‍About Cresco Labs

Cresco Labs is one of the most recognized names in the cannabis industry. A publicly traded, vertically integrated multi-state operator, Cresco was founded in 2015 in Illinois with three licenses to grow, process, and distribute cannabis products. Today, the company operates across eight markets with nearly 3,000 employees and runs its own dispensary brand, Sunnyside, with a heavy focus on consumer education.

Operating at that scale demands operational rigor that few industries can match. For Cresco, finding the right technology infrastructure wasn't just a matter of efficiency. It was foundational to the company's ability to thrive.

The Challenge: Manual Processes in a Complex Regulatory Environment

The cannabis industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the United States, and multi-state operators face a uniquely difficult challenge: each state mandates its own seed-to-sale traceability system, and those systems are clunky, fragmented, and never built with operational insight in mind.

For Cresco, this meant that before Canix, day-to-day operations were built on a patchwork of manual processes, not because the team lacked sophistication, but because the regulatory environment left them little choice.

"Prior to Canix, the process was very manual across our operations facilities," says Cat Stewart, VP of Business Solution Architecture at Cresco Labs. "A lot of spreadsheets, a lot of paper, physical checklists on clipboards. It was arduous to say the least."

The complexity was compounded by the fact that even when two markets use the same traceability system, the regulatory requirements in each state can be entirely different. Reporting was a particular pain point. Exporting data from multiple state systems meant receiving inconsistent data sets, with missing columns, irrelevant fields, and gaps that required teams to manually hunt down missing information and backfill it before any meaningful analysis could begin.

"It was a lot of formatting and grunt work in Excel to try and get any kind of consistency in those reports," Cat explains.

With 16 licenses in some markets alone, the burden of running the same report independently for each license, and then normalizing all of that data, was enormous. And this task was particularly burdensome at the end of every month and quarter.

"The worst part of the process would have had to have been end of month and end of quarter reconciliations," says TJ Burns, Manager of Post-Harvest Operations at Cresco Labs. "It was a Herculean effort with each system being completely unique."

Finance and accounting teams bore much of the downstream impact, having to make sense of inconsistent and incomplete data sets for financial reporting with limited ability to investigate discrepancies on their own.

The Solution: One Platform, One Standard

Cresco was first introduced to Canix in 2022 through a pilot at their Ohio facility. The platform is now deployed across all of Cresco's operational facilities, supporting teams across cultivation, post-harvest, manufacturing, packaging, and logistics, as well as corporate teams.

The impact was felt immediately in reporting. Where teams once had to run reports license by license and manually reconcile the results, Canix delivers consistent, standardized data across every facility in every market.

"With Canix, all of our facilities, when you run a report, you're getting that same consistent report every time," says Cat Stewart.

But the value of Canix at Cresco runs deeper than reporting efficiency. One of the most significant benefits has been the control it has given Cresco over their master data.

In a large-scale, multi-site cannabis operation, something as seemingly simple as how a strain or SKU is named can have significant downstream consequences. When individual facilities make their own naming decisions, the result is a proliferation of duplicate items that makes cost accounting nearly impossible.

"When you have 10,000 items that are actually the same thing, it becomes near impossible to do anything meaningful in terms of cost accounting," TJ explains. "It just makes it easier for us to put rules in place and enforce them. It's setting the standards, and once we set that standard, we can improve upon it. Canix has really helped set the foundation for that."

Canix has also transformed how Cresco handles compliance and investigative work. Previously, when finance teams identified discrepancies in reports, they had no way to independently investigate. They had to involve operational staff and navigate access restrictions in the state traceability systems. With Canix, finance teams can access activity logs, package histories, and parent package data directly, without requiring facility badge access.

"With Canix, we can have them have access without having to be badged” says Cat. "Meaning less people have to get involved when there's something not looking right."

The Results: Efficiency, Consistency, and a Foundation for Growth

The operational improvements at Cresco since implementing Canix are wide-ranging. On the operational side, the team was able to fully retire an internally built cultivation tracking tool, consolidating that functionality into Canix and simplifying their tech stack in the process.

The impact on data accuracy has been equally significant. By eliminating the dual data entry previously required to feed harvest data into spreadsheets, Cresco has dramatically reduced the risk of a single human error cascading into downstream product availability issues.

"One human error on the keyboard could lead to a complete change of product availability down the road," says TJ. "So having it be accurate has led to more consistency."

At the facility level, day-to-day tasks that once required navigating multiple systems and physical processes have been dramatically simplified. A task as routine as creating a shipment manifest, once a multi-step process involving physically locating packages across rooms and vaults, now takes minutes.

The cumulative effect is an operation that is not just more efficient, but more resilient, more transparent, and better positioned to scale.

"It's streamlined so many different things for us that used to be just chaotic and challenging and frustrating from day-to-day operations," says Cat. "It's made our day-to-day users at our production facilities' lives inherently easier. At a corporate level, everybody's life is easier in the sense that it's all normalized on one platform. It's all accessible to everybody, badge or no badge."

When asked directly whether the investment has been worth it, the answer from the Cresco team is unequivocal.

"Yes, absolutely! The investment in Canix has been worth it."

A Partnership Built on Trust

Perhaps what stands out most from Cresco's experience with Canix is not just what the platform does, but how the relationship has evolved.

"It doesn't feel like a vendor-customer relationship whatsoever," says Cat. "It feels like you guys are true partners in this with us. When we have ideas or suggestions on things that you could improve on or would make our lives easier, you listen, take notes, and deliver."

For a company as operationally sophisticated and standards-driven as Cresco Labs, that kind of partnership isn't just nice to have, it's essential.

Watch the full case study to see how Cresco standardized cannabis operations across 8 markets with Canix.

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