Cultivation Facility Achieves GACP Certification

Cannasouth Limited (NZX:CBD) is pleased to announce that its subsidiary, Cannasouth Cultivation Limited, has today received it’s Good Agricultural and Collection Practice (GACP) certification for its controlled environment agriculture sealed greenhouse facility based in Waikato.

CEO Mark Lucas says “Achieving GACP certification is a credit to our cultivation and quality teams which have been working towards this since commissioning in November 2021.”

The certifier is global organisation Control Union, which conducted an audit of the facility during its first commercial harvest in June 2022.

Control Union Medical Cannabis Standard GAP (CUMCS-GAP) is the globally leading certification standard for medical cannabis. The goal of the standard is to ensure the best quality and consistency in the production of the product.

The scope of CUMCS-GAP covers medical Cannabis propagation and cultivation and is fully compliant with both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and European Medicine Agency (EMA) GACP guidelines. Certified organisations receive both CUMCS-GAP certificate and GACP compliance certificate for both the WHO as well as EMA GACP guidelines.

GACP certification is required by many countries for the import of bulk cannabis flower to be used as a start material for further processing.

Cannasouth’s cultivation and post-harvest facility is one of only a few of its type that has been specifically designed to operate with two quality standards. GACP, which covers the propagation and cultivation activities, and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), which covers the post-harvest, drying and packing processes. This is an important distinction because for higher value premium flower to be used as a finished product requires GMP certification for certain post-harvest activities in most jurisdictions, including New Zealand.

Mr Lucas says “GACP certification is a critical first step for both our exports and local sales of premium cannabis flower – it allows us to export bulk flower for use in further manufacturing, including extraction.

“Our next step is achieving the higher pharmaceutical quality standard of GMP certification for our post-harvest processes. GMP will allow us to produce flower as the finished product for both export and the New Zealand markets. This supports the recent multi-year supplier agreement we recently reached with our German customer”.

Cannasouth’s GMP audit is scheduled for September 2022.

---