

For Jake Van Wingerden, owner of Maryland-based SunMed Growers, being what he calls a “plant person” runs in the family. Where his grandfather once grew pansies and poinsettias, however, he now grows cannabis in a state-of-the-art, 250,000-square-foot cannabis facility. The third-generation cultivator, whose family oversees more than 30 million square feet of plant canopy, didn’t become the premier cannabis grower in Maryland by happenstance.
He did it with a great team, the right partners—like Fluence by OSRAM—and a top-down reimagining of a cultivation model that prioritizes efficiency and quality.
SunMed’s journey began six years ago with a 70,000-square-foot greenhouse facility with high-pressure sodium fixtures for supplemental lighting. As SunMed grew, Van Wingerden saw an opportunity to reach new economies of scale and adopt simplified cultivation methods that would establish SunMed as a national leader in cannabis production.
Finding that competitive edge in commercial-scale production relied on several critical factors: becoming more efficient, reducing costs, offering more diverse products to meet changing consumer demand, all while improving quality and yields necessary for sustained success in an evolving market. SunMed’s comprehensive search to address each of these factors led to Fluence. Van Wingerden made the decision in 2019 to retrofit SunMed’s expanding facility to Fluence’s LED technology, seeking to combine their inherent efficiency and ability to meet the demands of a high-intensity lighting strategy with the innovations the company had already adopted to automate its facility.


Designed for continuous production, SunMed uses a Dutch rolling table system to move plants in custom-designed, air-pruning pots throughout the facility based on their growth stage. Compressed air rails move the tables up and down, while a boom system waters the plants and disinfects them by exposing them to ultraviolet light. Even the coco-based grow media is custom-made and blended in house. A smart environmental control system leveraging thousands of sensors also provides data on temperature, environmental factors and, most importantly, light levels.
With such a comprehensive approach to facility design and commitment to automation, even modest improvements in plant quality and production would yield exponential benefits—especially as SunMed invested heavily in expanding its facility.
Results under Fluence’s VYPR top light were more than modest.
Since 2019, SunMed has increased yields by 30 percent across its most prominent strains, recording consistent or elevated potency. Today, Van Wingerden, his advisers and Fluence’s horticulture experts are working to double the facility’s light intensity to enhance production even further—which goes to show that even the best, most established cultivators on the planet can benefit from having the right partners.