The new Israeli CannoMed is building the country’s largest indoor facility that will grow and export 10 tons of medical cannabis to Europe per year.
The cannabis cultivation indoor facility at the Ziporit Industrial Zone in the north is expected to begin operating in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The facility is planned in accordance with international standards to comply with the EU-GMP standard, and the cultivation and production process will be supported by experts from Israel and abroad.
The company’s facility is planned to include areas for cultivation and propagation of medical cannabis as well as a factory for drying and packing the dried inflorescences and extracting oils.
CannoMed already cultivates medical cannabis at its Jordan Valley farm, which is undergoing expansion to an overall area of 2.75 acres of greenhouses, of which the company is already cultivating 0.9 acres of it.
The revenue from the new facility could reach about $45 million annually.
CannoMed already has distribution agreements with European customers, including a distribution agreement with ACA-Muller, a veteran company that imports medicines from the European Union to the German market. The agreement with ACA-Muller is worth about $13.5 million annually, over five years.
Israel has made a strategic decision to invest in the medical cannabis field, and in December 2019 the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) announced the establishment of a state-sponsored incubator for start-ups focused on medical marijuana, a global first.
The CanNegev center is located in Yeruham, a town in the Negev desert, and will admit six start-ups from the medical marijuana sector per year for the first five years of the center’s operation.
In April 2018, Israel announced it would be providing the first export licenses to farms producing marijuana for medical purposes. Some 50 Israeli farms were recipients of the licenses. That month, Israel’s first pharmacies gained permission to start providing customers with medical marijuana.
Israel has steadily been revising laws governing the use of cannabis since legalizing medical cannabis products in 2016.
According to data by Israel’s Ministry of Finance, local medical cannabis exports are an estimated $1.2 billion (NIS 4 billion) industry.