Marijuana Business Magazine - January 2017

Offering Customized Trimming In February 2017, TCD acquired Cut & Dry, an Oregon mobile trimming business, to run its in-house product care operations. Jon Pelzner, Cut & Dry’s CEO, joined TCD as vice president of business development to scale its cannabis processing operations - including its trimming and drying services - and its tactics for avoiding cross-contamina- tion among growers’ plants. “Primarily, what we’re looking for are clients who can grow great flower but might not have the ancillary services dialed in on their farms,” Pelzner said. “We want to take the ancillary need off their plate because the allocation of resources for trimming, drying, storing, and transportation – security aside – is so vast, and the business acumen that is needed to develop those services internally just requires so much band- width, that we want to be a solution for farms that want to focus on growing and only growing.” TCD’s trim consultants meet with cli- ents to fill in a three-page consultation form to understand trim specifications and build a client profile that includes information on the bud’s structure, density, height and moisture content – all factors that affect how cannabis is trimmed, Pelzner said. “We don’t take the stance that we’re the masters of trimming and we’re going to trim it how we want it – we give the most comfort to clients by telling them, ‘You tell us how you want it done, and we’ll find the most efficient way to execute your trim preferences,’” Pelzner said. Trim leaders then study the client’s profile and teach TCD’s trimmers how they should be trimming a client’s product. For TCD’s hand-trimming operations, staff work with 300 grams of cannabis at a time, which Pelzner’s team identi- fied as the sweet spot for trimmers to be most efficient. By contrast, 200 grams resulted in high bin turnover, meaning trimmers finished quickly and spent too much time returning bins of trimmed cannabis and taking new bins; 400 grams bogged trimmers down. Each bin comes with a time- stamped receipt to monitor how long trimmers take to trim different prod- uct, and that time is entered into a system to help standardize processes. The receipts also identify the flower by client, strain and the ID from the METRC seed-to-sale-tracking system. The receipts track valuable, post-trim data, too, such as loss percentage and Quick & Clean Installation Versatile & Re-Locatable Consistent Quality Tax Advantages Cultivation Rooms Modular Building Systems for the Cannabis Industry 800-325-3781 • cultivationrooms.com January 2018 • Marijuana Business Magazine • 85