Strain IQ makes best pitch at JSE Regional Conference
Published:Friday | January 26, 2024 | 12:11 AMNeville Graham - Business Reporter
A ‘stick of weed’, enough to make a ‘ziggy’, made the difference on Wednesday afternoon, as cannabis industry support company Strain IQ topped all comers at the Jamaica Stock Exchange’s (JSE) regional investment conference pitch room.
Co-founder Oswald Smith made the case as he convinced the investment community judging panel and audience that the three-year-old company had the ‘right strain’, declaring that ‘Jamaica is the land of wood, water and weed’, and copping the $500,000 prize.
The JSE’s 2024 Regional Investments and Capital Markets Conference heard how the small start-up reacted to the pain being felt by many cannabis growers, as they struggle to comply with the regulatory requirements of the Cannabis Licensing Authority (CLA). Key to the effort was developing software that could fulfill all the requirements of the system of track and trace for all cannabis products, from seed to consumer.
Brandishing a small amount of cannabis, commonly called a ‘stick of weed’, Smith educated the audience about the regulatory requirements for those in the cannabis industry. He harped on the piece of folklore that a large ganja spliff is sometimes called a ‘Bob Marley’ while the small spliff is called a ‘ziggy’, harkening back to the recent premiere of the Bob Marley biopic.
Smith said the many steps between planting a ganja seed and a user smoking a ziggy are fraught with pitfalls.
“We saw the experience people were having in the field and we identified the need for specialised software to deal with track and trace within the context of the Jamaican cannabis industry,” Smith told the Financial Gleaner after Strain IQ collected its winning cheque from sponsors, the JSE.
With Smith acting as programmer, fresh out of Caribbean Maritime University (CMU), the company leveraged the in-depth knowledge of its other co-founder Floyd Moncrieffe, who spent years at the CLA as a field officer.
The result was that the two developed a software product that takes the drudgery out of keeping proper records, going as far as producing the necessary tags for cannabis trees that are used in the track and trace process.
“A grower can have a hard time producing hand-written labels for each plant, and it gets worse when these plants number in the thousands,” Smith told the JSE conference.
Moncrieffe recalls the many times when he’d be doing field inspections and a half-hour visit to inspect records would turn into a five-hour audit.
“One particular grower was next to tears when she realised that months of hard work would be literally going up in smoke if she didn’t furnish the records. We worked with her all day until 10 p.m. to get her records together. Now, with the Strain IQ software, she is a loyal customer,” Moncrieffe told the Financial Gleaner.
This is the second time that the company has won an entrepreneurial support competition. Strain IQ also won the $150,000 first prize in the Kingston Beta competition for tech entrepreneurs in November 2023.
Smith said the prize money was used to acquire a special labelling machine that has provided more revenue to add to software licences from which the company earns.
As he wrapped up a colourful presentation, Smith made it clear that Strain IQ was only after the JSE prize money – to be used to purchase other labelling machines to satisfy its growing clientele.
Strain IQ won the pitch competition ahead of Rentech Consulting, a company focusing on data protection and data privacy; Artel, a predictive software company focusing on the insurance industry, and Outland Hurd Creamery, a specialty cheese manufacturing company catering to the tourism sector.