CANTON – Inside an unassuming building on Steinway Boulevard, cannabis plants are stacked five tiers high in a brightly lit bloom room.
Irrigation tubes feed the potted roots while fans circulate air that’s controlled for temperature and humidity. The plants are at the core of Verano’s cultivation and processing operations in Canton — the multi-state cannabis company’s only grow facility in Ohio.
Verano, which also operates Zen Leaf dispensaries, recently began manufacturing single and five-pack pre-rolled joints. The Division of Cannabis Control issued guidance for pre-roll sales in August around the anniversary of the state’s first recreational marijuana sales.
Voters legalized the adult use of marijuana with a ballot initiative in November 2023, but the industry started operating under existing medical regulations that prohibited combustible forms of consumption while adult-use rules were established.
As of Sept. 13, the state reported more than $3 billion in cannabis sales — $2.23 billion in medical and $802 million in recreational. The average price per gram of flower was $6.55.
“Pre-rolls are the fastest-growing category in cannabis right now, followed by vapes,” said Steve Mazeika, vice president of communications for Verano.
So far this year, the Chicago-based company has sold more than 3 million retail and wholesale pre-roll units across 13 states. It also debuted the Savvy Strut, a 2-gram disposable vape, and the Verano 1-gram disposable vape with live resin in Ohio.
Trip McDermott, chief operating officer of Verano, said pre-roll customers “run the gamut” from regular smokers to the occasional buyer who wants to relax or take one to a party.
“It’s an easy product to just pick up,” he said. “You don’t have to grind up the material and roll it yourself. It’s just more of a convenience factor.”
Verano invited The Canton Repository inside the 22,000-square-foot Canton facility to see the process behind the products that end up on dispensary shelves. About 50 of the company’s 125 Ohio employees work at the Canton site.
A, B, Cs of cultivation
It starts with a mother — plant that is.
These are the cannabis plants that will be propagated from cuttings. A branch is cut off and put in soil to take root and form its own plant.
“We are running over 40 strains here in the facility,” McDermott said. “And each of these moms, we will take clones off of.”
The mother plants are used for a couple of months before being replaced by a newly grown plant. McDermott said that practice helps prevent pests, diseases and “genetic drift.”
The clones are placed in covered trays to maintain humidity for seven to 10 days before being hardened for a vegetative or “veg” phase, when they’re transplanted into four-by-four-foot pots. After about a week, they’re transplanted again to larger pots and later moved into a flower or bloom room.
The overhead lights are constantly on until that final phase. Then, the light will be cycled on and off for 12 hours at a time.
“What that darkness does is it triggers the plant that it’s time to flower, and then it will grow the bud,” McDermott said.
The environment and nutrients are adjusted throughout the process for each particular plant stage and strain. Some varieties are more bushy or tall, and a trellis net supports the mature plants as they produce buds.
The flowering stage takes about two months. The facility has five bloom rooms and can fit about 1,000 plants in each.
Processing pre-rolls and more
When it comes time to harvest the buds, workers clip the branches and then hang them upside down to dry in another room. The drying lines stretch wall to wall in vertical rows.
The largest buds, deemed “A” or “B” quality, are clipped and put in separate bins. They’ll be carefully trimmed and processed to be packaged as flower.
“With that larger bud, we want to make sure that we’re really handling that properly, we’re not damaging it throughout the process,” McDermott said.
The trimmed A and B buds are placed in stacks of air-tight totes to cure in the plant’s own gases and moisture. The totes are “burped” periodically to off-gas and let in fresh air, McDermott said.
“We want to have optimum moisture, which we test with moisture analyzers and water activity meters so that we’re ensuring that the product gets to the end consumer and it’s not too dry but it’s also not too wet,” he said.
Too dry, and it loses the earthy aroma that hits like a wave when a tote is opened. Too wet, and it molds.
Smaller, “C” buds are removed by hand in a curing and drying room. Those are ground up for pre-rolls, the source for edible and vape extractions, or packaged as “popcorn” flower.
Automated machines form the gummies, chocolates and pre-rolls. Starting pre-roll production mainly involved the machine installation and staff training.
“At this facility, we use ground flower, so that would be more of like the C bud,” McDermott said. “Certain companies will use the trim and just put trim in those pre-rolls, but we use ground flower just to make it a better quality product.”
Verano produces the Essence-branded pre-rolls. Singles are one gram, and five packs are a half gram per pre-roll.
Single pre-roll prices can range from $12 to $16 with five-pack prices between $30 to $45, depending on brand and quality, McDermott said.
Verano is selling pre-roll products at all six of its Ohio dispensaries, and several other local dispensaries show the new product for sale on store websites. They are:
Reach Kelly at 330-580-8323 or kelly.byer@cantonrep.com.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Verano cannabis cultivation facility in Canton begins producing pre-rolled joints
Reporting by Kelly Byer, Canton Repository / The Repository
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