In late September, the state of Kentucky announced that KCA Labs would be the first recipient of a business license under its startup medical cannabis program, which goes into effect on January 1.
The Nicholasville-based company, which launched in 2019, initially tested THC levels in hemp following the passage of the Farm Bill the previous year. Led by co-founder and Scientific Director Dr. Richard A. Sams, KCA Labs has since expanded its services to include testing food products for metals and pesticides, as well as a variety of hemp-derived products like edibles, before they reach the marketplace.
The announcement garnered praise from Gov. Andy Beshear, who commended KCA’s commitment to quality control, which will ensure product consistency when the medical cannabis program begins.
Nicholasville-based company KCA Labs received the state’s first license to test medical marijuana products for quality and potency.
“Our mission is to ensure Kentuckians with serious medical conditions have access to safe and high-quality, tested medical cannabis products,” the governor said. “That’s exactly what KCA is going to help us do.”
To support this mission, the program has placed no cap on testing licenses, unlike other categories — such as dispensary, processor, and cultivator — which have limits to ensure testing capacity can meet demand. With contracts already in place to test hemp products for states like Massachusetts and North Dakota, KCA has the capacity to meet the program’s requirements.
Additionally, the lab has found far more demand for testing processed hemp products rather than raw plant materials, said Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Bellone, which makes it well-positioned to test cannabis-derived products for potency and contaminants. Kentucky’s medical marijuana law prohibits the sale of cannabis flower.
“We thought we’d be doing a bunch of testing for the flower material, but by 2019 the floor had fallen out of the [hemp] market and the industry’s never fully recovered,” Bellone said. “It led to us pivoting to test more of these hemp-derived materials, specifically Delta-8 THC, which goes hand-in-hand with the new program the state is getting ready to launch.”
KCA’s focus on hemp-derived materials has been further strengthened by its industry-leading discoveries of new cannabinoids, which allow for more precise analysis of chemical compounds and THC levels in products. While previous tests monitored just eight or nine cannabinoids, KCA’s tests can now detect nearly 70, offering an unmatched level of accuracy.
“You can’t just test everything like it’s a plant, which is what a lot of these other labs are doing [that don’t test for as many cannabinoids],” Bellone clarifies. “Over the past five years we’ve been testing all these novel cannabinoids being introduced to the market to help people understand what these products are and if they’re safe to consume or not.”
Unlike the testing licenses, which were not subject to a lottery, licenses for cultivators and processors are limited and were assigned through a lottery system held on October 28.
Cultivator licenses are restricted to three lower tiers: small (5,000 square feet or less), medium (5,001 to 20,000 square feet), and large (20,001 to 50,000 square feet). Industrial licenses, for facilities over 50,000 square feet — often operated by multi-state companies referred to by Bellone as the “Walmarts of hemp” — were excluded from this lottery.
A separate lottery for dispensary licenses is expected to follow in November.