Show-Me Data

Growing up, Boston Dickerson always thought he was going to be in the family business. The Dickersons owned an independent pharmacy chain in Kansas City, Missouri, and Boston worked at the pharmacy.

His older brother, Montana, had paved the way for Boston by getting a biochemistry degree from the University of Missouri and doing his post-graduate work at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

But about halfway through his own biochemistry degree, Boston realized he didn’t want to spend his time working in labs. Instead, an aptitude for business called for him to pursue his MBA after completing his technical degree.

During his transition to graduate school in 2018, Boston was involved in several startups, from medical devices to food & beverage and logistics, “just cutting my teeth learning about organizational structure, corporate governance,” he tells Cannabis Business Times. Around the same time, “my dad had his first solid night of sleep after trying edibles in Denver for the first time,” Boston says. “From that point forward, my brother and I pressed our parents to pivot into cannabis, which came to fruition as Missouri legalized medical cannabis in 2019.”

The Dickersons jumped on the opportunity to marry Boston’s business passion with the family’s value of helping their community.

Missouri’s cannabis application process favored those with pharmacy and legal cannabis experience. “We obviously had the pharmacy piece covered, but we really needed that legal cannabis experience,” Boston says.

“I asked my brother, Montana, if he wanted to leave academia to pursue a career in the cannabis industry,” he remembers. Montana did just that, taking a role as a packager at Mjardin’s Next1 Labs and working his way to head extractor within a few short months, a role he had for two years.

Ultimately, the Dickersons won two retail dispensary licenses and quickly acquired an extraction and processing lab–given the family’s pharmaceutical background, Boston says manufacturing was a natural business strength.

A new family business, Show-Me Organics, was born, with Boston, CEO and Montana, Chief Science Officer, at the helm, along with their mother, LeAnne, who lends her expertise in operations as President of the company.

But it wasn’t until 2022 that Show-Me Organics finished its vertical integration by acquiring Holistic Industries, another Missouri-based company with manufacturing and cultivation space in Kansas City. With that deal, “we made a big bet,” Boston says. “We closed on that deal 11 days before the Nov. 8 [adult-use] vote in 2022.” The adult-use measure passed, and the Dickersons’ bet paid off.

Finding the Right Facility

As a manufacturer of edible brands Missouri’s Own and Vivid, Show-Me Organics was seeing first-hand how quickly demand can grow in a new medical market. “We knew that with the amount of biomass that we were purchasing from third parties that we really needed to have full control over our own supply chain to control our own destiny,” Dickerson says.

Dickerson waited two years to find the facility that would complement Show-Me Organics’ current operations. Upon leaving a visit to Holistic Industries, he knew that was the facility he needed to buy.

Show-Me Organics cultivation facility. Photo courtesy of Show-Me Organics

“One of the first things that attracted me to the facility was cleanliness,” he remembers. “Holistic did a great job developing training protocols where the cultivators know when they go through training that 70% of that cultivation job is janitorial work. It's keeping the facility clean.”

The second facility feature that stood out was that it was purpose-built for cannabis as opposed to being a retrofit of an existing structure. “It goes from clone to mother to veg to flower extremely well,” Dickerson says of the design. “The flow of the facility is set up for an efficient workforce. We have a separate packaging room, fulfillment room, vault, and manufacturing lab that all fall in line with the chain of custody that the product follows.”

Holistic Industries, a multistate operator, had experience designing purpose-built cannabis facilities, and its former Missouri location benefitted from those years of experience, Dickerson says. The facility was designed around Fluence LED lighting systems, with HVAC and environmental control systems tailored to handle the fixtures’ higher performance and customizable features.

“We take a very data-driven approach to cultivation,” Dickerson says. “We have redundant systems that measure pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and volume of every feed that goes in, which is six to eight times a day.” Show-Me Organics also measures the fertigation runoff of 10% of its plants to measure EC levels and adjust nutrient recipes as needed. “When you're able to chart that data over a year's time, you're really able to see whether Florida Kush needs more food and less light than a Cap’s Frozen Lemons needs to achieve the highest yield,” he says.

Show-Me Organics can have multiple strains in each of its flower rooms, each with its input preferences. With that in mind, each room is designed with four zones with lighting that can be independently adjusted. “So if we do find out over a six-month period that Cap's Frozen Lemons needs more light and less water than Florida Kush, we're able to make that adjustment on the fly in those rooms,” Dickerson says. “Being able to really have the plug-and-play ability to test and research over six months and collect that data is invaluable to us.”

From the Grow to the Shelf

Being able to produce a consistent supply of pharma-grade cannabis that feeds into its flower and manufactured product lines is key to Show-Me Organics delivering on its promise to patients and customers. That’s especially important when customer feedback can directly influence cultivation practices.

For example, as retail customers might increasingly seek out Missouri’s Own products that feature elevated levels of CBG or CBN, cultivation practices can be tweaked to maximize the production of those minor cannabinoids. Likewise, consistent control over inputs allows Show-Me Organics to meet the expectations for its high-end Vivid edibles.

“It's been a great last eight months with the market where it's at. Now we're starting to see supply and demand even out, so our continued focus on building brands and quality is what we hope will drive us to continue the sales and keep going,” Dickerson says.

Fluence has been a collaborative partner to the Missouri-based grower. “Fluence has been out on-site half a dozen times over the last year as we dial stuff in. They're not afraid to jump on a plane to come out to help us,” Dickerson says. “It's really beneficial for our growers and our director of cultivation to just be able to bounce some ideas off people and hear what they've been seeing as one of the biggest commercial lighting companies in the world.”

One of the main pieces of advice Dickerson picked up operating his new cultivation facility is to not be seduced by maxing out lighting intensities. “With the capabilities of these new LED lights, you can get up to 1,600, 1,800 PPFD in a room,” he says. “If you're going to pump the lights up, you better pump the HVAC up, the watering, the EC levels, everything has to be synchronized at the same time for that plant to really benefit from that increased lighting.”

At first, he recommends keeping intensities similar across veg and flower before starting with a scientific approach to developing intensity schedules. “Change one variable while keeping all other controls consistent, seeing what that does, going back, taking feedback, and employing a data-driven approach.”