The Brand Tender’s Guide to the Metrc Gap: Why Your Brand Story Lives or Dies in the Back Office
Edward Boatman • May 6th
Chelsey Scott has spent nearly a decade watching the cannabis industry grow from the inside. Since 2017, she has navigated almost every corner of the retail ecosystem, moving from the front lines as a budtender to the high-stakes world of compliance and operations as an Agent in Charge. Today, she is a free agent looking for her next big challenge, bringing with her a decade’s worth of institutional knowledge about how a product actually moves from a delivery truck to a consumer’s shopping cart in the cannabis space.
In Chelsey’s experience, the most critical mile of that journey is the digital transition from the wholesale manifest to the retail menu. While brands spend months perfecting their aesthetic, that intentionality often hits a wall in the dispensary back office. For the people managing inventory, a brand’s assets are only as valuable as they are accessible. As Chelsey puts it, "It's a lot of manpower... nothing's really automated as well as it could be.”
The Triple-Entry Tax: The Reality of Dispensary Ops
Most brand managers assume their job is finished once a manifest is signed. For an operations specialist like Chelsey, that is exactly when the digital ghost hunt begins. The core of her workflow involves moving high-fidelity data through a fragmented ecosystem of platforms that often refuse to speak to one another.
Image courtesy of Dutchie
This redundancy creates a daily tax on a dispensary's time. Data must be meticulously tracked in Metrc for state compliance, then manually bridged into point of sale systems like Dutchie and Jane. Because these systems do not always sync, inventory managers are often forced to manually input cannabinoid profiles, testing numbers, and product descriptions for every single SKU.
Chelsey explains the manual nature of the work: "The descriptions aren't always there. We have to manually update testing numbers... it's a lot of just us filling in information ourselves.”
When a brand fails to provide easily digestible data, the gatekeeper in the back office faces a difficult choice. They can spend ten minutes hunting for the information on Google or they can leave the digital listing incomplete. In a fast paced retail environment, incomplete often wins by default.
The 48-Hour Compliance Window
In a strictly regulated market like Illinois, operational mistakes have high stakes consequences. Chelsey notes that inventory is counted and tracked at least once a day, with variances requiring immediate attention. "Discrepancies have to be monitored daily and must be resolved within 48 hours of being found," she notes, emphasizing the constant pressure to maintain perfect records.
