Seed to Sale: Inside Cresco’s Sprawling Florida Cannabis Factory

Cresco Labs’ 54,000-square-foot cultivation and manufacturing facility is positioned on a 38-acre plot within the wetlands of Martin County, devoid of cell service, and with none signage to recommend what’s transpiring inside. A safety guard mans the gate beneath a cover tent. The simple stench of marijuana is the one trace that is not a top-secret CIA black-ops website, however fairly the hub the place the entire medical marijuana for Cresco Labs’ 28 Sunnyside dispensaries throughout the state is grown and manufactured into shelf-ready merchandise.

All licensed medical marijuana operators in Florida have to be “vertically built-in,” a contentious regulatory mannequin that requires the businesses to supervise each step of manufacturing from “seed to sale.” While opponents argue this mannequin prevents small and minority-owned companies from collaborating within the Florida hashish business, it’s the cause why the Cresco Labs cultivation facility is as intricate, huge, and elusive as Willy Wonka’s chocolate manufacturing facility.

“It is a enjoyable operation getting our 28 shops equipped day-after-day,” Cresco Labs’ Regional Florida President Cris Rivera tells New Times. “The rising, the drying, the edible room, the packaging, and logistics — it is fascinating.”

Cresco Labs was working in 9 different states earlier than it set its sight on Florida’s $1.3 billion medical marijuana business. In 2021, it acquired One Plant Florida’s eight dispensaries together with the Martin County cultivation facility in a $213 million deal. Since then, Cresco has rebranded the One Plant dispensaries as Sunnyside and opened 20 extra shops.

“One Plant was doing rather well at [its] shops, however it could not increase previous that with out the enhancements and enhancements that we made to the positioning,” Rivera explains. “I can now provide 30 shops, doubtlessly as much as 40 shops with slightly little bit of buffer — that is how way more productive the ability is — and we nonetheless have plans to proceed to evolve that website to make it best-in-class within the state.”

Last yr, Cresco Labs introduced a $2 billion buy of rival Columbia Care and its more-than 30 cultivation and manufacturing amenities and 99 dispensaries, together with 14 in Florida. The Columbia Care deal, anticipated to shut this summer time, might make Cresco the most important hashish firm within the U.S. by income.

There are greater than 200 individuals who work on the Martin County facility in two shifts that run Sunday to Friday. To discover the final word hashish strains with the perfect colour, odor, and efficiency, workers embark on a genetic scavenger hunt known as “pheno-hunting” and develop a number of plant variations, AKA phenotypes, from seed to find out which of them will fare greatest. Only the highest phenotype of every pressure is cloned through propagation. Though there are greater than 300 hashish strains within the Cresco Labs “pressure library,” solely 27 are saved on the harvest rotation, with new strains being added and older ones being decommissioned frequently to fulfill market demand. 

Two weeks after roughly 2,000 clones are propagated contained in the humid, indoor incubation room, solely the highest 1,300 or so are wheeled a number of ft down the corridor into one in all three “veg rooms,” sprawling greenhouses that boast pure and LED lighting overhead together with fertigation strains to feed the vegetation with vitamins. Staff tends to the vegetation dutifully over the following two to 3 weeks as they rise like bean stalks towards the clear roof. The vegetation are examined for defects and those who survive ultimate scrutiny advance to the following spherical within the harvest whereas the rejects are processed as organic waste and destroyed. 

For the following seven to 10 days, the harvested stalks dangle the wrong way up like sticky inexperienced bats within the cool and darkish flower rooms to dry out earlier than the flowers and leaves are separated from the stem after which hand-trimmed.

If a selected batch is slated to be offered as flower, it is going to be weighed and packaged. If it is destined to be offered as an edible or focus, it is going to be frozen within the on-site “Connex Village,” the place 31 transport containers are set as much as extract cannabinoids from the plant matter and manufacture them into 9 flavors of edibles, butane- and ethanol-extracted resin, or solventless rosin, which makes use of warmth as a substitute of chemical substances to extract cannabinoids.

“I’ve chemists which might be working with the plant matter to get the correct mix of all the things to make the merchandise so there’s much more consistency and lack of variability within the manufactured items,” Rivera explains. “With flower, it is simply what nature gives you, and nature has a manner of getting swings you can’t management. You can attempt to restrict the swings, however there at all times will probably be pure swings in flower.” 

In the ultimate phases, all of the merchandise are meticulously measured into their respective vials, baggies, or containers. They are saved behind lock and key till third-party laboratories clear the batch on the market. Drivers should then transport the merchandise to dispensaries all throughout the state, together with to Sunnyside dispensaries in North Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Oakland Park, Boynton Beach, Lake Worth, and West Palm Beach.

Cresco Labs’ twenty ninth Sunnyside dispensary is slated to open in West Miami this week in anticipation of 4/20 — a “Superbowl-like vacation,” Rivera says, for which the hashish firm spends six to seven months getting ready. To honor the natural festivities this yr, Cresco Labs is providing in-store occasions and promotions, and unveiling three new strains: Melon Fizz, Truckstop Wedding, and White Runtz. Whereas Melon Fizz and Truckstop Wedding boast excessive THC proportion, Rivera says, White Runtz is taken into account a lower-potency flower with lovely colours that’s actually smokeable and gives a managed excessive.

“I wish to be certain that everybody can take part in 4/20 no matter what your pocketbook will permit as a result of lots of people wish to have fun what this plant does for folks,” Rivera says. “Now it is go time.”