Shoppers Drug Mart partner with Trutrace Technologies

Shoppers Drug Mart partners with Trutrace Technologies to pave the way for blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical market

News has emerged that Shoppers Drug Mart has partnered with TruTrace Technologies to implement blockchain technology for the purpose of commercialising Medical Marijuana.
Shoppers Drug Mart is a Canadian retail pharmacy chain based in the Canadian city of Toronto. Amongst stocking traditional medicine, Shoppers Drug Mart is renowned for making Medical Cannabis available on the Canadian market. This exchange became possible as a result of the affairs that took place in 2018, which saw Canada to be the second country to legalise Cannabis for recreational and medical purposes. Since then, Shoppers Drug Mart has been selling cannabis online in Alberta and Ontario.
The pharmaceutical company established ties with TruTrace Technologies, formally known as BlockStrain, on June 17th. TruTrace Technologies is set to bring eight years of experience as well as plenty of knowledge of the Cannabis industry to the partnership. This comes as a result of their extensive work in developing a technology which allows cannabis growers and breeders to identify and secure rights to their intellectual property. TruTrace Technologies does this by minutely following the activity of collaborating Cannabis farms and concurrently documenting their progress in the ledger. This collaboration is to be made possible by TruTrace Technologies’ partnership with seed-to-sale data analysts such as Strainprint and Molecular Science Corp.

The partnership between the two companies comes off as unconventional at first glance given that they origin from parallel industries but blockchain technologies have been found to play an intrinsic role in virtually all instances. In the case of Shoppers Drug Mart, the retail company pursued TruTrace Technologies in the hope of establishing a tracking system for merchandise of the Cannabis-nature. By utilising the technology developed by TruTrace Technologies, Shoppers Drug Mart aims to track its produce by means of seed-to-sale data. This process would allow suppliers as well as consumers to identify the product’s origin and genetic composition. This partnership could potentially bring about a revolution in the way things operate in the retail industry.
The demand for such a service comes about as a result of the intrinsic enigma that surrounds the Cannabis industry. For this reason, Shoppers Drug Mart seeks to make Cannabis more accessible and familiar to its audience by infusing an element of transparency into its transactions.
Apart from eliminating the barrier between the Cannabis industry and its users, Shoppers Drug Mart recognises the importance of targeting medical practitioners in the aim of minimising the encumbrance that doctors might experience in prescribing medical marihuana to patients. Given the recency of the antidote, Cannabis is seen to be a grey area. With over 700 cannabis strains available on the market, TruTrace Technologies could allow practitioners to accurately match Cannabis strains to the particular needs of the patient at hand. In relation to this, Robert Galarza stated: “This initiative should help researchers and clinicians to match therapeutic outcomes to specific genetic and chemical profiles, and provide physicians, pharmacists, and patients with greater confidence in the products they prescribe or consume.”
Should things go to plan, the pilot program is expected to launch in the late quarter of July, with full production and implementation targeted for November 2019.