Terms of Service

phenominal.io is operated by Phenominal LLC, a California limited liability company headquartered in Sacramento, California ("Phenominal," "we," "us"). When this page says "you," it means the person or entity using the site or engaging us for services.

By using the site, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the site.

Phenominal works exclusively with licensed California cannabis distribution operators and the professionals who support them (lawyers, accountants, brokers, and consultants representing licensed operators). By engaging us, you represent that you are a licensee in good standing with the California Department of Cannabis Control, or that you are acting on behalf of one with their authorization. We may decline or terminate an engagement if this representation turns out not to be accurate.

phenominal.io publishes information about California cannabis distribution compliance — recall trends, label-pipeline failure modes, and operational practice. The site exists primarily so operators can find us and engage us to do specific work.

The blog posts, recall-trend analysis, mechanism deep dives, and other written material on the site are educational. They reflect our reading of the public record and our experience with the underlying systems. They are not legal advice, regulatory advice for your specific situation, or a substitute for engaging a licensed attorney or a regulatory consultant who has reviewed your operation. Reading the site does not establish a consulting or advisory relationship with us. Only a signed written engagement agreement does that.

We make our best effort to be accurate. We cannot guarantee that every fact on the site is current, that every linked external source has not changed since we cited it, or that the regulatory environment we describe will look the same on the day you read it.

The site has a chat assistant called Phenom in the bottom-right of every page. Phenom is a software interface to a large language model routed through OpenRouter, Inc. It does not represent the personal opinion of any human at Phenominal. Its answers are generated automatically based on a prompt and the recent conversation history, and may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong.

Do not rely on anything Phenom says as professional advice. If a Phenom response and our website differ, the website wins. If a Phenom response and a written document we have sent you separately differ, the written document wins.

You agree not to use Phenom to attempt to extract personal information about people, to harass, to send abusive content, or to defeat the safety filters that limit what Phenom will discuss. We may discontinue or modify Phenom, or refuse to respond to specific requests, at our discretion.

The full list of third-party services involved in operating the site, and what each one receives, is in our Privacy Policy.

Phenominal works with clients under written agreements that we negotiate and sign outside this site. Nothing on phenominal.io is itself an offer, a contract, or a binding commitment to do work. If you and Phenominal enter into an engagement, that engagement is governed by the written agreement you sign — not by anything on this page.

Booking a call through the site's scheduling page (powered by our self-hosted Cal.com instance at cal.phenominal.io), exchanging messages with Phenom, or sending us an email does not create a consulting or advisory relationship with us. Those are introductory steps. The relationship begins when a written engagement agreement is signed.

Phenominal provides consulting services in California cannabis distribution compliance. The specific scope, deliverables, fees, payment terms, and service commitments of any engagement are what is written in the signed agreement — that document controls.

We do not provide legal advice. We are not a law firm. If a regulatory or contractual question requires legal interpretation, we will refer you to counsel.

We do not file regulatory submissions on your behalf, sign documents on your behalf, or appear before regulators on your behalf.

The California cannabis recall index, the per-recall detail pages, the licensee aggregation pages, and any monthly or quarterly recall reports published on this site reproduce public-records data from the California Department of Cannabis Control's recall portal at recalls.cannabis.ca.gov. Phenominal does not vouch for the accuracy of the underlying DCC records. Errors in the regulator's source data are not corrected by us. Report those directly to DCC. We refresh our index regularly and have no obligation to do so on any particular schedule.

Compilation and use. The underlying facts are public records. The categorization, methodology, cross-referencing logic, monthly-report writeups, and aggregated views on this site are Phenominal's own work. You may view, search, link to, and cite this material with attribution to phenominal.io. You may not scrape, bulk-download, republish more than a small portion, sell, or use it to train a third-party model without our written permission. Direct links to specific recall pages, licensee pages, or reports are encouraged. Use by AI engines and language models is governed by the published policy at phenominal.io/llms.txt, which serves as our machine-readable consent for citation, training, and reference use under the attribution practices described there.

No editorial assessment of licensees. Per-licensee aggregation pages compile recall events DCC has published. They do not constitute Phenominal's assessment of any licensee. Recall classifications (Voluntary / Mandatory) are DCC's regulatory framing, not ours. A licensee who believes an aggregation page misrepresents their record should contact us at brandon@phenominal.io. We will verify against the DCC source and correct any error introduced by our compilation.

Information you share with us in the course of an engagement — about your operation, your data, your relationships with regulators, your suppliers, or your customers — is confidential. We do not share it with third parties except as needed to perform the work, with your authorization, or as required by law.

We may use anonymized, non-identifying observations from our work to inform our practice and our published writing. We will not name your company, your license, or any individual at your company in any published material without your explicit written permission.

You agree to keep our written work product (engagement agreements, deliverables, methodology, internal documentation) confidential to your operation. You may share it inside your company on a need-to-know basis. You may not republish, resell, or post our work product publicly without our written permission.

The site, including the design, written content, blog posts, and underlying code, is the property of Phenominal LLC. You may read it, share links to it, and quote it briefly with attribution. You may not republish substantial portions, scrape the site at scale, or use it to train a machine-learning model without our written permission.

Deliverables we produce for a specific engagement are licensed to you for your internal use upon full payment of the engagement, unless the engagement specifies otherwise. We retain the underlying methodology, frameworks, and reusable components. We do not assign ownership of those to clients.

You agree not to use the site to:

Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the site or its underlying infrastructure without our explicit written permission.
Submit content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, or that infringes someone else's rights.
Submit chatbot prompts intended to extract personal information about other people, to defeat the chatbot's safety filters, or to obtain content for republication or training of a third-party model.
Submit fraudulent bookings, applications, or other false statements through the site.
Use the site to send spam or other unsolicited communications to anyone associated with Phenominal.
Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source of any non-public component of the site.

We may suspend or terminate access to the site, refuse to respond to chatbot requests, or decline to do business with you if we believe you have violated this section.

The site and the chatbot are provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent permitted by law, Phenominal LLC disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, with respect to the site, the blog content, the chatbot, and any other publicly accessible material on phenominal.io.

This disclaimer does not apply to deliverables we produce for you under an accepted engagement. Our work product under a specific engagement is governed by the engagement and these terms together; the engagement controls if there is a conflict.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Phenominal LLC's total liability to you arising out of or related to the site or any consulting engagement is limited to the amount you have paid us under the engagement that gave rise to the claim, or, if your claim arises from your use of the site without an engagement, fifty United States dollars ($50).

In no event will Phenominal LLC be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of profits, loss of data, or business interruption, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Some of these limitations may not apply to you if your jurisdiction does not allow them. In that case, our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Phenominal LLC and its officers, employees, and contractors from any claim, demand, loss, or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of (a) your breach of these terms, (b) your use of the site in violation of law or someone else's rights, or (c) information you provided to us that turned out to be materially inaccurate or unauthorized.

This section does not require you to indemnify us for our own negligence or misconduct.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising out of or related to these terms, the site, or any consulting engagement will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Sacramento County, California, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

Before bringing any formal claim, you agree to first contact us in writing at brandon@phenominal.io and give us a reasonable opportunity (at least 30 days) to resolve the issue informally.

You may stop using the site at any time. If we have an active engagement together, the signed engagement agreement controls how that engagement ends.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the site at any time if you breach these terms, if continued use would expose us to legal risk, or if we discontinue the site.

Provisions that by their nature should survive termination — confidentiality, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law — survive termination.

We may update these terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will update the effective date at the top of this page and, if we have an active engagement with you, notify you by email. Continued use of the site after a change indicates acceptance of the updated terms. The version of the terms in effect when you signed an engagement agreement with us continues to govern that engagement unless we have separately agreed to apply updated terms.

Entire agreement. These terms, together with any signed engagement agreement and our Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and Phenominal regarding your use of the site.
Severability. If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.
No waiver. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a sale of the business or a corporate restructuring.
No agency. Nothing in these terms creates an employment, partnership, joint venture, or agency relationship between you and Phenominal LLC.

Questions about these terms, requests for written permission, or notices required by them should be directed to:

Phenominal LLC
Sacramento, California
brandon@phenominal.io

The operator.

The site, and what it is not.

Phenom (the chatbot).

How a relationship gets started.

The nature of our work.

The recall index and what it is.

What we keep to ourselves.

What belongs to whom.

What you agree not to do.

No warranty on the site’s content.

The cap.

If a third party comes after us because of you.

Where this is decided.

How either side ends a relationship.

If we update them.

The boilerplate, briefly.

How to reach us.