Licensed cannabis retail in BC operates under provincial security expectations that most shops never face: camera coverage of the premises, secure product storage, alarm protection and controlled access are part of holding the licence, not optional extras. That changes how a security system gets designed — coverage has to be demonstrably complete, storage genuinely secure, and records available when an inspector asks. We design dispensary systems to satisfy those provincial requirements in practice: full-coverage camera plans, secure-room protection, monitored alarms and logged access. Specific regulatory thresholds are your licensing consultant's territory; making the building meet them is ours.
Get a Free QuoteFor most retail, camera placement is about priorities — cover the choke points, accept gaps elsewhere. Cannabis retail inverts that: the expectation is coverage of the areas where product is sold, handled and stored, and a blind spot is a finding, not a trade-off. The design process therefore starts with a floor plan and works to demonstrable completeness: sales floor, point of sale, product storage, receiving and entries.
Within that completeness, quality still matters. Face-height identification at the entry, clear transaction views at the counters, and proper low-light performance for the after-hours record — an inspector wants coverage, but after an incident you want footage that identifies someone.
Retention is designed deliberately rather than left to whatever the recorder defaults to: storage sized so footage is held for the full period your licence requires, with export straightforward when it's requested. Confirm the required retention period with your licensing consultant; we make sure the hardware actually achieves it.
Product storage is the heart of a dispensary's security design. The secure room or storage area needs to be more than a locked door: camera coverage of the room and its entry, intrusion detection inside it, access restricted to the people who genuinely need it, and a log of every entry. Overnight, it's where the store's entire exposure concentrates.
We design storage protection in layers — the room's physical door and lock, an alarm zone dedicated to the space so entry outside business rules generates its own signal, and a camera that records everyone who goes in and what leaves with them. The result is a space you can demonstrate is controlled, not just assert.
A cannabis store's after-hours profile is straightforward: everyone knows what's inside, and the frontage is usually glass. The alarm design treats that honestly — detection at the frontage and entries, interior layers behind them, a dedicated zone on the secure storage, and monitoring so the signal reaches a real person while the event is in progress rather than being discovered at opening.
Arming discipline matters more here than in most retail. Open/close schedules, late-to-arm flags and a clear keyholder plan mean the store's protected state is a matter of record — useful operationally, and exactly the kind of diligence a licensed business wants to be able to show.
Duress provisions belong in the conversation as well: staff-facing features for the scenarios cash-and-product retail plans for, designed quietly and trained properly.
Provincial oversight runs on records, and metal keys don't generate any. Electronic access on the staff entry, the office and the secure storage puts a name and a timestamp on every door event — who entered the storage room, when, and how long the door stood open. When staff leave, their credential dies the same day, with the change itself logged.
The same system tidies daily operations: no shared key that new hires copy and departed staff keep, storage access limited to the roles that need it, and a clean answer when a discrepancy investigation asks who was in the room that week.
We design and install dispensary systems to satisfy provincial security requirements as they apply in practice — coverage, storage, alarms and access records built the way licensed retail needs them. What we deliberately don't do is play licensing consultant: requirements are interpreted and confirmed by the professionals who handle your application, and the fine print is theirs.
The productive workflow is collaborative. Bring your consultant's requirements list to the design conversation, or bring us in early enough to build the floor plan around them — either way, the system that gets installed is one your application can stand on, in a store that's genuinely harder to steal from. Twenty-one-plus years of industry experience goes into that design.
Tell us about your property and we'll come back with practical options and honest pricing.