The pungent, sticky sweet smell of cannabis is the first thing visitors notice when they enter the 750,000-square-foot grow house that Trulieve built east of Tallahassee.
A robotic crane carries a tray of seedlings along an overhead track to each stage of development until they’ve become fully mature 4-foot-tall cannabis plants popping with lush, fat green buds ripe for clipping and drying. All along the way some 400-plus workers tend to each stage of their growth.
“I don’t believe that will be the last facility like that we will build in our future,” Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers told a group of reporters after they took a tour of the gargantuan grow house. One of the first five medical cannabis licensees in Florida, Trulieve is the largest purveyor of Florida’s $2 billion a year medical cannabis market. It is also among the largest sellers of cannabis in the nation, with stores in eight other states.
Rivers sees the day when employees will be selling recreational weed alongside its medical grade products in Florida. “That facility gives us the ability to take that product to large-scale output with a high quality,” Rivers said. “If Florida recreational passes and we see an immediate demand spike, having that flexibility in our portfolio to ramp those buildings up to meet demand in very short order and very little cost to us is … an important advantage.”
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