The Long Road to Certification; Designing & Testing Child-Resistant Packaging For Cannabis

Published

February 26, 2019

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In this occasionally light-hearted account of the journey to gaining a certified child resistant package under the 16CFR1700 regulations, it may be easy to forget the importance of doing this job the right way. Children are wonderfully entertaining, frustratingly unpredictable and unknowingly delicate creatures. They are also our future and represent the legacy of all our own hopes and dreams. This project was dedicated to protecting them as best we could.

One of the things that makes any child-resistant test so difficult to pass is that kids by their very nature are inquisitive beings. It’s amazing how interested they are in a cardboard box and just how much they want to open it to find out what’s inside. Now imagine that the box is filled with sweet, delicious candy, but that the candy is in turn filled with a potent psychoactive narcotic. A curious child and controlled substances do not mix well, and there are plenty of sobering facts that help to maintain one’s focus when taking on challenges like this.

But it’s a critical, necessary step, and one that we put a lot of time and consideration into when we were developing our own Duallok, a card-based child-resistant package.

Dane Whitehurst

Dane Whitehurst – Creative Director. I studied Industrial Design at graduate and post graduate level and left my studies in 2005 with the dream of designing furniture and lamps and all that good stuff. I kind of fell into packaging design as a ticket back into the city and since then I have never looked back. In many ways packaging design, for me, represents the ultimate design discipline. To do it well you need to understand products and how people interact with them. You also need to understand brands, materials, manufacturing processes, sustainability, users, and logistics and you need to squeeze every drop of creativity out of what is often an impossibly low production budget with often very little time to execute a solution. I am now the Creative Director at both Burgopak and Duallok, both of which focus on the structural side of packaging design. At Burgopak, our core focus is on developing and producing new mechanisms, formats and experiences to provide delightful, enriching and responsible packaging solutions on a global scale. We founded Duallok in 2018 having spent 2 years researching, developing and testing what we feel is the ultimate brand-enhancing child-resistant packaging system. It passed the 16CFR1700 certification in September 2018 and has already been making waves in the legalised marijuana space. I have had the pleasure of working with some truly inspirational individuals and companies along the way and I now also teach, write and talk about my experiences and where I see things going in the future.