Bloom Farms success story: Custom Incentives Program

“Bloom Farms has several different entities: distribution, corporate offices and production.”

Adrian Moore, VP of Manufacturing, lays out the scope of Bloom Farms’ operations, which promotes itself as a cannabis company that covers its customers “from soil to oil”.

“We’re the manufacturing arm of Bloom and this is the primary production facility. We produce vaporizer pens and vaporizer pen oil.”

Despite the successful growth of his facility during its first year, their power consumption was accelerating beyond their means. So SMUD created a tailored plan using the Custom Incentives program that allowed Bloom Farms to continue to thrive while saving money and energy usage.

“Our SMUD representative contacted us to tell us about all these great programs. So they came out to our facility to do a site evaluation. We showed them our process, how we extract both THC and CBD and convert that into the products we sell. And that’s when they told us about their energy efficiency incentive program.”

The next step was deciding what part of the manufacturing process was the best candidate for increasing energy efficiency.

“We ended up honing in on the extraction machine as the best opportunity to take advantage of the incentive program. We had pretty explosive growth during the first year, and then looking at the second year we saw our power consumption was going to be greater than what we could handle.

The final product, cannabis oil, after extraction.

So, we looked really hard for the most efficient machine in our industry, one that can increase production by 8 to 10 times over what we were doing for one machine. That was crucial, because we run the extraction machines 24 hours a day.”

After doing some research on the most efficient machines in the industry, Bloom Farms finally settled on the EL 140 Extractor.

”With this one new machine, we are able to produce about the same amount of product as 8 to 10 of the older model machines and save 3 times more power. So it’s a huge savings.”

After SMUD confirmed the energy savings, they issued Bloom Farms an incentive check toward the purchase of the new extractor based on those savings, in this case, for just under $50,000.

“The incentive check is great, but over and above that we realize huge cost-savings on our power bill. Without SMUD’s help, we wouldn’t have gotten the new machine.

Now, because of our positive relationship, whenever we come up with a new idea about saving energy, our initial thought is to first talk to SMUD about it. The benefits of our relationship have probably translated into savings of $5,000 - $10,000 a month.

And we’re producing more oil at a much faster rate and our quality is better than ever.”