The cannabis industry is growing at high speeds. With new states onboarding, and new stores popping up, up to date data, metrics and facts can put you ahead of your competitors. By relying on hard data rather than guesswork it enables you to make smarter decision towards higher profits, better customer service, and over all satisfaction. Eric Boone joins us to share the importance of data, and how it can help you today.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford 0:07
Hey 420MSP I am with Eric Boone of Meristematix. So hopefully got that right, Eric, how you doing in that Seattle heat? Good lord.
Eric Boone 0:18
Yeah, well, I think we’ve got, we’ve got about 10 minutes before the heat exhaustion just a pat, I just fall over. So if if some of my answers come out a little bit obtuse, I claim, I claim heatstroke in advance.There we go. So you’re a well known figure in the the the industry. You’re one of the people behind the scenes or in front of the scenes over at hemp fest. But that’s that’s not why we’re here. The Seattle hemp fest a popular I’ll call it a lifestyle show.We’re really here on the business side today. So first of all, what does that name mean that I can barely pronounce? meristematic Yeah. Okay. So this is a word advanced AI analytics company, focusing in retail analytics, but really covering the entire supply chain. And the root of the name is the meristem region of plants. Our world, the undifferentiated cells occur, like the apical meristem, it’ll say, well, you turn into chlorophyll cells, or you turn into stoma cells. And it’s world growth occurs in plants. And that’s really what Meristematix does with, with companies data, as well as the cannabis industry is so highly regulated, we generate a tremendous amount of data at every touchpoint of the planet. So whereas, you know, a few years back, that was considered very onerous. For a lot of business owners today, it’s very empowering. And Meristematix helps take the undifferentiated chaos of your data, and convert it into growth your business.
Harry Brelsford 1:50
And so are you I’m trying to picture this, are you a corpus, a repository for all this data? Are you a dashboard? to present the data at the presentation layer? Are you all the above what walk me through your business model a little bit more?
Eric Boone 2:08
Sure, of course, well, we will, we will store the data based on on the needs of the clients, we have clients currently in the United States. And in Canada, we’re working a lot with cannabis quality assurance in Canada as well. And in a lot of those cases, you know, the licensed producers will want to retain ownership of their data, which is fine. So we work with and help analyze it without actually storing it as a repository. And there are data structures that you can use to facilitate that. And then we’re, but then in answer to your question, do we visualize the data? Yes, we do. But Meristematix is capable of so much more. And that’s what a lot of what you see in the cannabis industry right now is advanced visualization. Essentially have descriptive analytics, where as you’re taking a tremendous amount of data, and you’re making it easily digestible, often visual formats, charts and pie graphs to allow your managers to make better data driven decisions. Meristematix, the engine that we’re dealing with, we look at so many different impact factors, and have analyzed so much data over the course of the last 12 years, that the platform is actually capable of predictive and prescriptive output as well. which not only tells you, here’s what all the data is saying. But it gives you management direction on you know, price elasticity demand. So went up in the instance of a you know, consolidated supply chain, it can tell you that the system can give you a good idea of what consumers are going to like before you ever plant anything in the field. And then once it makes it through to the to the retail end of the supply chain. It’ll tell you exactly how much product to send which one of your stores and how much to charge for it at what time of the day. So when it comes to automating and find and really hitting the the economies of scale in in supply chains, particularly in supply chains that have just gone through an acquisition or a merger. You know that that that level of AI interaction is really the key to unlocking the powers of those economies of scale and optimizing those supply chains quickly.
Harry Brelsford 4:28
Yeah. So who’s the customer? What what are your customer personas that the people that give you money?
Eric Boone 4:36
Ideally, we would like to work with the enterprise level. Clients we can we can work with the one of the powerful things about the Meristematix engine is that we can start producing some fairly actionable predictive output with as little as two weeks of sales data. So we can actually help you know the smaller retailers with one or two Three stores. But that’s not really where our sweet spot is when we’re dealing with the large enterprise level clients that have managed to capture their entire supply chain from production, to particularly even lab testing, to the the end point of sale. That’s where the true magic of our platform can really shine.
Harry Brelsford 5:21
Yeah, yeah, really cool. I, I’ll tell you what, Jenny’s over in the radio control room, Jenny, let’s, let’s get Eric back next quarter if you’re agreeable, and maybe you could give us an onscreen demo? Or are you prepared to kind of show us some of the secret sauce?
Eric Boone 5:39
Not today. I’ve got team members who are eminently more qualified at that than I am tonight. I’d be happy to include them on a future call. Yeah. So we’d be happy to give a demonstration to you know, it’s a little bit difficult to show a whole lot in real time, but we can definitely give you some some demonstrations on some of the output and, and sort of powers that we unleash.
Harry Brelsford 6:02
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Love. All right, my friend. We’ll go go upstairs and get next to that air conditioner in the hot summer.
Eric Boone 6:11
Yeah, I’m glad I’m glad we didn’t do this on high rez, or you would die. And I’m glad that this is not smellivision either. That was pretty good at this stage.
Harry Brelsford 6:22
There we go. All right.
Eric Boone 6:24
Thanks very much. And thanks to everyone out at SMB Nation as well.
Harry Brelsford 6:28
All right, thanks.
