Every licensed cannabis business in California reports through the same system. It's called Metrc, and if you've touched a plant, a package, or a sale since you got licensed, you've already used it whether you thought about it that way or not.
TL;DR
Metrc is California's track-and-trace reporting system, built by Franwell. It doesn't set cannabis policy, it's where you prove you're following it: every plant and package gets a unique tag that follows it from immature lot to final sale.
The System Behind the State
Metrc is built by Franwell, a company with a background in supply chain tracking and RFID technology, not cannabis specifically. California's implementation is called CCTT-Metrc, the state's version of a platform Franwell also runs in other legal cannabis states. It's a cloud-hosted reporting system: a web application, backend web services, a mobile app for state inspectors, and a separate mobile app for industry use.
Metrc itself doesn't set cannabis policy. It's a reporting system, not a rulebook. The DCC's regulations define what has to happen; Metrc is where you prove it happened.
Why It Exists
The point of a track-and-trace system is diversion control: stopping legally grown cannabis from sliding into the illegal market, and stopping the state from having to take anyone's word for what's in inventory. Every plant and every package gets a unique, unforgeable ID the moment it enters the system, and that ID follows the product through every stage until it's sold, destroyed, or transferred out.
That same chain of custody is what makes recalls possible. If a batch fails testing or turns up contaminated, the state can trace it backward to the source and forward to everywhere it went, instead of guessing.
The Life Cycle
Metrc is built around one core sequence: immature, then packaged or harvested, then transferring, then selling or infusing. A plant tag gets applied to an immature lot when the planting is created, up to 100 plants per lot. That tag gets replaced with an individual plant tag once the plant moves to flowering or into mature canopy. When it's harvested, the batch gets a unique harvest name. From there, product gets packaged and tagged again before it can move anywhere, and every transfer between licensees runs through a manifest logged in real time.
Everything downstream of the plant, extraction, infusion, repackaging, retail sale, is the same idea applied again: create a new package, give it a new tag, log what went into it and what it connects back to.
Who Regulates What
Before the DCC existed as a single agency, Metrc access and license type were split across three departments: CDFA handled cultivator licenses, the Bureau of Cannabis Control handled distributor, retailer, testing lab, and microbusiness licenses, and the Department of Public Health handled manufacturing licenses. The DCC consolidated all of that in 2021, but Metrc's permission structure still tracks closely with those original license-type boundaries. What a Cultivator can do in Metrc and what a Distributor can do in Metrc are genuinely different systems wearing the same interface.
Tags Are Not Optional, and They're Not an Extra Line Item
Every plant and every package needs a physical tag before it can legally exist in the system. Licensees order tags directly through Metrc, and the cost of those tags is built into the license fee you already paid the DCC, not billed separately per order.
What Comes Next
That's the shape of the whole system. The rest is mechanics: how to get credentialed, how to order and receive tags, how to move a plant through its stages, how to build and adjust packages, how to run a compliant transfer, and how to close out a sale. Each of those gets its own breakdown, because each one has rules that will cost you time or product if you get them wrong.