New York’s estimated $1.5 billion cannabis market now won’t have seed-to-sale tracking until early 2026, regulators said recently.
The latest delay in imposing track-and-trace on what’s projected to be the East Coast’s biggest legal marijuana market follows an abrupt and unexpected turnaround last month triggered by an acquisition involving the country’s two biggest providers of monitoring software.
It’s at least the third time regulators have delayed seed-to-sale tracking in New York.
New York launched legal sales in December 2022 but did so without a working track-and-trace system like those monitoring the flow of product in other states.
The lack of track-and-trace has at least partially contributed to ongoing inversion and diversion problems, in which cannabis product produced outside legal channels ends up on licensed store shelves, and vice versa, observers and regulators have said.
Latest delay for New York marijuana track-and-trace
According to a timeline introduced earlier this summer, license holders in New York were to begin complying with track-and-trace requirements on a rolling basis starting Aug. 1.
Cultivators were the first license category to comply, with distributors, manufacturers and retailers to follow over the coming months.
New York selected Florida-based software provider BioTrack as its vendor for track-and-trace in 2022.
However, that was all put on pause amid a deal between BioTrack and the market-leader Metrc, announced on Aug. 5.
Instead of BioTrack, license-holders will have to use Metrc software, according to the New York Office of Cannabis Management (OCM).
Exactly when New York marijuana businesses will have to use Metrc is still unclear.
OCM “is actively working with Metrc to develop a project timeline, with a targeted integration go-live in early 2026,” according to a notice posted on the agency’s website.
Unexpected merger meant Metrc dominated track-and-trace
BioTrack’s five-year, $1.2 million deal with New York was a significantly lower sum than most contracts between states and Metrc.
Metrc’s four-year contract with California that began July 1, 2024 is worth $113 million.
On Aug. 5, Metrc and BioTrack announced a “strategic partnership” that saw BioTrack give up its “government-facing operations,” the companies said at the time.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With New York, Metrc, based in Lakeland, Florida, will operate track-and-trace systems in 30 states.
Ahead of the rollout of track-and-trace, many New York operators had complained of unclear or conflicting instruction as well as a controversial requirement to spend heavily on BioTrack ID tags that needed to be affixed to nearly every product.
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