Member Spotlight: Dalgety
When people talk about building a world-class medical cannabis industry in the UK, they often focus on policy, prescribing or patient access. Behind every prescription, however, is the quality and consistency of the medicine itself.
For Cannabis Industry Council member Dalgety, that has been their mission from day one.
Founded in 2019 and fully self-funded, Dalgety was created with a clear purpose to produce pharmaceutical-grade medical cannabis in the UK. After securing its cultivation licence in 2023, the company has established one of the country’s most advanced medical cannabis production facilities, designed specifically for medicine rather than adapted from recreational cannabis or traditional agriculture.
Today, Dalgety is the UK’s only facility licensed to cultivate, manufacture and supply a GMP medical cannabis flower active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) from a single integrated site. This end-to-end approach gives the company complete oversight of every stage of production, from genetics and cultivation through to post-harvest processing, manufacturing and product release.
It is an approach that reflects a simple philosophy: doing things properly, even if that means it takes a little longer. As the team puts it, “being first to market isn’t important, being best on the market is.”
Precision at Each Stage
Dalgety has invested heavily in creating an environment where every variable can be carefully controlled. The fully automated indoor facility maintains humidity within 1 percent and temperature within 0.5 °C, helping deliver consistency between batches. Around 1,300 monitoring alarms operate throughout the site, notifying the cultivation and security teams of even the smallest environmental changes, demonstrating the level of precision required for pharmaceutical production.
While some producers adopt faster techniques to speed up drying, curing or trimming, Dalgety deliberately takes a slower approach. Every harvest is hang dried before moving through a multi-stage drying and curing process lasting more than four weeks. Each flower is then hand trimmed, preserving quality while allowing the team to bring out the best characteristics of every cultivar.
It’s a labour intensive process, but one the company believes is essential for producing medicine that patients and healthcare professionals can rely on.
Expertise Driving Innovation
The cultivation team combines decades of experience across cannabis production, controlled-environment agriculture and plant breeding. Dalgety’s Head Grower, Brady Green, brings more than 20 years of cannabis cultivation experience from Canada, alongside expertise from other specialist crops, helping drive impressive cultivation performance while maintaining pharmaceutical standards throughout production.
The facility itself has also been designed with future innovation in mind. With five metres of vertical growing space and reflective white walls to maximise light efficiency, Dalgety continues to invest in new technologies to further optimise plant development while maintaining consistency and quality.
Strengthening the UK Supply Chain
Reliable UK production also offers an important advantage for patients. Medical cannabis in the UK has historically depended on international supply chains, which can be vulnerable to shipping delays, regulatory complexity and stock shortages. By cultivating and manufacturing domestically, Dalgety is working to improve supply chain resilience whilst supporting the long-term development of the country’s life sciences sector.
Raising Standards Through Education
Education and transparency have also become central pillars of Dalgety’s work. The team regularly welcomes clinicians, pharmacists, researchers, policymakers, law enforcement and industry stakeholders into the facility, providing first-hand insight into how pharmaceutical cannabis is produced. By opening its doors wherever regulations allow, Dalgety is helping build confidence in medical cannabis through transparency rather than assumption.
This same philosophy underpins the Dalgety Knowledge Hub, where the company shares educational content designed to challenge misconceptions and encourage informed discussion. Rather than relying on marketing claims, Dalgety focuses on science, data and transparency to explain the realities of pharmaceutical cannabis production.
A Patient-first Vision for the Future
Every environmental control, quality check and additional week spent caring for the plant is designed with one goal in mind: delivering safe, consistent and reliable medicine that patients can trust.
As the UK’s medical cannabis sector continues to mature, businesses like Dalgety demonstrate what is possible when long-term investment, pharmaceutical standards and cultivation expertise come together. Ultimately, according to the team, “everything comes back to the patient.”
