The Contamination Case File
A microbial investigation for cultivators and manufacturers tired of guessing. “Total yeast and mold” and “bile-tolerant gram-negatives” aren’t single organisms — they’re categories covering hundreds of thousands of species. Your failure is usually one or two specific culprits, and they leave evidence. We walk the facility, sequence the isolates to species level, trace the transmission path, and hand you a written case report. Six hours, fixed fee, from walkthrough to findings. The fastest first move when a harvest is failing right now, and the wedge into a full Microbial Root-Cause Investigation only if the problem actually needs one.
EngagementScoped at intake. Every engagement is sized to the work, so we quote to scope rather than publish a list price.
What we deliver
- ·Facility walkthrough — the full process room by room (moms, veg, flower, dry, cure, trim, package) plus raw materials, inputs, and beneficials, mapping every point microbes could enter
- ·COA failure review to narrow the likely organism group and flag where in the process it is entering
- ·Isolate sequencing coordination — species-level identification of what is actually on the product, not a vague TYM/BTGN CFU count or “TNTC”
- ·Transmission-path analysis tracing the organism back against the facility walkthrough to the most probable entry point
- ·Live debrief walking through the finished report together and aligning on next steps
- ·The Case Report — a written 1–2 page summary naming the top suspect organism(s), the likely entry point, and a prioritized action list: what to monitor, what to sample and how often, what root cause to fix — and what not to waste money on
Who leads
Tess Eidem, PhD (PCQI; cannabis microbiology and bioaerosol depth; Senior Research Associate, CU Boulder Environmental Engineering Department).
“Bleaching and ozonating everything won’t fix the problem, and neither will remediation — remediation tolling recurs every time you fail again. This finds the source once.”