Hang on to your leftover Halloween candy, because this installment of Live Active Cultures is likely to activate the munchies. Massachusetts-based Insa is currently one of the smaller competitors in Florida’s medical marijuana market, with only nine dispensaries — including two in Orlando — across the state. But they’ve got huge potential for expansion if and when legal adult recreational use arrives, thanks to their ginormous grow facility in Polk County. I recently drove an hour to Auburndale for a guided tour of Insa’s high-tech facility with CEO/co-founder Peter Gallagher and head grower T.J. Cummings, and came back with a buzz about Boston bud’s future in the Sunshine State.
Insa’s Auburndale cultivation complex is easily the most modern and massive marijuana-making facility I’ve been invited to visit so far. Although unassumingly industrial from the outside, the interior resembles Willy Wonka’s candy factory, if that film had been directed by Stanley Kubrick circa 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stark white hallways and keycard-controlled security doors — which I had to don a head-to-toe clean-suit coverall before entering — lead to vast climate-controlled rooms crowded with cannabis in every stage of development, from freshly cloned sprouts to full flowers on the verge of harvest.
Every stage of production, from trimming and packaging to making extracts and edibles, for all of Insa’s Florida stores is handled under one roof by a staff of fewer than 60, and I was struck by how the operation is so technologically advanced — with wavelength-tuned lights and computer-controlled irrigation individually nourishing thousands of plants, and Italian confectionery equipment capable of churning out 1,500 chocolate bars in four hours — yet simultaneously old-school, like the complex contraption dribbling concentrated cannabis oil into the same Ball jelly jar your grandma might use for canning fruit…