and a cannabis plant are the recipes and raw ingredients.
As with many food and beverage companies, there is a huge need to integrate these machines into production lines, collect data, track efficiency, setpoints and recipes, and the overall health of the equipment while tying everything into a centralized system.
Luckily this can all be accomplished using tools like Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform, Canary Labs Process Historian, and other tools to support the architecture, many of which we already have developed with our Power Pack approach. This speeds up deployments and decreases the time to realize a full ROI.
Regulation
Unsurprisingly, the cannabis industry is heavily regulated. This makes total sense, many industries are, especially food and beverage which has a lot of overlap with cannabis.
The main difference for cannabis is that the level of track and traceability required by regulation is much higher than most industries. This is where each state dictates a “seed to sale” system where the manufacturing process is tracked from the seed stage of the plant, all the way through to consumers the finished products at a dispensary.
While the particulars of each state regulation system vary, each facility needs to track quite a lot of data. We can simplify the ease of getting data into these systems through the use of APIs, hardware integrations, and overall system integrations with the software used to run cannabis facilities. This is no different than a typical Track and Trace implementation using something like Sepasoft’s Track and Trace module, the data just ends up in a different database to meet the regulatory needs.
Growth
While the science and horticulture behind growing optimal plants is anything but simple, many of the control systems used in grow facilities are not terribly complex from an automation perspective. Grow lights, airflow, nutrients, and sometimes some great tunes on a playlist are all managed by standalone systems. Ancillary systems like water filtration, nutrient mixing, and of course the various seed to sale requirements like barcodes or RFID tags are all required to support the grow operation and can might be difficult to integrate with the control system itself.
This is a huge opportunity to integrate various systems across the entire cannabis supply chain. Many facilities we have visited need to open two or more applications to see a full picture of the grow operation with all of the supporting systems. Many of these systems use industry standard protocols, so tying them into industry standard manufacturing tools like Ignition is an easy proposition. You just need to decide it is time to stop dealing with multiple systems to get the job done when it can be easily simplified.
New Horizons
Even 5-10 years ago, it was common for integrators to joke that they didn’t do work for cannabis companies because it was hard to deposit a duffle bag full of cash at the bank. While there were unscrupulous companies operating under the radar, cannabis is now an industry focused on doing the right thing, turning out amazing products, and building long term relationships with happy customers. Yes, there will still be some folks who do things under the table, however they aren’t going to be seeking the right tools to make the best product in a positive environment.
The focus at Corso Systems is simple, do the right thing, build strong relationships, and make the world a better place while helping businesses run more efficiently with technology. We happen to really enjoy technology, problem solving, and developing things at the forefront of industry revolutions to help innovate manufacturing at the next level.
As with any manufacturing enterprise, these tools in order of adoption are usually automated equipment, Process Historians, OEE and Downtime Tracking, then more involved Manufacturing Execution System (MES) implementations to tie the plant floor into the entire business, from customer orders to shipping and receiving, giving you a true “top floor to shop floor” technology platform. This is perfectly applicable to the cannabis industry with the stringent integration requirements for seed to sale tracking systems.
We believe there is a huge opportunity to help build the capability, mindset, and throughput of the cannabis industry by leveraging what we already do, learning how to apply that to each facility’s operational strategy, and developing the next industry standard solutions to grow cannabis as a cornerstone of American Manufacturing.
Updated - 9/3/2025
