With cannabis, there is a bit of a misconception that you need a really large facility – and massive grow – to be commercially viable. But that’s not the case.
Investors wrongly assume that bigger is better, due to greater economies of scale. The reality is you need to build a good facility which can be expanded and scaled modularly as this emerging market grows.
When it comes to determining the size and layout of a cultivation facility, the first thing we ask is: “How much cannabis are you trying to produce?”
"Finding this out allows us to determine the facility size needed to achieve the required production output," the team with CambridgeHOK explains. "Some investors have a reasonable view of the size and layout they want to achieve before they contact us. Others do not. Some people come to us with a number in mind – and say they want to have a facility which is ‘X’ in size."
"However, when we ask why they’ve settled on that figure, they don’t know – they just think ‘it feels right’ in terms of scale. At CambridgeHOK, the first key part of our role is to establish the right size cultivation facility. This is not always the same as the one the client wants to build."
Once we have defined the production output, we are able to support with the development of the full layout of the facility. Often one of the key discussions is separating GACP and GMP, alongside designing all of the rooms to be the correct size relatively to each other
"We often advise that a facility only needs to be half as big as their original estimate. Even though this reduces the potential size of a project we’ll be working on, we adopt this approach because it’s the right thing to do for the investor."
"Earlier this year, a potential client approached us to build a facility and we recommended their initial plans should be scaled back to make it 50 times smaller. We gave this advice because we know the UK cannabis market – and we understand they’d have ended up with a facility that could have produced more cannabis than the current size of the entire European market."
Read more at cambridgehok.co.uk