At Revolutionary Clinics, we’re constantly striving to be a business and a brand you can trust. That’s why we created a series of videos on our Vimeo channel that take you behind the scenes of our growing center in Fitchburg, MA and offer you a tour of the most important parts of the process “From Seed to Sale”.
The star of several of these videos is Christine Champagne, our Cultivation Operations Manager. A graduate of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts, Christine spends her days overseeing the activities of our Mother Room, Cloning Room, Flower Room and Incubator Room. Her knowledge and passion for the growing process are on full display as she begins the tour at the room where we cultivate plants that have been separated from our flower producing crop for the sole purpose of producing future plants.
Appropriately enough, this room is called the Mother Room.
The Mother Room is essentially a nursery where the “best of the best” plants from our flower room are set aside to as Christine says “be all they can be”. These plants have been selected through a process called ‘pheno hunting’ where our employees identify the traits or ‘phenotypes’ that they most want to see in our products and then set those plants aside to become mother plants that we will use to create new plants for future production and harvesting.
As the mother plants grow, our crop care specialists remove trimmings from them and transport them to the next room on our “From Seed to Sale” tour.
The Cloning Room is where our flower producing plants of the future are raised.
Cloning enables us to create exact replicas of plants with the characteristics that Christine likes to see such as “squat, bushy plants with nice thick big buds”. In the cloning room, cuttings from mother plants (clones) are placed in a sterile rooting media until they develop roots of their own.
These seedlings are then planted in a growing medium and cared for until they are tall enough and strong enough to be transplanted in the Flower Room.
While every step of the cannabis growing process is critical, The Flower Room is where the magic happens.
In the Flower Room, we’re not only producing the product that will be on the shelves of our dispensaries within the next 8-12weeks, we’re evaluating the buds, doing additional pheno hunting and setting aside new “best of the best” mother plants that will continuously improve the quality of our products 3-6 months into the future and beyond. In addition to pheno hunting, our crop care specialists do a lot of pruning just like you’d do in your home garden. We use sharp garden snips to remove fan leaves to improve air flow and ensure the plant is putting its energy to work on growing the healthy buds that we will eventually harvest and process into products. Believe it or not, the iconic leaves of the marijuana plant are not used in the development of finished products. They may be the symbol of cannabis, but they don’t contain much if any of the compounds that give cannabis its therapeutic power.
After the buds have been picked, they go into the Incubator.
In the video above, you’ll not only learn how much Christine loves her job, you’ll see how we reduce the cure time of the buds by placing them in an incubator. Spending time in a perfectly controlled environment at optimal humidity levels prepares the buds for a shorter stay in the Cure Room.
The Cure Room is where the buds undergo their final drying phase and are ready to become sellable products.
The incubated buds spend 10-14 days drying out in a clean room environment where they are safe from mold or any other issues that can compromise their quality. Curing is important to maximize the potency of each bud and ensuring the quality of our final product. We’ve put many weeks and a lot of labor into getting our buds to this point, now it’s time to finish strong. In sporting terms, this is where we touch home plate after hitting a home run, high step into the end zone on a big kickoff return, or tap in the birdie putt on a long par five.
The biggest, fullest and most visually appealing buds go on to packaging.
As you’ll see in the video above, the final manicuring, weighing and packaging of buds is done entirely by hand. It’s how we make sure that every product that goes into a Revolutionary Clinics package and onto the shelves of our dispensaries meets our strict quality control standards.
Undersized buds as well as the buds of strains grown specifically to become concentrates, edibles, prerolls or infusions are sent on to extraction.
Extraction is where our operation goes from botany to chemistry. It’s the process of converting our cured cannabis flower buds into oil that we then heat, winterize, distill and process into the pure THC or CBD cannabinoid that we use in our tinctures, vape cartridges, and fruit chews that you’ll find on the shelves of our dispensaries.
We hope you found this behind the scenes tour of our “From Seed to Sale” process interesting. More important, we hope you come away feeling confident about our dedication to quality and safety at every phase of the process and inspired by the passion and professionalism of our growers, processors, packagers and extractors. They all care as much about the quality of your cannabis experience as our patient advocates do and are every bit as committed to making sure you enjoy excellent benefits for years to come.
