Building the Cost-Per-Gram Stack
Cost-per-gram is the single number the whole business lives or dies on. Here's how to build it from the ground up — every input line, how coco and rockwool shift it, and why a room's yield discipline moves it more than any purchasing decision.
The prior unit-economics lesson taught you to normalize output — grams per square foot, grams per watt. This lesson does the other half: normalize cost. Cost-per-gram (or cost-per-pound) is the price at which your operation manufactures a gram of sellable, tested flower. Every capital choice, every hire, every yield gain, and every failed test resolves into a single move on this number. If wholesale is $1,000/lb and you make flower at $1,400/lb, you are subsidizing every buyer — and no volume fixes a negative margin.
Growers obsess over gross yield and ignore cost-per-gram, then discover at the sale that they grew a lot of unprofitable flower. Wholesale prices in mature markets have fallen hard and stay volatile. The operations that survive a price crash are the ones whose fully-loaded cost-per-gram sits comfortably below the trough price — not the ones with the biggest harvest.
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