Brandy Young is founder of a cannabis testing lab in Rochester, N.Y.
Brandy Young launched Certainty Analytical Labs in Rochester, N.Y., in March 2021. With a Phd in analytical chemistry from Purdue, 15 years in the workforce and a previous entrepreneurial venture behind her, she’s poised to succeed in one of the biggest new markets to roll across America in decades: Cannabis.
She operates one of only 13 labs in New York State. Her company is Drug Enforcement Agency certified, state-registered and awaiting its ISO certification. Her clients include medical organizations to high-tech growers to former drug dealers. They bring their products, from gummies to flowers to brownies, to her two-employee lab to make sure they are safe and of consistent quality. She calls the former drug dealers-turned dispensary owners, “free-market privateers,” and says it gives her a lot of satisfaction to help them come out of the shadows.
The market for cannabis products is expected to be $40 billion by 2030, according to San Francisco-based Grand View Research. Right now, cannabis is legal, with more or less regulation, in 21 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. Companies in those states, including New York, are waiting like racehorses at the track for the federal “legal” flag to fall. When the U.S. government legalizes marijuana, companies with the fastest and most nimble business models – or the most cash on hand — will start rapidly expanding.
Young wants to be one of them. Her lab is already testing about 20 samples a week, charging $1,200 for a full battery of tests. If she can raise $1.5 million, she’ll buy more equipment, add to the tests so that cannabis companies can label their products as free of things like pesticides and butane — and keep building.
The cannabis industry is at the leading edge of testing innovation, she says: “When you scan a bar code on a cannabis product, you’ll be able to see all the information about it, from THC to pesticides and everything else,” she said. “All that is done for an apple, but you can’t see it.”
Young is the only woman and the only Black woman among the New York state lab owners – as far as she knows, she’s the only Black woman lab owner in the United States. And, she’s the only one with a Phd in analytical chemistry. Sometimes Young, a woman from genteel Virginia, finds herself in a room full of her colleague-competitors, mostly men from New York City and Long Island.
“They can be boisterous,” she says, proving herself a master of euphemism. “I have to remind myself there’s room for me here, too.”
Sometimes her colleague-competitors turn to her to answer questions, which creates another whole set of dilemmas. Research has shown that women who do favors for men don’t get the credit; because men feel entitled to be served by women, they don’t even remember the favors that women deliver.
So far, Young has tried to be generous with her knowledge, without being foolish. “Never give away a weapon you’re not prepared to meet in the battlefield,” she said.
Reared By A Tribe Of Women
Her ambition and composure come from what she calls a tribe of women. She was reared in an extended family, in Richmond, Va., in a house where mother, her mother’s sister, her cousin, and her grandmother and grandmother’s sister resided.
In high school, she had a chemistry teacher who inspired her: Dr. Joyce Willis. “I have no idea why she was a doctor, and teaching in public school in Richmond,” Young said. “I asked myself that question a lot.”
“But she looked like me, and that made me think I could be like her.” One day, Dr. Willis organized a trip for students to Virginia State University. Young spent the day with a college student, who old her chemistry was a lot like cooking.
Young liked cooking, especially pineapple upside down cakes with her grandmother, who to whipped the merengue into stiff peaks in front of Young’s fascinated eyes. When it came time to register for college, Young checked the analytical chemistry box and went off to Hampton University, an HBCU. She met her husband, a South African named Putuma Gqumana who had grown up in apartheid South Africa. They graduated and went to Purdue University together. She studied with a famous analytical chemist. R. Graham Cooks. She was also part of a generation of Black students drawn to the school through a diversity program developed by Dr. Dwight Erwin Lewis. The administrator set up mentorship programs so the students could deal with the challenges of a space “that wasn’t always welcoming,” Young says.
Lewis died in February. “I recently wrote to his wife,” Young said, with emotion in her voice. “Dwight is the reason many of us made it through.”
Research Into Infectious Disease
Eventually, the young couple moved to South Africa. “The call was to go out, get educated, and then come back and help build the country,” Young said. “I didn’t at all mind the adventure,”
They focused on infectious disease research, Young’s of tuberculosis, developing testing services to support the business community and the hosptials in the Western Cape.
After they returned to the United States, Young set up her first company, which aimed to market point-of-care diagnostic tests – a field that boomed during the pandemic. But she had a hard time penetrating the Richmond entrepreneurial scene, and eventually, that venture petered out.
Jobs in the toxicology department at the University of Rochester drew them north about five years ago – which is why, in 2019, after attending a conference about the business of hemp, she founded her company in a northern city of 210,000 people. In Rochester, she has found a welcome, more than in Richmond for her first venture. “The mindsets are different in the North and South,” she said. “People have looked at me and thought, I can give her a chance.”
In part, that’s because of the industry. “People are highly interested and excited about cannabis. People say, cannabis saved my life. It believe them, because they speak so passionately about it.”
New York has set aside 50% of the licenses it is granting for cannabis businesses to people who were hurt by the state’s punitive drug laws, which sent some people to prison for decades for non-violent marijuana offenses.
The Advantage for Medical Companies
Grants from the local energy company and the Ain Center at the University of Rochester got Certainty Analytical Labs off the ground. Now, she is talking to Excell Ventures, the state-funded venture capital fund, about how to raise the money she needs.
“Things just came together beautifully. People listened to me; people wanted to help. I got funding from various sources, and I found a space.”
Lab companies – or hard-tech companies in general – aren’t usually seen as great venture capital bets because they take longer to bring to market. But the times are changing: Cannabis is a fast-growing, untapped market, and in an environment where funding is harder to come by, a real-world company with medical applications might look like a safer bet to investors than the next software play.
“My impetus is to build something great. To secure money, to take part in the economic enterprise of cannabis, is part of it,” she said. “But cannabis is a guise for something bigger and more impactful. Money is not the only metric.
In her career as a college professor, she has taught many classes, hoping to see students connect with science, as she connected through Dr. Wilson in a high school classroom in Richmond.
“I bring a perspective rooted in my cultural identity, my viewpoint, which is not really seen in the sciences. Training off those skills within the community is where the true innovation and inspiration comes from for me.”
