THE GREAT INDOORS
“ We have a sustainable source of organic nutrients that we then pump through the rooms to the plants ” – Tim Heydon
rooms , infrastructure and everything . Given the fact that the product is extremely perishable and it ’ s difficult to move it more than 400 miles without a deterioration in quality , we looked at ‘ what ’ s it going to take for us to expand across the continent ?’ and looked at every 400-mile radius .
“ We found it was going to cost tens of millions of dollars in each case , so that at the end of the day didn ’ t seem feasible . With the way the LED rooms were working , we started to apply those same ideas to our logistics and our supply chain . From that , what we call our ‘ finishing room concept ’ was born .
Heydon goes on to explain the new innovation . “ What we have now implemented and installed on several of our sites is our hub n ’ spoke finishing room system . What we do is have our main infrastructure in a hub , in this case in our main headquarters in Virginia where have our greenhouses , our LED rooms and all of our main growing expertise ; this is where we start growing the plants . We have an LED finishing room in Indianapolis for the next phase .
“ What we do is we start the plants in Virginia and then we fill a full tractor trailer load of plants and send them to Indianapolis once or twice a week , where they ’ re then offloaded and put into inventory in the finishing room in Indianapolis , and they will then grow for up to another week . And from that room , we have an inventory that we can sell from to that market out of that facility .
This has potentially game-changing consequences for Shenandoah , as Heydon concludes : “ We ’ re able to expand our capacity and offload our plants in another region without building an entirely new infrastructure . With the finishing room , we ’ ve eliminated the need to spend tens of millions on a whole other facility , but we ’ ve also eliminated the alternative , which was sending them from Virginia five days a week .”
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