Behind the scenes: Follow NJ legal weed from seed to sale
READINGTON - It takes six months from the time cannabis grows roots until the time it's ready to be purchased at a New Jersey legal weed dispensary.
The Asbury Park Press took a tour through Verano Holdings' cannabis cultivation center in Readington, where cannabis is planted, harvested, cooked, packaged and shipped every day. We saw humans re-pot cannabis clones with the gentlest of touches. We saw factory workers cover soft lozenges with sugar. We watched machines fill and cap vape cartridges and spit them out like a penny-pusher arcade game.
For years, cannabis enthusiasts waited for the day when they could finally walk into a store empty-handed and leave with a bag full of marijuana, fully within the bounds of the law. But simply walking into a Zen Leaf, or one of the 20 other legal weed dispensaries across the Garden State, isn't the whole story. It's the tip of the iceberg.
Or, to make it more apropops, it's the teeniest, tiniest leaf on the end of a thin, skinny branch sprouting from a bushy, four-foot-tall fully flowering cannabis plant.
Sometimes, you've just got to stop and smell the roses.
Follow along with our timeline to get a behind-the-scenes look at how legal weed is made, from the time it's planted to the time it's fully produced and ready for sale.
Cloning & clipping
The Mother and Clone Room
(3-5 weeks)
A small branch is clipped off a “mother” cannabis plant and planted in a small plastic container (2 weeks).
Cultivators clip its leaves to promote “generative growth,” which pushes the plant to grow vertically instead of horizontally. The stress of the clipping also helps to strengthen the plant.
After they grow long roots, they're planted into bigger and bigger pots during the “pre-vegetation” phase (1 week) and “vegetation” phase (10-14 days), where they're subject to 20 hours of light per day. At this point, each plant is assigned an ID tag that follows it through every stage of production.
“At this facility, nothing starts from seed. Everything starts from clone,” says Oscar Cabeza, cultivation director. “Once the clones actually start rooting, we actually start transplanting them into these smaller pots ... until they get to a point where we can induce flowering.”
Flowering
The Bloom Room
(8-9 weeks)
This is the bulk of the time spent growing cannabis.
The cannabis plants spend 12 hours each day in darkness and another 12 hours in bright lights. This helps the plants to begin flowering, with thick green buds growing near the tops of the plant.
While the entire plant will eventually be harvested, it's these buds that become what you typically buy by eighth, quarter, half or full ounce.
“I didn’t know what to expect. I thought it was a bunch of flower pots in a backyard,” says Aaron Miles, Verano's chief investment officer. “In reality, it’s getting people like Oscar (Cabeza) in here. It's getting people who have horticulture degrees and people who understand how to grow.”
‘Bro science’
The Dry Room
(11-14 days)
The plants are hung upside down to dry.
Cultivators use a number of different factors to determine when a plant is dry enough — including technology that can estimate the specific moisture content of a plant (about 7% or 8%) or what Cabeza called “bro science,” like seeing if the stem snaps like a twig or if there’s moisture within.
After the plants are fully dried, the buds are trimmed and the rest of the plant is ground up.
“All our plants stay here for approximately 11-14 days, until we hit the moisture content and the water activity that’s ideal for consumption,” says Cabeza. “We bring them down, and depending on the tier level of the flower, we’ll either hand process ... or we’ll run it through one of our state-of-the-art trimming machines.”
‘Burping’ the bud
The Cure Room
(3 - 4 weeks)
After being trimmed, the cannabis is stored in giant plastic tubs to let the flavors develop.
From here, if the cannabis is being turned into an edible, it goes into the laboratory and kitchen. If it’s simply being sold as flower, it goes onto the packaging room.
“Every day, we're ‘burping’ the product,” Cabeza says. “We‘re opening the bags, allowing ethylene gas, any moisture, to basically escape from the bag.”
Scientists & chefs
The Laboratory and the Kitchen
(1 - 2 days)
This is where the cannabis is turned into edibles, vape cartridges and other products. While the process for each product is slightly different, it all starts with making cannabis oil. The ground cannabis is left to soak in some kind of solvent, usually ethanol.
After a while, it’s heated up to evaporate the solvent and activate the tetrahydrocannabinol — or THC, the main psychoactive component of cannabis — and becomes “crude oil.”
That crude oil is filtered and distilled to separate plant matter, fats and lipids until what’s left is a lighter, olive oil-colored cannabis oil. The final oil product varies depending on the strain.
From there, it could be packed into a vape cartridge or turned into one of the few forms of edibles legal in New Jersey — like combining it with sugar to make a soft lozenge.
“What it all boils down to is consistency of product, quality of product, pricing, and making sure the customer has a good experience,” Miles says.
Jars & joints, lids & labels
The Packaging Room
‘This is truly [the] last mile’ - Oscar Cabeza
A small army of people and machines pack everything up into the containers you’ll see at a dispensary.
Buds are sealed in jars, pre-rolled joints are stuffed and rolled and labels are affixed onto everything.
Those labels detail the full seed-to-sale history of a product, from the time a clone is planted (and what mother it came from) to its eventual harvest and packaging date.
“Everything gets packaged here, everything gets labeled here,” says Cabeza. “This is the base of where everything ends up as the end product to the consumer.”
Ready to roll
The Warehouse
Next stop: the consumer
Here, in what was once the garden center of a Walmart, the journey from seed to sale is nearly over.
The cannabis products are packed and shipped to dispensaries across the state.
“We are very proud of what we’ve accomplished here. We feel that we're continuing to evolve our cultivation facilities,” says Miles. “We’re proud to open our doors and really show what we’re capable of, and it’s only going to continue to evolve from here.”
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: NJ legal weed: How long does it take to go from seed to production
