Innovator Spotlight
Inside Franklin BioScience: Cultivating a Consistent, Reliable Experience
85 grams per square foot
2.1 grams per watt
Increase in Potency (THC & CBD)
Decreased HVAC Costs
“By deploying Fluence LED solutions in our rolling-rack vertical farm, we have increased our grams-per-square-foot, reduced our operating costs-per-pound, and created an optimized work environment for our growers to inspect, care and harvest more efficiently than before.”
“Being in the infused-products business, the success of our cultivation efforts really comes down to milligrams of active ingredient such as THC or CBD. Fluence has enabled us to achieve higher yields and potency, driving up these top line metrics, while simultaneously driving down the costs associated with producing them.”
By focusing their mission on continual consistency, Franklin BioScience is on the forefront of cannabis cultivation, extraction and production by controlling their manufacturing process from start to finish. They have been able to achieve their goal of delivering consistent products to the market by investing in research, technology and focusing on operations efficiencies to increase crop yields and potency while reducing operating costs. Franklin BioScience operates under two brands: Altus Labs which delivers a medical-grade, cannabis-infused swallowable pill and Lucky Edibles which provides “sweet and discrete” flavored mints to the recreational market.
Like many cannabis cultivators, historically Franklin BioScience has had success growing under high pressure sodium (HPS) lamps. However, after being awarded a cultivation license in Las Vegas, Nevada, Franklin BioScience started to explore other cultivation practices and lighting technologies to address cultivation challenges unique to Las Vegas. Prime real estate in Las Vegas is limited and expensive, and with unbearably hot temperatures, it is costly (and sometimes impossible) to maintain optimal climate control for indoor growing. Franklin launched a research trial in its Denver facility to evaluate several different vendors in the LED space, Fluence and two others. “We ran a controlled study across multiple harvests comparing HPS with LED lights side-by-side, and Fluence outperformed the others significantly,” said Farudi.
Franklin BioScience has proven the value in researching and deploying an array of innovative cultivation techniques and technologies, including Fluence lighting solutions. By maximizing their real estate, increasing their light intensity and increasing their energy efficiency, Franklin BioScience has achieved their goals across the board with an increase in yield and potency, and a decrease in overall energy costs.
After the trial, Franklin BioScience worked with the Fluence team to design their Las Vegas facility. The vision was to transform both the propagation/vegetative and flower space into a state-of-the-art vertical farm, building upon the method proven successful in their Denver research lab. Their new vertical farm deploys Fluence SPYDRx PLUS on the bottom layer and Fluence VYPRx PLUS on the top layer of rolling-rack systems from Greenhaus Industries in flower, and Fluence SPYDRx and Fluence RAZRx in vegetative. The rolling rack systems outweigh traditional tables by decreasing the amount of static aisles, and the vertical racks increase cultivation real estate/canopy square footage in each room by 2-3x. The rolling racks also enable the cultivation team to move in and out of the canopy space with ease. The unique cohesive partnership between the Fluence lighting systems and the rolling racks allowed Franklin BioScience to more than double their production in the same real estate square footage as compared to traditional HPS grow techniques.
