How to Save Time & Money in Your Cannabis Extraction Lab

Running a modern cannabis extraction lab isn’t what it used to be. If you’re anything short of completely dialed across the board with your product lines, material selection, and processing efforts, you’re going to hamstring your business’s bottomline without even knowing it. On top of that, there’s ever growing competition that virtually all operators face: more people trying to rip off your SKUs or large MSOs entering your market. The easiest way to take the pressure down a couple notches and improve your profit margins is to follow this curated, expert-tested exclusive Lowtemp Industries guide. These pro tips and tricks will help you either boot up a new lab that’s built for efficiency from day one or offer suggested improvements for your existing one across multiple facets of day-to-day operations, saving you time and money.

Optimizing Your Lab’s Layout

Right off the bat, the foundation of how your extraction lab operates begins with how it's laid out. Full disclaimer: while different states and localities have certain rules about how certain aspects of your floor plans have to go, typically they are focused on safety, not efficiency, so weaving both together is critical whether you’re reorienting your process flow or starting from pre-licensure day one.

For solventless labs specifically, or ones that have solventless divisions, you need to try and ensure that everything is nearby, on one level of your building, and set up for proper water management (both inputs and waste outputs). One key example is that you do not want to be hauling material up flights of stairs or have any more extra steps than is absolutely necessary to receive and process everything, so try to design it in a way that keeps everything as close as possible. 

This doesn’t mean people should be tripping over each other, but having sinks, freezers, your wash setup, your freeze dryers, and everything else in a smaller area not only reduces utility costs but it also increases throughput by shortening each step between the various extraction processes. Also, make sure you have plenty of sinks in your wash room to drain into instead of having to plumb it all elsewhere. 

Our Top 9 Lab Layout Suggestions

1. Map the Current Workflow

Start by documenting every step of your current process, from raw input to finished product. Use a spaghetti diagram to visualize how far team members move between tasks, stations, and equipment.

2. Identify High-Traffic Inputs and Tools

List the materials, tools, and components your lab uses most frequently. These are your critical access points. Pay attention to any repeated reaching, walking, or unnecessary steps that slow things down, as well as which tools need frequent repairs or maintenance to have extra parts on hand at all times.

3. Group Related Processes

Organize stations so that steps with high interdependency are physically close to each other. For example, washing, collection, and freeze drying hash should flow in one direction with minimal backtracking.

4. Apply the U-Shape or Cellular Layout

U-shaped or cellular workstations are ideal for small-batch manufacturing labs. They reduce travel time and allow one operator to handle multiple steps efficiently.

 

5. Minimize Cross-Traffic and Overlap

Separate inbound raw materials and outbound product flow to avoid collisions or bottlenecks. Clearly mark walkways and ensure tools or carts don’t block movement or processing efforts.

6. Store at Point-of-Use

Move commonly used items to ergonomic, easily accessible locations at each station. Tools, ingredients, or critical processing materials should be within arm’s reach without bending or walking.

7. Use Vertical Space and Mobile Carts

Shelving and mobile storage can help keep supplies nearby without cluttering the workspace. This is especially useful in labs where bench space is limited.

8. Involve the Operators

Your team knows where the inefficiencies are. Have them walk you through their routines and identify what slows them down. This can be done more than once as time goes on as your lab scales up or SKUs change.

9. Pilot and Iterate

Test changes on a small scale before redoing your entire layout. Even small tweaks, like moving a table 3 feet closer to the sink, can save hours over the course of a week in certain cases.

Tighten Up Your SOPs and Label Everything

Just like how your lab has certain layout requirements that the state is going to verify, you also have to have standard operating procedures that dictate how you do every step of each processing effort your company conducts. And just like how your region’s cannabis governing body probably doesn’t care about throughput efficacy, just because your SOPs are compliant does not make them optimally efficient, either.

For solventless labs that live and die by their hash washing efforts to feed their rosin presses, some of the easiest ways to introduce better measures into SOPs include:

1. Consider scheduling certain days to be dedicated to certain activities, such as wash-focused days, and rosin pressing-focused days.

2. Use end point detection with your rosin press (like with our V2 rosin presses with the pressure sensor upgrade) so your technicians can know immediately when the press is complete instead after the pressure stabilizes.

3. Generally speaking, smaller teams wear more hats and have workflows based on specific tasks on specific days, or for larger labs, bigger teams offer more flexibility to do multiple tasks every day to meet more demanding production schedules.

4. The main bottleneck most wash and press labs encounter is with their freeze dryers, so having more capacity than you theoretically need is always advisable. 

5. Take the time to thoroughly train your people on your SOPs and verify that they understand them intimately. You can have the best procedures in the world, but if you or your directors don’t take the time to ensure they’re understood, it’s largely wasted effort. 

Additionally, labeling everything is a must. It’s easy to get lazy, but when things aren’t clearly marked, that’s when you can drop balls with compliance or batch management quickly. The best hash makers don’t just focus on getting the best material in the door (even though that’s step #1), but they also care immensely about cleanliness, tracking, and organization throughout each part of the trichome’s journey from garden to jar. Whatever you do, implementing strict labeling measures as a part of your SOPs and beyond is a surefire way to reduce mistakes while adding a layer of accountability. 

Getting Your Equipment Selection Right

There are just hard lessons that labs everywhere either learn themselves or watch their peers learn and avoid entirely. Case in point, the equipment you choose and which sizes of those options available are truly mission critical to your business’s success at every stage of growth. It’s very easy to get overly focused on capital expenditure concerns (CapEx) and buy machines that are too small or cut corners early only to lose the forest through the trees because operational expenses (OpEx) is what truly has the heaviest effect on your profitability over time. 

First and foremost, investing in tried and true equipment is the easiest way to avoid mistakes, such as our turnkey lab bundles both for commercial operators as well as boutique hash makers. When shit hits the fan as it inevitably does, having a seasoned customer support team that is ready to help your lab with a technician accidentally shreds a gasket and you need one overnighted is crucial. We proudly work with more top rated hash labs than any other manufacturer in the space, and they trust us because they know Lowtemp provides the kind of reliability, yields, and product quality their customers demand. 

Second, for all the equipment you buy, easy to clean machinery is also essential for simple workflows. The best hashmakers swear by lab cleanliness as one of their top, underrated tips for making better products – which makes perfect sense. Clean labs = clean hash. We also strongly suggest utilizing bubble hash production systems that rely on gravity draining instead of complicated pump-based arrangements. This is because gravity draining means less cleaning, and less stuff to take apart. You really only want to worry about a recycle pump to recirculate water after washing and nothing else.

When it comes to the actual drying of your hash, we can’t stress it enough: pony up to get at least one or two additional freeze dryers, such as the Harvest Right X-Large or Holland Green Sciences Xiros Mikros if you need a more reliable option. Like we mentioned earlier, this is the main bottleneck that screws up production when one goes down or you see a temporary drop in throughput if one of your freeze dryers is having issues. Investing in a HashyLink if you’re using Harvest Right freeze dryers is also well worth the money. There is always going to be varying amounts of ice water hash on trays and you’ll typically run a similar or identical cycle for most strains. The HashyLink will help your lab save time so you don’t have freeze dryers running for no reason and increases product quality since you’re not volatilizing any more terpenes than you absolutely have to.

Automate Packaging Early

The number one labor cost for extraction labs historically has always been final packaging. This tedious process requires some skill, but really long periods of focus doing a monotonous task that requires precision. Sloppy work by packagers can lead to overfilling, which quickly adds up to eat away at your profit margin for each batch giving extra product away for no reason. Over the course of 1,000 grams at a $25 wholesale price for live rosin, if your manual packagers are accurate only up to ±5%, that can mean a loss of up to 50 grams, or $1,250 in potential income. Not only that, but the pace at which even your best packager can fill jars is rarely going to reach 100 jars per hour, and is more likely 

Until recently, there was typically a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio of packagers to actual processing technicians, but since we’ve launched our Lowtemp Concentrate Dispenser, that math has completely shifted. Now a single packaging technician with a Concentrate Dispenser can do the work of 4 or more full time employees. This modest investment upfront equates to years of savings on labor and most labs see positive ROI in just months. Even if you’re doing very low volume, freeing up a packaging technician’s time to help with other tasks around the lab is a game changer. Now instead of having them just spend 40 hours a week filling jars, they can do the same work in a fraction of the time and then help clean, organize, or do any other prep work your lab needs to stay on schedule. 

Other Pro Tips & Tricks for Hashmakers

#1: Go Big. Seriously. When it comes to your hash washing system, go bigger, not smaller, if you’re doing commercial production (even at an artisan scale). It takes the same amount of time to wash and process 5,000 to 7,000 grams of fresh frozen as it does 20,000. This is essentially the same guideline for pressing rosin, too. If you’re doing volume, using one press is going to slow you down, so get multiple and introduce as much efficiency as you can to the system. 

#2: Get Subscriptions Going. It’s not a marketing gimmick: getting on a subscription service for consumables really does help, such as our rosin bags or parchment. Then you can just set it and forget it. Also, make sure to take advantage of any season sales and stock up. Any dollars you can save on your consumables mean more money saved, which adds up at the end of every year.

#3: Training is Critical. Take the time to train your people and retain them with incentives. It’s significantly more expensive to hire and train new employees than keep existing ones (that are worth it, this does not apply to low performers or drama makers). Ensuring your team members are properly trained on your SOPs and lab’s expectations goes a long, long way in ensuring success. 

#4: Thoughts on Mini Osprey vs. Osprey. If you’re a commercial lab, don’t try to pinch pennies with the Mini Osprey or a fleet of them. The Mini Osprey is great for small labs but requires significantly more labor; a single employee cannot efficiently run multiple Mini Ospreys, but a single employee can run an Osprey 75 gallon. The additional employees you need to effectively run multiple of Mini Ospreys are not worth the cash saved on the front end. Bottomline: for larger labs, you need to be thinking more about OpEx, not CapEx. 

Talk to a Lowtemp Expert Today

If you need help figuring out exactly what equipment you need to set up your solventless lab, or if you’re ready to scale up, our experts have you covered. Not only does our team actually make hash, we are always finding ways to help labs save money while making better products. Contact us today to get your free consultation scheduled.