01
Check at entry or at the counter
Whichever matches your floor. The verifier is handheld, so it works for a greeter at the door and for budtenders at a counter without changing the deployment.
Cannabis retail
Age assurance in a category where identity records are a liability.
Cannabis retail sits under strict age rules and equally strict scrutiny of what operators keep about their customers. A check that collects nothing is easier to defend than a check that collects carefully.
01 · The problem today
Two pressures pulling in opposite directions
Operators face rigorous age-verification expectations and, simultaneously, well-founded customer anxiety about being on a list. Many dispensaries scan IDs at the door because it feels like the rigorous choice — and end up holding exactly the record their customers were worried about.
The situation is worse than it looks: a scan log tied to a visit time is a purchase-adjacent record about a lawful but sensitive activity. Holding it creates obligations that scale with your customer count, not your revenue.
02 · The LaurelID workflow
How the check actually runs here.
02
Cryptographic outcome
The credential proves 21+ or it does not. There is no judgement call about a hologram and no photograph of a licence sitting in a folder afterwards.
03
Nothing accumulates
No visit record, no repeat-customer identifier, no ability to reconstruct who was in the store on a given afternoon.
03 · The privacy advantage
No repeat-visitor identifier, deliberately
It is technically easy to hash a document number and call the result anonymous. It is not anonymous — it is a stable per-person key that links visits together. LaurelID derives no such value anywhere, on the device or on the platform.
This is the difference between minimizing an identity system and not having one. For a category where customers reasonably ask what you keep, the honest answer is short.
04 · Deployment
What a rollout looks like in this setting.
Scoped during qualification against your real floor, not assumed from a template.
Dimension Shape
Posture Handheld at entry or counter
Placement Greeter station and/or dispensing counter
Network Outbound HTTPS; verification is local
Reporting Aggregate counts by location and day
Fallback Your existing manual procedure
05 · Limitations
Where LaurelID is the wrong answer here.
If one of these is a hard requirement for you, it is better to know now than three weeks into a pilot.
This is not regulatory advice
Cannabis age-verification and record-keeping rules vary by jurisdiction, and some regimes require records that LaurelID deliberately does not create. Confirm your own obligations with counsel before assuming a no-record posture is permitted where you operate.
Controlled-pilot coverage today
Canonical production gates cover 13 states and Puerto Rico, with checked-in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet physical evidence on Elo M51 across 15 target jurisdictions. Arkansas is physically qualified in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, but official issuing-authority certificate binding remains pending; it is not production enabled.
06 · Other settings
Nearby verticals.
Bars and nightclubs
Door staff make a judgement call every few seconds, in bad light, with a queue behind the person in front of them. LaurelID gives them a cryptographic answer instead of a squint.
Liquor retail
Retail age checks happen mid-transaction, under time pressure, with a line forming. The check needs to be fast, defensible, and free of the data exhaust that a scan log leaves behind.
Stadiums and venues
A venue's age checks all happen in the same twenty minutes, on the worst network of the week, run by staff who may be working their first event. Everything about that is a design constraint.
Pilot LaurelID in cannabis retail.
Thirty days, one location, two to five verifiers, and a written readout against metrics you agree to first.