Health Canada has approved an expansion for a Leamington marijuana facility.

Aphria Inc. has been granted a license amendment, permitting the company to start production in an additional 800,000 square feet of facilities at its Aphria One location.

It is part of the company’s completed Part IV and Part V expansions.

“This is a major milestone for Aphria on its path to becoming a leading global cannabis producer, as well as a positive development greatly anticipated by the Canadian cannabis industry,” said Irwin D. Simon, Interim CEO of Aphria.

Simon says Aphria’s progress expanding production and automation is essential to their strategy of securing scale and long-term advantages that enable the evolution of the cannabis industry through product and brand innovation.

“With Aphria One, we now have the ability to expand our production capacity by over three times,” says Simon.

Simon says they are ready to hit the ground running and look forward to alleviating industry-wide supply constraints with their greatly expanded production capacity and sophisticated, proprietary automation technology.

“It will ensure Aphria remains at the forefront of cannabis cultivation and innovation,” he says.

“In anticipation of Health Canada’s approval, we had allocated a portion of our previously approved capacity to mother and vegetative plants that will be used as the initial growing crops in Part IV and Part V.”

As a result of these measures, growing operations in the expanded facilities are expected to start soon.

By this Friday, Aphria will move swiftly to establish nearly 22,000 plants in the Part IV and Part V expansion, with an additional 12,000 plants added each week thereafter until we reach full crop rotation.

The 700,000 square foot Part IV Expansion and the 100,000 square foot Part V expansion represent the completion of Aphria’s five-part expansion at Aphria.

Once in full rotation, Part IV and Part V will produce on an incremental annualized basis 80,000 kg bringing the total annualize production capacity at Aphria One to 110,000 kg.