Franklin Bioscience Teams Up With Fluence Bioengineering

When Franklin Bioscience was awarded their cultivation license in Las Vegas, Nevada, they did everything they could to make the most of their investment. Real estate in Las Vegas isn’t cheap, and the climate requires specific considerations in order to build an efficient, successful operation. Chief among those considerations for Franklin was finding the best lighting system available on the market.

Franklin has been operating in Denver, Colorado since 2014, producing products for their two brands, Altus Labs and Lucky Edibles. They specialize in edible THC and CBD products, controlling the entire production process from growing to final product to ensure that dosages are consistent, accurate and responsible.

In Denver, they’d been using traditional high-pressure sodium (HPS) lighting systems to grow their cannabis. However, for their Las Vegas facility, they wanted to explore new options to maximize their square footage, so they looked to vertical farming — and thus LED lighting.

Franklin tested three leading LED light manufacturers against their 1,000W DE HPS lighting systems. The result? The Fluence Bioengineering LED lighting systems created better results, hands down. “We ran a controlled study across multiple harvests comparing HPS with LED lights side-by-side, and Fluence outperformed the others significantly,” said Cyrus Farudi, president of Franklin.

Implementing State-of-the-Art Lighting Systems

For the Las Vegas facility, Fluence and Franklin worked together to design a wholly customized, cutting-edge vertical farm. The facility utilizes Fluence SPYDRx PLUS on the bottom layer and Fluence VYPRx PLUS on the top layer of rolling-rack systems from Greenhaus Industries during the flower state, and Fluence SPYDRx and Fluence RAZRx during the propagation and vegetative state.

The results were transformative. In the Las Vegas facility, Franklin more than doubled their production in the same real estate square footage when compared to traditional HPS grow techniques. For Farudi, that’s only part of the story.

“Being in the infused-products business, the success of our cultivation efforts really comes down to milligrams of active ingredient such as THC or CBD,” Farudi said. “Fluence has enabled us to achieve higher yields and potency, driving up these top line metrics, while simultaneously driving down the costs associated with producing them.”

While they increased the potency of both their THC-and CBD-based strains in their new facility, they also increased efficiency and profitability by producing 85 grams per square foot of canopy (170 grams per square foot of real estate) with 2.1 grams per watt.

The Difference is in the Technology

Fluence is putting decades of experience designing lighting systems into each of their products. Using passive thermal management systems, a commitment to energy efficiency and all-LED technology, they’re helping commercial (and hobbyist) growers achieve results similar to Franklin’s on a regular basis.

All of their customized lighting applications are designed and manufactured in their Austin, Texas facility, using a mix of handcraftsmanship and innovative robotics. To read more success stories like Franklin Bioscience’s, visit Fluence Bioengineering’s website.

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