California cannabis regulators issued a mandatory recall Aug. 16 for a batch of pre-rolls from Santa Barbara County-based cultivator Glass House Farms due to the presence of Aspergillus flavus, a common mold. However, the company plans to appeal the recall.
The recall was for a batch of the company’s five-count, 3.5-gram package of Garlic Starship pre-rolls that was packaged by Alkhemist DM LLC on or after April 4, 2024, and sold at 15 licensed dispensaries on or after April 30, according to the state’s Department of Cannabis Control (DCC). The product’s batch number is GHFGS0416MPNEW.
The product was sold in 10 California counties: Alameda, Los Angeles, Monterey, Orange, Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Francisco, Sonoma, Stanislaus and Ventura, including at six retail facilities owned by Glass House Brands co-founders Graham Farrar and Kyle Kazan.
This marks the DCC’s 18th recall of a cannabis flower or pre-roll product this year due to the presence of Aspergillus. The department made no such recalls for Aspergillus throughout all of 2023.
Glass House, which began business in 2015 as a single greenhouse farm in Carpinteria, Calif., now has a 6-million-square-foot greenhouse footprint with the largest cannabis flower brand in the state. The company won five honors at the 2024 California State Fair Cannabis Awards, including the coveted Golden Bear trophy for its Lilac Diesel cultivar, presented by the state to the best of California agriculture.
“Of course, we complied with everything on the recall,” Farrar told Cannabis Business Times. “The product’s been frozen; Whatever is at the distributor won’t go out, stores have held it, and we’ll get it all back, and it’ll be destroyed because that’s the rules.”
In eight years of cultivating cannabis for California’s licensed market, this marks the first time Glass House has had a recall for one of the company’s products. And Farrar called it a “bummer” because he doesn’t know what the company could have done differently to have prevented it.
Glass House double-tests its products, once through a DCC-certified lab for all state-required compliance tests reported on certificates of analysis and then during a pre-packaging phase for the company’s own internal R&D, Farrar said.
In addition to cannabinoid and terpene content, California’s licensed cannabis laboratories test for residual solvents and processing chemicals, residual pesticides, heavy metals, microbial impurities, mycotoxins, moisture content and water activity, and foreign material.
“And all those tests, of course, were clean, or [the now-recalled product] wouldn’t have gone to the market in the first place,” Farrar said. “That said, we will appeal it because we’ve gotten no information [from the DCC]. … It’d be nice if you got that, ‘Hey, this is being recalled. Here’s the test results why.’ But that’s not what happened.”
Farrar said DCC officials told Glass House that they froze the product batch in Metrc (the state’s track-and-trace system), were issuing a mandatory recall, and that Glass House should “please send us photos” of the product being quarantined.
“That’s it,” he said. “So, I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know when it came. I don’t know how they tested it. I don’t know who tested it. I don’t know what tests they did on it.”
Transparency from the DCC represents a significant opportunity for Glass House and other licensed operators in California to understand how products that have passed the state’s testing standards for Aspergillus end up in the hands of consumers only to be recalled months later.
- Was the recalled product batch sample from a dispensary shelf? Did it come from the distributor?
- What were the testing results?
- Did the DCC’s laboratory use a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) testing method?
- If the test detected the DNA of Aspergillus, was it a dormant spore? Was it a live spore?
“Without knowing that, I can’t even say if this was actually a viable Aspergillus [spore] or just a remnant of a dead speck of dust, basically, that happened to match the DNA pattern,” Farrar said. “[A qPCR test] doesn’t actually tell if you even have a viable spore. A test that shows DNA on qPCR but doesn’t grow when plated is still compliant. … If they aren’t checking that by plating [the spore] to see if it is really there, it’s essentially a coin flip.”
CBT connected with the DCC to seek clarity.
Hafner confirmed the department only uses qPCR testing for Aspergillus but did not confirm whether that testing method turned up an active or dormant spore for the Glass House recall.
“We can disclose that the recall samples tested by the department come from a variety of sources, including dispensaries and distributors,” he said in a statement. “The department does use quantitative polymerase chain reaction tests, with the appropriate negative and positive controls included, when testing for Aspergillus.”
Hafner did not say if the recalled Glass House pre-roll sample(s) that tested positive for Aspergillus came from a laboratory reserve sample that initially tested clean before the product hit the market.
The specifics matter to the team at Glass House.
“You don’t know a chain of custody. You don’t know how it’s handled. You don’t know how it’s stored,” Farrar said. “What if the retailer left it in a hot storage area for a month? Like, I don’t know. The distributor would seem to be the place you would test it because that’s what the product actually is going into. But we have no test results.”
To protect consumers, the DCC requires certified cannabis labs to perform microbial testing for salmonella, E. coli and four pathogenic species of Aspergillus (A. flavus, A. fumigatus, A. niger, A. terreus), according to Medicinal Genomics, a research and development product manufacturer that works with cannabis genetics and microbial detection.
While there are hundreds of Aspergillus species, the four pathogenic species listed above are testing targets throughout the cannabis industry because of inhalable products like flower and pre-rolls. State cannabis programs don’t typically require labs to screen for other Aspergillus species that are toxigenic or immunogenic in cannabis testing, according to Medicinal Genomics’ state-by-state breakdown of microbial cannabis testing standards.
California is one of 23 states in the U.S. where if a cannabis testing lab detects any traceable amount—measured by one colony-forming unit (CFU) per gram—of Aspergillus, then the sample fails the state’s compliance standards.
And this stringent compliancy standard makes Aspergillus testing challenging to predict based on random sampling at licensed laboratories, Farrar said.
“A dirty test doesn’t mean the whole batch is dirty,” he said. “And a clean test apparently doesn't mean the whole batch is clean. It kind of depends on which piece of flower you picked up, and that’s hard.”
Farrah said Glass House wants to do everything it can to help ensure public health and safety, but he doesn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with much of the industry’s Aspergillus standards for cannabis. Meanwhile, some states, like Oregon, simply did away with or never required Aspergillus testing for cannabis (more on this later).
“We all probably breathe 400 Aspergillus spores a day,” Farrar said. “And if you’re not immunocompromised, you know, how many friends have you had that have gone down with Aspergillus? It doesn’t really happen. … I’ve been smoking weed for 30 years and never met anybody that went down with Aspergillus.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) backs Farrar’s claim: Most people are exposed to and breathe in Aspergillus spores every day without getting sick. However, people with weakened immune systems or lung diseases are at a higher risk of developing health problems from Aspergillus, according to the federal public health agency.
But how many people experience adverse reactions from Aspergillus? The answer is somewhat unknown because aspergillosis—an infection triggered by Aspergillus—is not a reportable disease in the U.S., so the “exact number of cases is difficult to determine,” according to the CDC.
Because pathogenic Aspergillus species are common in open-air environments, it’s difficult to avoid breathing in their spores, according to the CDC. And, as many Oregon cannabis cultivators found out last year, preventing “the presence” of a single live spore in cannabis cultivation has become somewhat of a fool’s errand.
Specifically, the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission (OLCC) implemented new testing standards for microbiological contaminants on March 1, 2023, including the four pathogenic species of Aspergillus. Failed testing rates shot up over the next four months, leaving growers scrambling to remediate their noncompliant batches of cannabis flower or adopt new standard operating procedures, from using fungicides to decontaminating their raw material before testing via a radiation service.
In August 2023, however, the Oregon Court of Appeals suspended the state’s mandatory Aspergillus testing after cannabis cultivators cited “irreparable harm” to their businesses. Oregon is now among a handful of states that don’t require this microbial testing standard.
A month later, the OLCC lifted its hold on cannabis products that tested positive for Aspergillus, stating it no longer considered those products to have failed a compliance test. The commission also said that products would no longer be subject to holds based on laboratory detections of Aspergillus moving forward.
Farrar pointed to this example of less regulation in Oregon as one reason he believes many industry operators consider Aspergillus testing standards “somewhat questionable.”
“They said this is not protecting people. Don’t add cost and friction. Don’t make people do worthless tests,” Farrar said. “So, I think Oregon decided we don’t need to do this. This is a waste of time. Let’s not waste our time and money or the industry’s time and money.”
While the operational cost of destroying the recalled pre-roll batch and losing out on potential revenue won’t break the back of a business the size of Glass House, a more extensive recall for a smaller operator may end differently, he said.
“It’s a bummer because I don’t think we’re actually hurting anybody,” Farrar said. “Even in hindsight, I don’t know what we would’ve done different. We did all the required testing.”
