UNM growing new workers for cannabis industry

Feb. 23—BERNALILLO — Sharlene Breneiser works in an explosion-proof room.

As lead extractor for Ultra Health, a Bernalillo-based cannabis company with dispensaries all over the state, Breneiser spends her days creating concentrated cannabis products.

The extraction process is kind of like a souped-up coffee maker, Breneiser said — provided you replace coffee beans with cannabis flowers and the coffee pot with a closed-loop extractor, a complicated piece of machinery that uses both dry ice and highly flammable isobutane — hence the fire-suppressant workspace.

Breneiser works in cannabis product manufacturing, a piece of the process between cultivation and sales that's growing in both demand and complexity, said Ultra Health CEO Duke Rodriguez.

"The production of finished products, without a question, will ... become more complex, more scientific and more significant in our operations," Rodriguez said.

In hopes of better training would-be cannabis manufacturers, University of New Mexico Continuing Education has partnered with Green Flower, a California-based cannabis education company, to offer an online program in product development and design.

Although the program isn't eligible for New Mexico's Opportunity Scholarship — a state-run scholarship that pays for up to 100% of tuition for credit-bearing certificate programs as well as two- and four-year public colleges — it's a good option for workers hoping to get started in the still-nascent cannabis industry, said Max Simon, Green Flower's CEO.

"It's a fast-growing industry that has a lot more opportunity than people are aware of and is constantly evolving in terms of creating more opportunities," Simon said.

UNM Continuing Education has been working with Green Flower for a couple of years to offer online and asynchronous cannabis courses with interactive elements, said Laura Jimenez, UNM Continuing Education's marketing manager.

"We wanted to make sure that we could offer those to New Mexico given the recent boom in this industry — not only to provide opportunities to employers to train their current employees ... [but] also to offer new opportunities and make sure it's a sustainable industry that benefits everyone," Jimenez said.

The university's continuing education arm — which does not require an application or traditional student status for enrollment — now hosts five online cannabis education courses in partnership with Green Flower, ranging in subject matter from cultivation to business.

The course in cannabis production and design is the latest in a growing number of similar classes at UNM Continuing Education.

The program is designed to provide students with an understanding of cannabis extracts and the formulation of products from those extracts, Simon said — knowledge that will make them more attractive to potential employers in the industry.

"They get people who are clearly really serious about this industry because they've invested in their education, and you get people that are showing up with a baseline level of knowledge — they can kind of hit the ground running from Day One," he said.

The eight-week program is expensive; a glance at the enrollment website shows it costs more than $2,700.

And there are few options for students to eschew that cost. Because the program does not bear traditional academic credit on a college transcript, it's not eligible for the state's Opportunity Scholarship, according to a spokeswoman for the state's Higher Education Department.

The recreational cannabis industry also is excluded from worker training and support services from the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, since cannabis remains an illegal narcotic under federal law.

Still, the team at Ultra Health agreed a basic understanding of product design and manufacturing processes will help would-be cannabis workers, particularly given the industry's novelty and constant evolution.

In his lab at Ultra Health, Chief Production Officer Eric Howard works amid something of a graveyard of heating equipment and round-bottom flasks.

The equipment isn't inoperative; it still works for the final step of the process of refining cannabis oil into a concentrate suitable for vape cartridges. But Howard updated the equipment in 2017, then in 2018, then in 2020 and finally in 2022, each time making the distillation process faster, safer and more economical, he said.

Now, the lab produces 35,000 to 40,000 cartridges per month, 10 times what it produced in 2017.

To keep up with both demand and quickly-changing technology, there will still be on-the-job training required to prepare new employees to enter cannabis production, but Howard said a class like the one at UNM Continuing Education would "take a load off of training for us."

"We have to accept that it is better to have people who are familiar with the science of what needs to be accomplished but ... able to be adapt to new technologies," Rodriguez said.