Spreadsheets and paper forms
Sample submissions were handwritten, then rekeyed by hand into disconnected sheets.
Rekeying errors
Case study · High North Labs
High North Labs is Canada’s first facility dedicated exclusively to cannabis testing. Chapeau! led strategy and delivery for its fully digital operation: LIMS selection, client portal, automated chain of custody and invoicing.
Legalization created a market overnight, and every lab serving it still ran on paper. In a market where shelf time decides survival, slow turnaround threatened producer viability. High North’s CEO came to Chapeau! with a bold ask: build a LIMS from scratch.
Analogue operations meant
Sample submissions were handwritten, then rekeyed by hand into disconnected sheets.
Every custody handoff was tracked on paper, the weakest link in a regulated workflow.
Finance rebuilt invoices from sample logs, hours per cycle, every cycle.
Static PDFs sent by email, with no way for a producer to see sample status.
A custom LIMS would have cost a year of build and risk, so we told them not to. We ran a structured evaluation, selected SLIMS for its API and headless flexibility, then built a modular Chapeau! layer on top to fit cannabis compliance. Recommending against the build they asked for is what earned their trust on day one.
Four pillars
Licensed producers order, track samples and view realtime results without a call or an email.
Onboarding, order processing, chain of custody and invoicing, all digitized.
Physical samples link to digital records automatically. No manual entry.
Tailored views for QA, regulatory, corporate and marketing teams.
The platform stopped being plumbing and started being product. Producers now buy High North for the data as much as the test.
What it unlocked
Potency and consistency data guides which strains producers grow and which products they push.
Tamper-proof audit logs behind every CoA, ISO 17025 methods aligned to Health Canada Part 6.
QA tracks potency variance, regulatory pulls audit logs, corp dev spots trends. One dataset.
10,000 clients since 2020. 100,000 CoAs issued. 150,000 samples a year, on 24-hour operation.
“Producers started using our data to make cultivation decisions: which strains to grow, how to position products, when to harvest. We became part of their strategy, not just a compliance checkpoint.”