“Emerald has been very productive year-to-date in executing on three key strategic pillars: production scaling, product innovation, and branding,” said Chris Wagner, CEO of Emerald Health Therapeutics. “We received our cultivation license for our Pure Sunfarms joint venture, completed our first harvest and submitted an amendment to Health Canada for Pure Sunfarms’ sales license, and started commercial production. Emerald also established a supply agreement with Pure Sunfarms and acquired a licensed indoor production facility in Quebec to allow us to strongly serve consumers in Canada’s second largest province as well as add to our capabilities to serve the eastern Canadian market. We are taking progressive steps to advance intellectual property and product development. We are aggressively building our sales and marketing team, retained DDB Canada, a well-respected advertising agency, to help us build out our branding strategy. We also created a unique branding opportunity for Emerald in important, complementary sales channels.”
Expansion projects
The company’s joint venture, Pure Sunfarms, continues to make great strides towards achieving its goal of large-scale, high-quality, low-cost cannabis production. On March 2, 2018, Pure Sunfarms received its cannabis cultivation licence from Health Canada. It completed its first harvests in May 2018 and has submitted to Health Canada its amendment package to attain its sales licence. Pure Sunfarms is now scaling commercial cultivation.
Pure Sunfarms continues to advance the development of the 1.1-million-square foot (25-acre) greenhouse facility located on a 50-acre parcel of land in Delta, British Columbia (“Delta 3”), with the entire 1.1-million square foot Delta 3 site expected to be in production in 2019. The facility will have 17 grow rooms and is designed to consistently deliver high-quality product and fulfill large-volume supply commitments.
Pure Sunfarms finalized a contract for the short-term rental of generating equipment to power supplemental lighting during the 2018/2019 winter months, while the installation of the approved additional 24MW by the local utility is in process.
Senior growing, financial, human resources and operational personnel, including the established team transferred from Village Farms, are in place.
Pure Sunfarms conservatively projects production of approximately 7,000 to 8,000 kilograms in 2018 and 46,000 to 52,000 kilograms in 2019.
The company continues to focus on its second expansion project, a 500,000 square foot greenhouse in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, but has recently experienced delays in obtaining required permitting for this project.