Meet The Founders: Cannabis Quality Group

Donavan Bennett, CEO & Co-Founder (Roswell, GA)

Joe Novalany, CTO & Co-Founder (Edison, NJ)

 

Cannabis Quality Group (CQG) is a cloud-based integrated quality management software designed to reduce risk, protects brand integrity, and enable transparency throughout the supply chain. CQG is creating solutions to the lack of quality controls in cannabis, the risk of product recalls, and lack of optimization with employees' time.

Quality is the main differentiation between competitors. If companies are not incorporating quality controls into their processes now, when federal legalization is implemented, these companies will be fighting an uphill battle. We help dispensaries and edible companies who sell directly to the consumer. If there's a recall with one of their brands, their brand integrity could be ruined - we want to help brands avoid that.

 

Joe and I are fairly new to the cannabis industry. We each bring quality assurance and programmer skill sets into the industry, and this is our first venture into cannabis. One of the reasons we applied to Canopy's accelerator program is to help make those industry connections and gain industry knowledge.

 

We found out about Canopy Accelerator from an article in Tech Crunch. After speaking to an alumni of the program and hearing about the benefits joining Canopy provided to her company, we decided this would be our best path forward. We are hoping to gain more insight into the industry. With our lack of industry experience we want to visit operations, interact with employees and customers, and gain a granular understanding of the industry.

I'm biased; however, with my experience in manufacturing, that industry is heavily adopting cloud-based QMS. These companies realize the benefits and the dynamics of tracking and standardizing quality metrics. My generation (millennials) have the opportunity to bring our technology skill set to this industry, and help shape the industry for the better.