Follow the 5 S’s of GMP for Cannabis Cultivators to Improve Your Crops and Revenue

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Good manufacturing practice (GMP) is a set of guidelines to consistently meet specific standards of quality to ensure products are safe for consumers, and the concepts are just as relevant and important to cannabis cultivators as they are to manufacturers.

In general, GMPs are categorized into five areas: people, processes, procedures, premises, and products. For cannabis cultivators, the key to implementing, following, and benefiting from GMPs is to develop practices that lead to one of three goals:

  1. Consistency: To deliver repeatable and reliable outcomes

  2. Quality: To improve brand reputation, sales, and customer satisfaction

  3. Economic Value: To save money and increase revenue, which lead to higher profitability

Together, consistency, quality, and economic value will give your company a competitive advantage in the marketplace that’s difficult to copy.

With competition increasing in the cannabis industry more every day, cultivators should be looking for ways to stand out and to set themselves up for long-term success. Developing and implementing GMPs is a highly strategic and effective way to do it.

The 5 S’s of GMP for Cannabis Cultivators

Of course, the goal for any cultivator is to improve crops and revenue, and that’s exactly what should happen if you develop effective GMPs and follow them closely. To help you get started, we’ve broken down the ways that cannabis cultivators can leverage GMPs to reach their growth goals into the 5 S’s introduced below.

1. Systematize Your Facilities

You can’t accurately determine if your grow facilities are operating cost-effectively if each facility or room works differently. Instead, systematize the setup and operations of your facilities and grow rooms, so you can quickly evaluate your overall costs of operation. Once you know the cost to operate one facility or room, you can apply that number to every other facility or room.

Keep in mind, this includes every part of each facility or room, including all inputs, equipment, tools, and so on. Repeatable systems deliver reliable, high quality outcomes that drive positive economic value, which are the three goals of GMP.

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2. Streamline and Reduce All Types of Waste

Waste refers to people, processes, and everything else that doesn’t add value to your crops and revenue generation. Anything that doesn’t add value should be eliminated, replaced, or improved. This requires an unbiased review to look for opportunities to streamline waste, including wasted time.

For example, analyze how much time your employees spend filling containers, washing pots, and so on. What does that time equate to on an annual basis? Chances are, you could save time and improve the quality and consistency of your crops as well as economic value by switching to grow bags.

How much time and money do you waste on single amendments? How much time do you waste watering and feeding? If you switch to bio365’s grow media, you’ll save time on both watering and feeding, and you won’t need to use single amendments. All of that reduced waste in terms of time and money will benefit your crops and your bottom-line over time.

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3. Shift to Evaluating Cost per Plant and Added Value

Chances are you know what the annual costs associated with your operations are, but do you know what the cost per plant is? Do you know what you pay for growing media, labor, inputs, and so on? If you don’t know the cost of every input per plant, then you have no way of knowing if each input is worth the cost at all.

For example, some grow media is cheaper upfront, but over time, you’ll spend more time and money per plant than you would if you invested more for better soil. You’ll also end up with plants that aren’t as high quality and smaller yields than you’d like. Conversely, when you use bio365 grow media, you’ll have to water and feed less often because everything your plants need is already in the soil.

When you invest in inputs that drive added value over the long term, your cost per plant goes down and your revenue will go up. The price you’ll be able to sell your crops for will increase, your reputation among buyers will go up, and you’ll sell more overall.

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4. Standardize Operating Procedures

Just as you need to systematize your facility and grow room set up, you also need to standardize how those rooms operate on a day to day basis. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) ensure consistency and reliable outcomes.

SOPs should describe not just your processes but also your inputs and how they affect your processes to ensure there are no deviations. For example, your grow media must be consistent from bag to bag, palette to palette, and so on. If it’s not, then your results will be inconsistent, which puts your quality, reputation, and revenue at risk.

With that said, always use inputs that are guaranteed to be consistent, such as bio365 grow media. There will be no discernible differences between one bag or palette of a bio365 soil and another. Also, the team at bio365 provides SOPs to its customers to help cannabis growers using our grow media develop and follow consistent processes that deliver the best results.

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5. Sample First

Sample (i.e., test) changes to your processes and systems before you invest in any wide scale changes in your facility. It’s essential that you evaluate any change to ensure it delivers incremental value in terms of consistency, quality, and/or economic value before you roll it out to your full operation. Working toward continuous improvement is less risky and delivers better results over the long-term than making big investments on significant changes all at one.

To sample first, you should have a small part of your facility, a corner of a grow room, or even a table dedicated to testing. Tests that show an incremental increase in value (and the increase could be derived either in the short-term or over the long-term) can be rolled out to the rest of the operation in a systematized, methodical way.

For example, you can request a free trial sample of bio365 soil, and we’ll send you enough of the right soil based on your needs and goals to get measurable and meaningful results from your test. Our team will also work with you to set up and run your test, so you can accurately and confidently determine if switching to bio365 grow media will provide the consistency, quality, and economic value you need.

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Key Takeaways about GMP for Cannabis Cultivators

The cannabis industry will continue to get more and more competitive, and cultivators that will survive and thrive in the coming years are the ones who build competitive advantages and operate as efficiently as possible today.

Developing and following GMPs can help you reach your goals, so get started now with the 5 S’s introduced in this article.

Remember, your grow media has an effect in all 5 S’s. Reach out to the soil experts at bio365, and we can help you set up a free trial sample, streamline waste, get reliable outcomes, and more, so you can achieve the consistency, quality, and economic value your business needs to thrive.