Chef Putting Her Stamp On Marijuana Labeling Effort

DENVER (CBS4) - Chef Hope Frahm is baking up a batch of cookies.

What's unclear, at first glance, is that they're marijuana cookies.

The cooking isn't the problem. It's the marking.

Frahm and her employers, Love's Oven, want consumers to be able to easily identify marijuana products from their non-laced cousins.

How? By stamping or marking the cookie with a "10," for the milligrams of THC -- the chemical that gets users high -- allowed in a serving under state law.

Results have been mixed, she said.

"Stamping before the product goes in the oven, it just bakes out. Stamping after, it ruins the integrity of the product," Frahm said.

It's serious business for the industry.

"We're all concerned about the safety of children," Peggy Moore, the owner of Love's Oven, said. She said the company wants to "take those steps that seem like the right thing to do as a responsible manufacturer before being told to do that."

Regulations require that marijuana edibles are contained in child-resistant packages. But the state hasn't been able to decide how products should be marked to indicate to consumers that they're pot. A state committee that's reviewing and deciding rules for edibles has met several times but hasn't made significant progress.

Love's Oven is attempting to solve the problem before restrictions are in place.

Other than stamping, other experiments have been tried but aren't fool-proof. For instance, tinting the cookies with dark green doesn't always show up on a dark edible.

Frahm hasn't reached that eureka moment yet. But she said she'll know she'll get there.

"I'm confident," she said.