The President of ACS Laboratory, Roger Brown, sat down to discuss this recognition and honor of winning 14 Emerald Test awards recently. He attributed this to the strong scientific scope ACS brings to the industry. ACS Laboratory, based in Tampa, FL, tests for FL licensed Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers as well as hemp and CBD producers nationwide. Companies as far as Oregon and Washington State can count on the quality of ACS results to support their reputation, products, and business as a whole.
Cannabis & Tech Today: What does the Emerald Test consist of and how is it measured? Why does it matter?
Roger Brown: The Emerald Test is something that happens in the fall and spring of each year. This is a company that created the standard for testing in the cannabis space. It is a proficiency test where they send you a blind sample that is spiked on their end to a certain unknown value. You test it and send the results, and from there they tell you whether you’re correct or incorrect. To obtain 14 Emerald Badges in the spring of 2019 is actually quite unique. No other company in the eastern United States has received 14 badges. I think the closest is 8 badges that anyone was awarded. We consider ourselves both a standard and the standard in the industry; we are all about the quality, reproducibility, and accuracy of our results.
C&T Today: Many laboratories nationwide participated. How important is compliance?
RB: Transparency and compliance are very important to the company and me and it’s important to many consumers of cannabis and hemp. I want to ensure that anything end consumers and patients digest is safe and free of a wide array of contaminants.
Some labs may test a sample and they take two weeks to get back where we only take 2-5 days. Other times, when others test a sample, they get different results each time. ACS Laboratory strives to deliver consistency and reliability in third party testing, as accuracy is the single most important factor for our clients. ACS uses the utmost stringent Standard Operating Procedures and carefully takes each and every step of the process appropriately. Another reason to pride ourselves in making sure all of our tests are accurate.
C&T Today: How used to this level of depth is ACS?
RB: We’re very familiar with proficiency tests and I think they’re very important. Every single lab is going to do tests with methods, protocols, and procedures they’ve developed internally, but not everybody develops the same protocols and procedures. If you can’t pass proficiency testing, then all the results you are putting out could be misleading, they are not all necessarily real. That’s not good for the client or their consumers.
C&T Today: Do 14 Emerald Test Awards speak for themselves? And what does winning 14 badges mean?
RB: It means that we’re one of the highest performing laboratories in the country, and we’re one of the top performing laboratories in each of the proficiency categories. Those badges recognize our lab for its capabilities compared to our peers. These badges can be seen on their website at www.acslabcannabis.com/about/.
