William SumnerFebruary 28, 2018
Cannabis testing company EVIO, Inc. (EVIO), announced that it expects to double the number of its cannabis testing laboratories from 9 to 18 in the coming year.
As legalization spreads across the United States, laboratory testing has become more integral to the legal cannabis industry. In states like California, a shortage of testing facilities has led to a bottleneck of cannabis cultivators and a surge in cannabis testing prices. Recent reports by BDS Analytics have estimated that the California market may reach as high as $5.1 billion by 2019 and the company estimates that cannabis testing will account for as much as 5% of that figure, or approximately $250 million.
Bearing this mind, the company hopes to focus its expansion on the critically underserved California market.
Heading up the expansion are two new additions to EVIO’s management team; Albert Lustig and Ron Russak. Lustig recently departed from his position at Pfizer as State Director, where he was responsible for managing multiple districts, regional and national sales organizations. Lustig will serve as President of Operations and use his experience to help drive growth in new and existing markets.
Russak will serve as Vice President of Operations and draw upon his more than 17 years of experience working for Quest Diagnostics, one of the United State’s leading testing providers, to help the company with scaling existing and new laboratory operations. Both EVIO and Quest operate under a “hub and spoke,” business model in which over-arching decisions and resources are centralized and distributed from the “hub.” This business model is most popular with transportation companies, but have also caught in industries such as aviation and cannabis.
The company also announced that on Feb. 7, 2018, its licensee, Kaycha Holdings, became the first cannabis testing lab in Florida to gain ISO 71025 accreditation; which is the highest quality standard in the world for testing laboratories. Currently, all of EVIO’s laboratories are either accredited or in the process of accreditation.
