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Buy buds grown legally in Youngstown soon
YOUNGSTOWN
Within the com- ing weeks, medical marijuana patients will be able to buy buds grown legally, for the first time, in Youngstown – with strains branded as Stambaugh, Idora and Gypsy.
That’s if the next few weeks of bud drying, curing and state testing go according to plan, said Brian Kessler, board chairman of the city’s first medical marijuana growing facility, Riviera Creek LLC.
Workers harvested the North Side facility’s first batch Thursday. Brian Kessler and his nephew, Riviera Creek CEO Daniel Kessler, unveiled that product and its local brandings, which “pay tribute” to the Kessler family’s more than 100-year history in the community, Brian said.
“Everybody’s asking for product. The processors are trying to get up and running, the dispensaries are trying to get up and running and people are looking for product for sale,” Brian said.
On Thursday, bud tenders in surgical scrubs, smocks and hairnets moved plants by the stem from their beds in temperature-controlled, pressurized rooms to drying racks. The grow, from seed to harvest, took a few months, Brian said. The drying and curing process will take another couple weeks, he said.
“Cycles go sometimes 12 to 24 weeks. We’re a little faster,” Brian said.
He said this first yield can’t be measured until it’s dried, but he expects it to be in the hundreds of pounds. And if initial in-house testing is any indication, it’s quality pot, he said.
The Kesslers showed off one bud trimmed just 24 hours before. The tip of the green flower was “albino” white, covered in crystalline trichomes that Daniel said contain the entire cannabinoidal profile – “everything that makes this into a medicine that a patient can use.”
That’s the result of the environment and conditions in which the plants grow, Brian said.
“We work very hard to make this one of the most sterile environments to grow the material in the world,” he said. “Nothing touches our plants except for water, nutrients or light.
“It’s all about the patient – getting the patient product that they’re happy with,” he said. “Our goal in here is every time we grow, it continues to get better and better and to make sure the consistency and safety of our product gets better and better.”
For now, Riviera Creek plans to distribute just the dried buds – not pills – to dispensaries in one- or three-day quantities, which can be vaporized.
The potential patient count for medical marijuana in Ohio has neared 20,000 in only a couple months, “which is good,” Brian said, adding the budding Ohio industry has seen a lot of support.
“If patient count continues on this pace and the dispensaries open up timely, we have a lot of demand,” he said.
Riviera Creek already has verbal sale agreements for all of its first harvest, pending the outcome of state testing, Daniel said.
Six dispensaries have opened in the state thus far, including FRX Health Dispensary in East Liverpool, which cut the ribbon last week. The state could award up to 40 licenses for medical marijuana processing facilities.
Riviera Creek currently employs about 20 people, most with backgrounds in horticulture or marijuana tending from the Cleveland School of Cannabis, which opened in 2017, Daniel said. The facility does a lot of in-house training, he said.
Brian said he expects the 25,000-square-foot facility could max capacity for product and have 50 to 100 workers by year’s end. He added Riviera Creek could look to add new facilities “as soon as the demand is there.”