After months of development and working with licensed cannabis businesses, we’re happy to announce a new version of Higher Origins! We feel this is our best offering yet to help California cannabis operators get to market and keep their business sustainable. The path to get here has involved a lot of trial, error, discovery, and asking ourselves: What are we as a platform again? We don't think anyone back in 2016 would have imagined the industry where it's at today- we've all had to change and adapt, and here we are today. The features discussed in this article are live today, and you can sign up for free right now here. We greatly appreciate all the support we’ve received from the community over our past few years of work, and are excited to grow with you!
The Evolution of Higher Origins
This is the third major evolution of Higher Origins. When we started we were focused on offering an improved compliance interface for METRC that based workflows on the actual realities of farmers. That gained some traction but was hard to market, relied entirely on METRC, and didn’t add as much value as we would have liked to the cannabis market- cleaning up after METRC (a largely useless program in the first place) wasn’t the solution to help as many people as we wanted to.
The second evolution of Higher Origins brought in the concept of a Marketplace, where buyers and sellers could get in touch to facilitate deals when they normally wouldn’t have been able to connect with each other. This was a good idea, and expanded our focus greatly into the market and brand growth space. We experimented with models that allowed small farms to self-brand, which were successful, and ambitiously pursued multiple growth options and partnerships in different sectors. Ultimately however, this was all too much for our two-man team to handle at once, alongside maintaining a compliance platform, and promoting all of our various offerings.
After a brief period of reflection, we’ve arrived at today, with the third evolution of Higher Origins. Compliance tools are no longer part of our platform, freeing up dev and support time for other focuses. The Marketplace is still there, with many of the same features as before, just more refined. Newly introduced are Menus, a tool which really brings value to all licensees in some way with little to no barrier to entry, and forms the core of our market-centric approach. Analytics have been expanded across the platform to show greater detail of regions and the market as a whole.
Current Ethos on Compliance
Over the past few years, we’ve really dialed in on where value is actually added in the cannabis market. One thing that is rarely a value add is track and trace. As we’ve written before, METRC does little to help the market thrive, and, due to its poor design, has no effective standard of use, which is exacerbated by the State’s inability to provide guidance or enforcement. We’ve spent thousands of dev and support hours decoding different user’s METRC workflows, digging through its terrible code, and throwing up our hands at the number of loopholes in its workflow. On a larger scale, we see that compliance-only platforms are struggling, more and more people are pushing back against METRC, and most operators have figured out how to use it, or hired a consultant to do it for them. Furthermore, METRC is pushing their new V2 METRC Connect platform, a paid version of the system that would shut out small integrators like us, kill competition, and not actually fix any of the fundamental errors with their product. In other states, this platform is already being mandated, and with California’s METRC contract in play, METRC integration is a dangerous bet for a startup these days.
That is why we are becoming fully track and trace agnostic. We will only use METRC for basic functions like license verification via API key at signup. Since there are as many ways to use METRC as there are users, we can’t optimize the workflows, so we are ending our compliance offerings entirely. Since we don’t know the future status of METRC, we can’t justify building our platform around it. If METRC goes away tomorrow (and it should!) We’ll just have to delete a few lines of code, tweak our user verification, and continue to operate as before. METRC is so incapable of reliable tracking that the State’s mandate for its use is little more than an honor system for licensees. If that’s good enough for the State, it’s good enough for us from a regulatory standpoint. We trust our users to conduct their track and trace responsibly through METRC, and we’re refocusing all of our energy on optimizing path-to-market tools instead, since making it easier to sell products is a true value add.
Launch Features
Menus
Higher Origins allows you to easily create, customize, and share menus of your cannabis products and services. Farms can showcase their crop to retail and wholesale buyers directly. Retailers can create different menus to share to consumers, and combine them with their promotions, seasonal marketing, and loyalty programs. Manufacturers can promote their services, and distributors can buy wholesale and sell retail products.
You can create as many menus as you want! Add some or all of your products to a menu, add customized pricing, minimum order quantities, and specify whether or not buyers can make you an offer- or require them to pay what your product is worth.
Retailers can use menus to curate different slices of your inventory for different consumer groups.
Menu access has an age verification check so you can remain compliant while promoting your products.
Menus have dedicated links that can be shared however you like- text, email, QR code, etc. Your Higher Origins menu can reach customers wherever they can click or scan- whatever digital communication you’re most comfortable with will work to help you sell. Your reps can get products in front of buyers through more channels, while spending less time on the road.
Access is controlled so only licensed buyers you trust have access- in order to view, they must enter their license number.
Pages
As a Higher Origins user, you can create and customize a public page where you can showcase your business. Maintaining a web presence is critical for brand building and differentiation, but websites can be expensive and an online POS page can’t really give consumers a good idea of who you are. Our pages are a simple but information-packed option to get your name out there for free- all without having to drive for hours to meet a rep for an introduction.
Pages display the following:
A cover picture of your choice to rep your business
Basic up-to-date license information from our License Search.
Products you’ve listed on Higher Origins, each with an information page (there is no limit to the amount of products you can add).
A description where you can introduce readers to your business, story, and mission.
Products you are offering, each with an information page.
A list of the farms and brands a retailer works with, so their customers can learn about them and what they stand for. This gives consumers transparency, allowing them to learn exactly who grew their favorite products.
Retailers that carry a farm's products so customers know where to find them.
Marketplace
The Higher Origins Marketplace is a tool which allows licensees to list products in a searchable marketplace, as well as browse products and contact sellers directly with an order. While Menus are useful for growth and promotion to specific markets and clients, Marketplace is a statewide open platform for product comparison, discovery, and sales where customers can come to you. The category of products that can be bought and sold depends on the license type. The Marketplace allows you to find more start and endpoints for your supply chain.
You can select which products you want on the marketplace, and set custom pricing, order quantities, and price tiers that are different from what you offer in private menus.
Sell both retail-ready and wholesale products on the Marketplace. For consumer safety you must show COA’s on your Marketplace listings to sell them to retailers, but for competitive security you are not required to show COA’s for products you sell to wholesalers/manufacturers.
The marketplace is working for you 24/7, allowing buyers to come to you. When someone is interested in your product, they can reach out to you through the marketplace with an offer or an order- you’ll get an email with their information and can contact them directly to make a deal.
Order manager allows you to see your orders, update their status, and save the information of your trading partners.
Source your products from a known supply chain, with greater knowledge of where it came from and when. You can get in direct contact with the farm, and have your transfer fulfilled by a mutually trusted distributor- from your personal network or theirs. Don’t just shop products- shop supply chains.
Features In Development
Menus
Quantity based discounts on menus and marketplace.
Blacklisting menu viewers by license number.
Set a passkey or other identifier to lock menus, giving only those with the key or specific identifiers access.
Built in tracking for Menu links, allowing you to see who’s viewing your menu and what product they were looking at.
Menu items are able to sync with your existing online POS listing, allowing consumers to click right into the POS from the Higher Origins product page. (Not available for all POS systems, we will integrate the industry leaders first)
Attach a discount code to a menu so only people with access to that menu can see it and get special pricing.You can passkey protect discounted menus to keep these deals exclusive to a select group.
You can restrict a menu to a certain region so licensees outside of that region can’t view it- this allows you to offer different pricing and products to different regions.
Farms can access menus shared by nurseries in order to source new genetics, and nurseries can share menus of their products.
Pages
A link list, similar to LinkTree, where you can link people to whatever pages you like.
A subscription system, where people can subscribe to you to get email notifications when you get new products in or launch a new service offering.
A selection of the strains you carry.
A list of other retail locations owned by the same licensee.
A gallery for all the cool weed pictures that social media won't let you post.
Marketplace
A Strain Explorer to find alternatives or similar products to replace or upgrade your inventory offerings based on the terpene profiles of the products.
Pricing Tiers on marketplace listings.
General Development Features
Support for Nurseries to create menus and use the Marketplace
Support for Services on Menus and Marketplace so manufacturers can promote their services.
Consumer Features
Consumers can subscribe to their favorite brands on Higher Origins, and get notified when they drop new products.
Retailers can create promotional menus that consumers can use to find the best deals or get special discounts.
Products ordered on Higher Origins have downloadable product display cards that are available for every retail product that passes through our platform. Retailers can print the cards out and consumers can scan the cards to go to the website and learn even more! This wealth of information helps out budtenders as well, since they have extensive knowledge at their fingertips to help customers make an informed buying decision.
Higher Origins allows consumers to recommend products they find on Higher Origins to retailers in their area. This allows retailers to understand what products their customers demand, and source them directly from the seller.
Pricing
Our pricing model is as follows:
-Free access: All licensees may sign up for free, which gives them access to all of the above Launch features and some of the features in development.
-Marketplace fees: We don’t believe in charging people when we’re not actively helping you get more sales. We charge sellers a flat fee on Orders completed through the Marketplace.
-Sellers pay a 3.5% fee on the final order price.
-These fees are optional for the first 3 months after signup. Fees are permanently waived if your business has 5,000 square feet or under of total active cultivation.
-Supporter: If you like what we’re doing and want to help out, we offer a 49$/month Supporter tier. This tier helps us pay the bills and grow the platform. Supporters pay only a 2.5% fee on Marketplace orders, and we are developing features that will be available only to Supporters.
This new version is live now, and we are working full time on the upcoming features listed above. If you want to sign up, we have a guide here, as well as a getting started guide to walk you through things like page setup and menu creation. You can have a complete menu ready to send out to clients in about 15 minutes if you sign up now. We’re very excited to see what you think of our platform, and welcome your feedback! If you have any suggestions, create an Issue with them on the platform, email us at [email protected], or @ us on LinkedIn or Instagram. Likewise, if you like what we’re doing, anyone can become a Supporter here!
Let’s Grow Together!
-Higher Origins Team
