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Timeline to the Finish Line: How Long Before a New Grower Should Have Sellable Product?

When launching a cultivation business, time is of the essence.

The sooner a new licensee has product to sell, the sooner they can start enjoying attractive wholesale prices in limited markets.

Even in mature states, if demand is strong, a swift market entry still makes sense.

But entrepreneurs new to cannabis are often unsure exactly how long it takes for a cultivation start-up to have sellable product. This can lead to unrealistic expectations, missed promises, and anxious investors.

If you’re launching a production site for the first time, ensure all stakeholders’ expectations align with reality. Here’s a rough outline of what to expect:

Facility design and buildout

Creation of a cultivation strategy (1-2 weeks)
A cultivation strategy defines how a business will grow cannabis. The “best way” to grow is that method that produces the highest quality and quantity of flower at the lowest possible cost. This decision should be influenced by everything from climate and available space to the intended finished product and regulatory considerations.

Facility design (4-8 weeks)
Remember that just half a facility’s footprint is dedicated to growing; the rest is support space like break rooms, bathrooms, offices, and storage. Want 20,000 square feet of cultivation space? Plan on a 40,000-square-foot facility. Want to extract or manufacture products on-site? You’ll need something even larger.

Buildout (6-12 months)
The more people on the construction team, the faster a grow site can be completed, but there are still many factors outside your builder’s control. Equipment availability and power supply snafus usually top the list. Stubborn municipalities and unwelcoming neighbors can also hold up a project, even if you comply with local laws and zoning ordinances.

Production planning

To ensure you can start growing the day your facility is finished, attack the following in parallel with the buildout:

Establish a genetics acquisition strategy (8 weeks)
It’s never too early to identify a trusted supplier of starter genetics. These can be seeds, rooted cuttings, or plantlets propagated by a tissue culture lab. Research potential suppliers by visiting their sites and speaking with former and current customers. Be crystal clear about delivery dates, royalty payments, and refund or credit policies in the case of compromised plants.

Hire a head grower (12 weeks)
Newly licensed cultivation businesses may have included a grower in their license application. If that person was only a placeholder, or circumstances have changed and they’re no longer available, you’ll need to hire new. Give yourself about three months to identify a good fit, and bring them on early to help commission the facility, create the SOPs, and hire the cultivation team.

Write your SOPs (4 weeks)
Have your head grower distill the cultivation and post-harvest processes down to a dozen standard operating procedures (SOPs). You will update, expand, and create new SOPs as your business evolves, but 10-12 cultivation protocols will be sufficient to start. The SOPs will serve as training documents in onboarding new employees, so it should be the first project your head grower tackles after being hired.

Hire and train the cultivation team (8 weeks)
If your head grower is skilled in commercial plant production, hire the rest of the team locally. Plant growing experience isn’t a pre-requisite for hire. Look for the same qualities that you would in any other industry; interest in learning new skills, a track record of showing up on time, and outstanding job references. Time their start date with the arrival of the first plants.

Production launch

Once the facility is built, the team is hired, and the plants are on-site, it’s go time. Here’s how long it should take to have saleable product:

Stock plant production (8 weeks)
If you’re starting from seed or just a few rooted cuttings, you’ll need time to grow them into stock plants—or “moms”—from which you’ll take cuttings throughout the year. You’ll skip this step if you outsource your propagation to a third party. Hundreds of rooted cuttings will arrive on your doorstep at pre-determined intervals.

Propagation (2-3 weeks)
Cuttings take anywhere from 7-21 days to root. Play it safe and plan on three weeks.

Vegetative plant production (2-4 weeks)
Plants need a vegetative growth period to size up and develop strong roots and branches. For moderately dense plantings, the average is about three weeks.

Flower production (8-10 weeks)
Today’s popular indoor varieties take about eight weeks to flower. Equatorial or “sativa-dominant” varieties are in great demand, but they take much longer to flower. You may not be able to make up for the increased cost of production at retail.

Post-harvest

How you trim and dry your harvest will directly impact your time to market.

Slow (4-6 weeks)
Hang-dried cannabis will need 7-10 days to dry. Hand-trimming these flowers will take an employee about 8 hours to trim a pound of dry flower. Plan on enough people to finish trimming in one week. Curing will tack another 2-4 weeks onto the process.

Fast (2 weeks)
After hang drying for 7-10 days, run the flowers through a trim machine built for processing dry material. Skip the cure and package the flowers to sell as soon as the lab tests come back clean.

Super-fast (24-36 hours)
Machine trimming followed by freezing and cryogenic drying will deliver perfectly dried flower in about 24 hours from harvest. The product does not need to be cured, and it’s ready for consumption once the process is complete.

Conclusion

There are many variables in determining a new grower’s time to market, and many of these—like supply chain disruptions and lab testing bottlenecks—are out of your control.

But if you bake these contingencies into your game plan, set realistic expectations, and do the proper steps correctly, you may find that your timeline to the finish line is surprisingly short.


Ryan Douglas

Ryan Douglas

Ryan Douglas helps businesses cultivate a profitable future in the cannabis industry. He is the founder of Ryan Douglas Cultivation, LLC and author of From Seed to Success: How to Launch a Great Cannabis Cultivation Business in Record TimeRyan has worked in commercial horticulture for 25 years and specializes in legal cannabis start-ups.

Before entering the cannabis industry, Ryan spent 15 years as a commercial greenhouse grower of ornamental and edible crops, growing up to 600,000 plants annually. As Master Grower from 2013 to 2016, he directed cultivation for Tweed Inc., the flagship subsidiary of Canopy Growth Corporation. Ryan now offers cultivation advisory services to cannabis operators worldwide, and he can be reached through his website, douglascultivation.com.

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