According to the Florida Office of Medical Marijuana Use, there are already 22 licensed Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers in the state.
It is a more than two billion dollar industry that serves approximately 1 million patients.
It’s also a booming business that emerged from a turbulent past, in the United States and for a family in Florida: the Cobb’s.
In the 1970s, Bill Cobb was one of the state’s top marijuana smugglers, using a tanning lotion company to disguise a $300 million drug empire.
“At the time, he was a tanning lotion distributor,” his son Brady said. “He continued to run that business that was the front to launder that amount of money from the movement of so much cannabis and that became the name of the DEA task force, Operation Sunburn.”
The Sunburn name is now a legacy. Brady has embraced his father’s passion.
He studied law and worked to legalize cannabis before opening his own company in August 2022. You guessed it: Sunburn.
“We get the best of the best,” said María Rivera, as she looks around the room of plants.
Rivera works on one of the cannabis company’s two farms, located in Winter Garden.
The farm operates 24/7 with weekly harvests and follows a vertical model. It means that every product you see on Sunburn’s shelves was grown, treated and packaged directly in their own facilities.
Rivera is the head of the farm’s propagation department and shows us what a plant should look like: “They look strong and healthy, they look uniform and grow with roots.”
Rivera oversees the first step, propagation and cloning. From a mother plant he takes a clone and transplants it into a tray where it will remain for 3 weeks until roots begin to appear.
The entire room has around 1,200 clones.
“They get stronger and stronger, in the morning when I come in, I say ‘Good morning girls!’ and I know they feel it.”
This first step is considered the most important stage. And Maria makes sure they are well taken care of, singing to them and talking to them. You can see her playing salsa music and singing her songs to her little plants.
“Do you think the extra care and detail makes a difference in the product?”
With a laugh Maria responds: “Believe it or not, they can feel it, that’s why I give them what I feel. I love my job, I love what I do, I love when I see my results. They like. “They like jazz and salsa.”
IT’S ALL ABOUT QUALITY
When the plants have enough roots, they move on to the vegetative stage. There, they are placed in a Rockwell brick that has monitored moisture levels. The vegetable room has about 4,000 plants that will stay for 4 to 5 weeks.
When that time is up, they move to a different room where they will begin their 60-day process to produce their fruit, or in this case, their well-known flower. This is known as the flowering stage.
There are around 1,800 plants in one room alone. In total, there are three rooms with sensors that monitor aspects such as light, humidity and temperature.
“Us Constantly monitor the plants and constantly monitor the plant. As you can see here,” Chris Keller said, “as you saw with the vegetables, there is not a yellow leaf or a single plant that is not completely healthy. And when they get here, they are the best of the best.”
Keller is the team’s vice president of cultivation. He says quality is the most important thing.
The State of Florida has no restrictions or regulations on how a farm must grow its product, but it must ensure that what the customer buys is actually what they receive.
If you take a look at each plant, they have a different colored band around them, what does that band mean? And how important is it to track product growth?
“Well, it’s the most important thing,” he says.
“The state regulates us to keep track of this plant from the beginning of its existence. From the moment it has roots, we assign it a serial number.”
And that number stays there until it dies or reaches the customer’s hands, allowing you to know which exact plant and farm your product comes from, make sure it’s been third-party tested, and provide how much THC and turbines the product has. .
After the plants bloom, they go to the curing room to dry. After they are dried, they go to the pruning room where the flower is separated from the stem and leaves.
The flower is then weighed, packaged, and then distributed to one of their 13 dispensaries across the state. In total, the process from start to finish takes 6 months.
But what’s the timeline for a plant to hit store shelves?
“The timeline is crazy, we have to wait about 16 weeks, 4 months in the future, for what we’ll actually see on market shelves,” Keller explained.
He emphasizes: “We have to make decisions today that we won’t see on shelves until next year.”
THE NOVEMBER VOTE
Come November, Florida’s cannabis landscape could change dramatically. A market that right now is only available to those with medical marijuana cards could soon be available to anyone over the age of 21 for recreational use. That means marijuana could become one of Florida’s biggest markets.
“If you look at other states that have gone recreational, the sky is not falling. They’re not stoned zombies walking everywhere. There are a lot of people coming in and out of stores looking for an alternative to prescription medications,” Brady said.
According to a new study in the journal Addiction that estimates tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse, for the first time, daily marijuana use exceeded daily alcohol consumption in the United States.
And in another big change for the industry, the Justice Department last month began the process of reclassifying marijuana as a tier three substance, no longer putting it on the same level as heroin.
“He Government treatment of cannabis lags far behind public sentiment. Which to me means it’s slow progress,” Brady explains.
“There have been many forces in the lobby world that have been fighting against us for some time; I call them our natural predators. And at some point, based on these numbers, we will become the predator.”
Cobb says Sunburn currently has 300 employees with expected revenue of $48 million to $55 million this year. That’s almost double what they earned last year.
And what could it be like when the market is open to everyone? Brady says it’s not even unfathomable: “Since we’re planning that, I can’t chase the shiny object. We are focused on the current medical market in Florida. “There is going to be a lot of noise from now until November.”
That noise will be a rigorous legislative session. If Amendment Three passes, they will have to determine whether Florida will be a wholesale market, time and place restrictions, tax revenue, and what can be imposed to curb the market.
That’s why Cobb says he’ll be a fast follower: “I don’t want to make a lot of moves and spend a lot of money to scale when I don’t know what the end market will be like.”
But now the market is well regulated and Sunburn’s operations run like a well-oiled machine.
They hope to plant even more potted plants, opening five additional stores this year and a new farm in New Smyrna Beach.
They are willing to give the option of what they claim is a quality product to those who need it.
“Sometimes I can’t help people with money, but by doing what I do, I know that the product can help a lot of people, headaches, seizures, back pain. I feel good when I help people say that I take this and the headaches go away. That makes me feel good because it is a little drop that helps,” said María.
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