Welcome to extract talks with Dr. Jon podcast. Dr. Jon is CEO and president of extract lab and united science and industry leader in hemp, cannabis and the extraction industry. Listen closely as Dr. Jon talks about his experiences, CBD extraction methodology, and the ins and outs of owning your own business. Dr. Jon teaches you healthy business practices, how to increase your profits and steps to take your CBD company to a whole new level. Let’s dive in.

Dr. Jon  00:35
Hello, I’m Dr. Jon Thompson. Thank you for joining us. Today I’m going to be going over advanced extraction workflow techniques. We’re going to be talking about some exciting stuff. First, we’re going to go through some of the overview of the extraction process. Then we’re going to really go deep dive into each part of the process. We’re going to show you pictures of the equipment. We’re going to show you pictures of the oils. It’s gonna be really exciting. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. So first what I’m going to do is give you an overview of the entire process. Starting with raw material, typically you get the raw material in NC either it’s either on sticks and stems, it has it on there or it comes in bags of bud, or flower, you receive it into your process. It’s important that you have all the proper metrics associated with that. Then you go to lab testing, sometimes you put it into quarantine and then you go into grinding and that’s where you’re taking large particles and bringing them down to small particles. And then you either dry it or remove the carbon dioxide. And during that process, you collect all your terpenes for that particular batch, then you extract it. And what that means is you’re taking all the waxes and the cannabinoids and you’re bringing it from a plant material into an oil. And once you do that, it’s very important that you remove, say, some of the waxes and some of the other stuff that comes out of the plant that may not have such desirable characteristics. So a lot of people remove those in a dewaxing or a winterization step, and I’ll go into what that means. But essentially, what you get out of that process is a dewaxed oil. And that doesn’t mean that it flows properly, even flows freely flows, it’s still a very thick, very viscous oil. And once you have that dewaxed oil, then you can upgrade the potency quite a bit by going through a distillation process. Once that distillation process is done, that’ll produce this distillate right around 70 to 90% potent. So that distillation process is a really, really great process that allows you to take an oil that would have less value and bring it up to an oil that has a lot of value. And then you can also take all of the cannabinoids out that are and make it into crystal isolate. So that’s another thing that is done, that typically is a white powder. Second option for you would be to not only take it to a white powder, but to basically bring it into a separations unit where you could separate out the oils from themselves like you could separate out the THC from the CBD. Or you can separate out the THC from the CBN and create large amounts of pure product that still has a lot of the matrix in it. So that’s the difference between isolate and broad spectrum. You can go into a formulations process where you take those oils and you bring them into products and then package them So that’s the overview. And I think it’s a really quick rundown. But what I’m going to do now is show you some of the materials that come out of each of the processes some of the equipment that you would use to convert at every stage. And I’m going to be doing that in about 20-25 minutes. So it’s going to be pretty fast paced. So let’s get going. So here’s a picture of a series progression of products. So you can see over on the left hand side, you have buds in in a beaker, and then you grind those buds up into small particles. The small particles then are decarboxylated. In other words, you taking a lot of water out, you’re taking CO2 out, and you’re also taking a lot of the pure terpenes that are out, that’s one really great way to preserve the terpenes. And then in the middle there, that’s what we call crude oil that comes from CO2, which is our process. And that particular crude oil is essentially it’s about 60% potent 60 to 70% potent depending on How you run your parameters. When you take the waxes out of it right next to that crude oil that’s you see that’s a dewaxed oil, and then off to the right hand side as you go to a distillate. And then finally an isolate. So that’s a typically the isolate is about 99 plus percent pure. And what’s wonderful about it is it’s great for formulations. If you don’t want to have for example, the matrix, the plant matrix in there. Yeah, the raw material that comes in, here’s what it looks like. And you can see all the sticks and stems on there we get usually in Super sacks. You know, if you’re doing cannabis, you’ll typically have just the flower only without the sticks and stems. Typically if you’re doing hemp, sometimes the hemp is chopped like in the field with a combine, and then they’re delivered in these big white super sacks that you see. Bottom line there is, you know, you’re going to get materials in from a variety of different ways in the super sacks are a really great way to really move the material around. Once you get the material into your facility you’re going to have to wait in, you’re going to have to barcode it. And we use a process and a software called GW lab to accomplish that. This is an example of a station. And basically what it is, is it’s a it’s a software hardware combination. The hardware is consisting of a scale, and the scale changes in size depending on which process you’re using. So you wouldn’t weigh in a super sack with a small scale that you see there. But basically, it comes with the scale comes with a barcode reader or barcode printer and software station. stations are set up throughout the entire process. You can see on the chart, you’ll see that there’s an igwLAB in between each process and basically what it’s doing is it’s weighing in the raw material. It’s weighing out the product, it’s weighing out any kind of waste. It’s also weighing out any kind of byproduct, for example, the terpenes it’s barcoding everything and then it’s also recording what equipment is being used who is doing it? Are they trained Along with training records, calibration records, maintenance records, cleaning records, anything that you can think of that would be required by Health Canada, or by the FDA GMP. It really is a system there that allows you to take your process and mistake proof it takes samples, send them to the lab, and then they have all of that information from the very beginning attached to the batch record. And this is really what you know, regulators are looking to do. So that’s what  igwLAB here’s a picture of that. And then of course, you go into the lab testing now, lab testing, an essential piece of operations, you have to sample basically at any yield process. So if you have a yield going from biomass to extraction, you should be measuring before and after in monitoring from a business perspective, you know, how that process is doing? So, igwLAB along with lab testing, which is kind of built into it, it’s got what they call a laboratory information system built right into the system. These two things in combination really keep it all organized. For new operators. Sometimes organizing all the paperwork is a huge challenge and keeps regulators busy, even something as simple as maintaining records on cleaning your equipment. A lot of those are paper records, what we’re trying to do is get away from paper records go to an electronic record that can be printed out and signed and stored for data integrity purposes. So this is an example we’ve set up laboratories all over the country. In fact, we set up facilities converting hemp and you know cannabis over to oils, we hundreds people would put into the business including many, many Canadian LPs and operators in Europe as well and in the US. So this is an example of a system that would be used to test pesticides. This setup right here would range anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000. You can see in this picture right here we’re measuring. We’re measuring some solvents, for example, and in the background there is what’s called acuetof. And that piece of equipment is vital because it is a key piece of equipment that allows an operation to understand what the unknowns are in their sample. A lot of times people send their samples out, they get pass or fail data, but they don’t get unknown data. I tell you, the unknown data is extremely important for maintaining the integrity of your products. If you don’t have it, you’re really flying blind. And because the third party testing doesn’t really give you those unknowns, here’s is just a workhorse piece of equipment. It’s called an HPLC. And what this does is it measures your potency, purity and identity. So we set up these labs for many, many customers with any number of you know, analytical techniques. They typically include HPLC for potency periods, identity, metals, metals testing, which would be ICPMS. We also set up pesticides measurements. So that’s kind of fun, just to make sure that you don’t have any chemical contaminants in there. And then also we set up solvent testing to make sure that there’s no solvents in there. We also have set up microbiological laboratories. So those things are very part and parcel to a laboratory operation. Moving on to the shuckNbuck. This is a piece of equipment that if you have materials that are coming in with their sticks and stem still on and you need to remove those buds, or if you have a grow right next to it, and you’re not receiving the flower in bags, use a shuckNbuck piece of equipment to get that done. It’s an automated it’s high throughput. I’m not going to go into this just suffice it to say that it will do large acreage actually in a very small amount of time. So zooming back out here you can see we’ve kind of advanced all the way to lab testing and now I’m going to go to grinding and talk a little bit about how you grind Now, if you’re doing like a ton a day or two tons a day What you use is very, very small, you don’t need to have a huge system like this, you would use something along the lines of this grinder here, in combination with this grinder here and this vacuum still here. And those would be all that you need. Now, you don’t need to have all of these hoppers and everything because you’re really not trying to warehouse tons of materials in between. And you can do that with bins. However, if you want a more automated process, or you’re doing three to five tons per day, this is the process that we recommend. And it’s really an automated process. Those super sacks are admitted to this grinder system with this forklift. And then they’re conveyed into a hopper. This hopper can hold up to five tons of ground material per day. So this is a daily hopper. There’s not any storage really, that takes place in it other than it just helps warehouse the material in between processes that don’t have the same cycle time. And then as you advance through the process, you have a weigh hopper and that weigh hopper really weighs in to this vacuum still here, the vacuum still is where you taking off all the water, you’re taking off all the excess CO2 and you’re also taking in grabbing all the terpenes in this process. So this is a very high value process here. And then as you move out of that mixer there you’re moving into another hopper with load cells. So you can see we’re measuring before and after the weights. And you can take samples to and measure cannabinoids. Typically you’ll have like 99%, 98-99% of the cannabinoids, you really shouldn’t be losing cannabinoids in here. And then you have a cone mill, that’s going to take the grind size down to, you know, a small, say 200 microns and then it bags up. And this bagger then goes directly into the extractor. So that’s kind of an overview. You can see this is kind of what a hammer mill material might look like. And you can see now that we’re going into the vacuum oven side of it, that’s in the center. That workflow scheme that I just showed you. There is a way to do it with small ovens if you’re doing like one ton a day. In fact, it’s pretty surprising. We use these little ovens like this and it’s batch process, but it is low cost and also it has a pretty high throughput. This is an example of some of the beautiful, absolutely gorgeous flavors and aromas. These are terpenes and you can see they’re labeled Cherry River, River Haze, Super Haze, Maxis. These are trade specific, they smell different, they taste different, they have different flavors, you can mix and match different flavors, obviously, in your final formulation. Definitely, this is the advanced level of formulations. If you can pull out those compounds that are what they call label or they’re not so stable, okay, and you pull them out before you process. You warehouse them and clean them up and then add them back into the processes in the same exact batch. That’s in my view considered advanced because you’re really maintaining a lot of the properties without degrading it. So that’s kind of a unique to our process. I’m just going to skip through here. Now, this is an example of what a layout might look like for 5 Ton per day facility. You can see there’s storage up on top and then there are these boxes we use 800 square foot, you know panel boxes, you probably have seen some of them used by by by growers, for example, we use the same ones. If you need to have fireproof ones we also sell fireproof ones. Just suffice it to say that this is kind of a just a general overview of what this might look like this is approximately 20,000 square feet, we would recommend that you keep all of your dust and dust processes separated from your oil processes. The way you can do that in an open warehouse is through the use of curtains and HVAC to provide pressures in between each of the different “rooms” if you will. The other way to do that is just to warehouse them in these boxes and then have separate HVAC and every one of them. We have had hundreds of installations and hundreds of different ways of doing it. So it’s it’s all it’s all good. There’s always some sort of, you know, compromise that takes place. Here’s an example of what that might look like looking down the hall, very typical, this particular facility See, here’s a five ton per day facility. And also just so you guys know we operate a five tons per day facility in Wisconsin. And what’s wonderful about it is that we can take all of our process R&D, we can take our new equipment, we can put it in there, test it out, see if it works, modify it all before we send it out our workflow it has gone under tremendous amount of evolution, and also all of our SLPs they’ve been honed in. We are a GMP certified facility. We’re also certified organic, which is a big deal when you talking about clinical grade oils which we produce also our facility is a CO2 extraction facility, just give you a couple points as to why we think CO2 is a good way to go rather than than ethanol or any other method. Lots of different ways to extract when I started out, I just wanted to have a very clean way of extraction CO2 really gives you that because all the other techniques will have residuals in them chemical byproduct residuals that can’t be removed from the oil. And as an analytical chemist, I can tell you, I see everything. We see all of the residuals that are in oil, and ethanol normally doesn’t carry residuals. But if you use, you know, denatured ethanol, which many, many, many companies do, you’re really hard pressed to get all of those solvents out of there. denatured ethanol is when chemical companies add chemicals to the ethanol to make it so that you can use it as a extraction solvent. So the way I’d like heptane or hexane or something like that to it so that ends up not being Able to be fully removed from the oil and I consider that to be a contaminant, even if it passes the test. So I’m not going to belabor that anymore, but just suffice it to say we are CO2 extractors. This is our equipment here. This is called a 180, three of these can do one ton per day. So it’s a pretty compact, you can fit three of them into 800 square feet, approximately 500-600 amps, something like that at three phase 208 volt. Yeah, this is some of our CO2 equipment, the CO2 equipment is used to really push condition the CO2 to really feed these lines. And this would be an example of a line. Typically one person can run about one ton per day. You know, you’d have preparation people in there and things like that. So that’s typically how it goes. Here’s another example of another line. Of course, you get barrels and barrels and barrels of crude oil out and it’s all looking good, smells wonderful. And you have a gallons and gallons of terpenes coming out of your vacuum oven process. So really you want you want to do now is point is to dewax it. And typically we’ll use these large scale Buchner funnels. They’re called DrainDroyds. And essentially, they allow you to remove the waxes from the crude oil. And you do that with a process called winterization. And winterization is just simply you add like food grade ethanol, so you don’t have those denaturants in there, you’re using a small amount of ethanol, you are solubilizing it you’re putting it in the freezer and a lot of those waxes then they precipitate out and then you just decant them and filter them. So that’s all we’re doing to make a dewaxed oil, if you need to scale up. We also have options for you guys to scale up up to five tonnes per day. In this case, you would not be five tonnes of oil per day, but it would be it would take care of the oil that came from five tonnes of biomass. I’m not going to belabor that but just suffice it to say that once you do have that ethanol in there, obviously you You need to take that out. So we have a piece of equipment called the fracTron. It’s a GMP piece of equipment. And if you notice on our equipment, just a couple quick notes here, you can see that we have taken care of all the GMP details. We have barcode readers right on the equipment, we have scanners, right on the equipment. This is a methods run piece of equipment. So typically, I as an operator would scan myself in, I would have a Push Button Method, I push the button, it would run the method. It’s really convenient, and also traceable. So all the data integrity, issues, or all of the items that the quality people need to have to put the batch record together are taken automatically by the equipment itself. So you can see we’re an hour at a dewaxed crude oil with no ethanol in it. Now it’s time to distill that oil. And the way you do that is using the clearSTILL which is a piece of equipment again We have this a high throughput, small footprint piece of equipment, low power associated with this equipment, all the GMP features built right into the equipment. This is a two stage that can be hooked up directly to the fracTron, which we saw earlier just a couple seconds ago. The great thing about that is it minimizes any kind of exposure that you might have for the oils to the atmosphere. You can see this is what you get, you know, you can get up to 90% potency, easy with these pieces of equipment, and you can scale them up pretty easily. They’re scalable. That’s one thing about our processes all the way from beginning to the very end here is that they’re all scalable. You can scale them up from 500 pounds a day all the way up to five tons per day and we help you get that done. Look at that beautiful oil. It’s absolutely gorgeous. There’s also what’s called an isolate process that you take a distillate bring it to a white powder. Those are laboratory pieces of equipment. Here’s what that looks like coming out of that. So we have processes and procedures, there’s not a lot of equipment associated with that just more or less laboratory. And you can make buckets and buckets of what they call isolate. And then we have what’s called the pure99. That system is essentially a separation system. And that’s a chromatography system. It’s actually my area of expertise, specifically, in what that will allow you to do is keep all the matrix in there, keep all of the plant material in there, but also separate out all the THC from the CBD. So it’s a great system for maintaining the integrity of the plant but not have any THC in there. It’s also really great for purposes of formulation. So it’s just an example. And here’s some systems that we have. Once you have these products, you have the distillate, you have isolate, you have the broad spectrum, then you have crude oils, you’re there and now you’re using them to really formulate all your different products. Whether those be edibles, brownies, or gummy bears or gummy materials, cosmetics, vape cartridges. That’s really where magic takes place. We’re using those raw ingredients as means to create products. So that’s what’s called formulation. And of course, we help our customers with formulating products all the time. And then we have formulations research center here in Wisconsin, we are always at the cutting edge. And a lot of what we do is we use those terpenes really to differentiate products from one to another. Everybody else it seemed they’re just, you know, they’re taking all the products that they’re not really getting out those terpenes that’s a big deal for brand differentiation and also just for the integrity of the plant itself. Then you’re going to get into packaging. I’m not going to go really deep into formulations and packaging. We set up laboratories we set up with igwLAB, we’ll set up all the batch records we’ll set up all the packaging equipment, like for example if you want to have a tincture line with 2000 tinctures per hour or gummy line where 2000 gummies per hour, just let us know and we can help you set that up. We have a lot of those facilities and a lot of that equipment here and so we’re constantly doing R&D. We’re getting our formulas honed, let me see what else are water soluble like for beverages. We also have that and we know a lot about how to micronized or how to nanoize, you know, some of that to get it into a beverage. So just like us, if you guys get some moments scan, this will take you to a screen, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, follow us on Instagram. We have lots of material coming out pretty much daily. We’d love to have you in our fan base. That concludes our advanced bioprocessing workflow presentation for you guys. I hope it was informative for you happy to answer any questions, please email us and also subscribe on our YouTube channel. Thank you very much.

Randall Thompson  23:54
Hey guys, was that not awesome? The questions have been pouring in I love that whole new fangled thing you did.

Jon Thompson  24:04
Well, you know, somebody’s gotta do it.

Randall Thompson  24:06
Yes, exactly. The background was just way cool. I love that. I was mesmerized, man. I don’t know if you guys were but I was. And I do this every day. So well done. I think it’s disconcerting that we’re on opposite sides.

Dr. Jon  24:21
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s I call that Yes, it’s out of order.

Randall Thompson  24:27
It’s like, Okay, well, I’m something different. All right. Sorry, guys. Okay, so we have had a whole bunch of questions and one of them is deep, deep, deep, super deep, deep.

Dr. Jon  24:41
Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. It’s gonna be fun.

Randall Thompson  24:43
Okay, so after supercritical CO2 extraction and winterization with ethanol each, we allow waxes about 24 hours to precipitate in a minus 50 Cº freezer filter. All right is dry ice. The most optimal filtration tool alongside a DrainDroyd to stop the temperature from raising and also stopping water from condensing on the product, facilitating wax disillusion if a cold space is not available to filter in, sorry, this is a long question, 

Dr. Jon  25:16
this is good question. It is a good question. I’m following the whole thing no problem. 

Randall Thompson  25:19
or are there better, more cost effective ways to do this?

Dr. Jon  25:25
Well, okay, we’re talking about filtration and filtration efficiency. And so what the question is, is that when you have your super cold wax plus ethanol, and you put it into the DrainDroyd, you don’t want it to warm up so it will re-desolve the waxes. So what he was wondering is if you couldn’t add in dry ice in there to keep everything nice and cold. Okay, so along with the DrainDroyd so there’s a couple different things. First of all, it’s more or less the residence time how long is it going to take to warm up to Same minus 20 minus 10 degrees, right? How long is that going to take? It’s gonna take quite a while. So what I would say is you have a filter, I would say pour it through the filter, you know, get a little amount of a wax on the filter until it’s completely kind of clogged up. And then I’d change out the filter. The filters are inexpensive, and I would just continuously change out the filters. That is a surefire way to just keep everything nice and cold. When you when you start filtering, the whole DrainDroyd basically gets really super cold. If you have water or, you know, moisture in the room, it’ll start to condense onto the DrainDroyd and you can see it’s get really, really cold. The other thing that you might want to consider is that we also have a jacket for the DrainDroyd. It’s a jacketed droid. It’s also one of our products. So if you want to be able to hook it up to a chiller and just let it sit there for a while, you know, fill it all the way up. Let it sit there for a while. You could do that as well, but I actually I don’t recommend That the beauty of the DrainDroyd is that you have a lot of surface area. And you know, once that filtration media gets plugged, change it and do it quickly so that it doesn’t sit in there long time warm up and then re-dissolve. So I’d say that that’s the that’s the short answer to the question. And there is a long answer, Randy. 

Randall Thompson  27:20
Okay. That’s, that’s good. 

Dr. Jon  27:22
That’s only a short answer. 

Randall Thompson  27:23
So the follow up was, does chilling at minus 50 Cº have any adverse effects on products versus winterizing it closer to minus 20?

Dr. Jon  27:31
I don’t think so. Now, there’s no adverse effects with chilling an adverse effect in my view, Randy would be something along the lines of Okay, I’m, I am now degrading the product and usually have to have heat to do that. So I’d say that, you know, it’s not degrading it. One thing that is known, however, is that ethanol will react with say, the other alcohols that are in there, it also reacts with CBD. So if it sits there for a long time, you’ll have a side reaction take place that’s more or less undesirable. Okay.

Randall Thompson  28:01
Yeah, thank you. Awesome. They’re still questions are still coming in. Thank you very much for those. Another question from Wade is, is it advisable to reintroduce terpenes to a formulated oil besides for sensory purposes, taste and smell like we talked about last week? Right? Does the entourage effect still hold up when the product is ingested rather than inhaled?

Dr. Jon  28:25
Um, yeah, I think so. I mean, you have, you know, the terpenes will go into your gut and get absorbed in your gut. So, absolutely, I think you have, you still have an entourage effect. It’s probably less effective, though. Because your gut is made to more or less digest things and it’s going to come in there. There’s going to be bile acids in there. They’re all gonna, they’re going to start emulsifying it okay. So, that’s one of the reasons why when you get it into your stomach, the bioavailability you know, goes down. That’s why inhalation is such an effective way because it goes you know, through your lungs and right into right into your spinal cord up into your brain. So it’s a lot more effective means of delivery.

Randall Thompson  29:05
I know this is kind of an add on thing, but I’ve heard that you can ingest it but that’s why with a tincture, you want to hold it under your tongue for up to two minutes because that that is a much more bio but availability sublingual, yeah, sublingual under your tongue. And then also, if you inhale it through your nose, there’s like a mister or something and people do that for that. You get the benefit of that right even at a higher level, right? 

Dr. Jon  29:30
Yeah, I think sublingual is also a really great way and they have they’ve done these studies on uptake. There are studies so you have inhalation a sublingual and then through the gut. It’s metabolized differently when it goes through the gut it the cannabinoids make it through the liver, and then they’re metabolized through through the liver into your brain. So that’s that’s totally different that they could totally bypasses that extra metabolistic next step, and then there’s you know, your body will start to convert it. It has receptors I mean, depending on what cannabinoid you’re looking at interacting with, okay, yeah,

Randall Thompson  30:05
excellent. Yeah. Okay, I am looking at some other questions here. From Sorry, I’m looking over here.

Jon Thompson  30:16
There’s really small writing on our screen. Totally, totally getting this figured out.

Randall Thompson  30:23
Okay, so that’s how old I am so far see middle and then see to read. So it’s, it’s good. Thank you James. James is the saver. He increased the size of the writing. Okay. How many different terms that people are using in the cannabis industry? Kingsley, thank you for your question. That’s a good question. Yeah. What is full spectrum or THC spectrum of THC or CBD product? Full Spectrum,

Jon Thompson  30:55
right, right. Okay, so let’s unpack This, you basically have a variety of cannabinoids, right? And then you also have a variety of terpenes. And you really can’t control for example, what those varieties are, you know what the distribution of those are in the, in the system or in the spectrum. So, full spectrum really refers to the wide range of terpenes that are in the system. So it doesn’t necessarily refer to a wide range of cannabinoids. The reason for that is because you really can’t, you know, that’s really dictated by the plant. Okay, so the same thing, so you can’t say like, for example, I want a full spectrum oil with .1% CBN, .3% CBC, 50% CBD, okay, that’s a designer. That’s a designer extract. That’s a custom formulation. It’s possible to do all everything, all of that but that’s not considered full spectrum. Full spectrum is: I get the plant in, I extract the plant, I get the full terpene spectrum in there, the full terpene spectrum plus the cannabinoids that extract out of the plant. That’s the full spectrum oil. Now, you know, in the CBD world, there’s also a requirement for less than .3% THC. So in that case, a full spectrum CBD oil would have to have less than .3% THC, but it would have the full, you know, terpene spectrum. Okay, this is a little bit different than broad spectrum. Now, a broad spectrum is where you have just CBD in there and no THC but you also have the full spectrum of terpenes. And you have the full spectrum of phytonutrients and things like that. So it doesn’t refer to a broad spectrum of cannabinoids and the reason for that is it’s pretty simple. It’s the same basic thought. The spectrum of cannabinoids that you’re getting out really is dependent on the plant. A lot of times there’s minor cannabinoids in there, but you never can tell. I mean, some of the strains don’t have any of that minor cannabinoids. So I can have a broad spectrum with a CBD with no THC in it, or non detectable amount of THC in it, and have my terpene spectrum in there. So, okay, so yeah, that’s the difference between a full spectrum and broad spectrum. 

Randall Thompson  33:25
And because we’re doing Cannabis 101, you did that very CBD 101 everything great. I mean, I I love that presentation. I would like I want that. Yeah, we’ll get it because I’ve got a lot of people who really want it. And I do have an additional couple of questions from Hussein and I talked to Hussein yesterday was very nice. All right, but the question is, if he started to extract CBD in hemp 2% concentration, how much can you expect after CO2 extraction?

Jon Thompson  33:57
I see. Well, there’s think that there’s a general rule of thumb and that is if you have a 10% material and you’re going to get 10% of material out, okay? That’s not include there’s there’s a weight recovery and then there’s a cannabinoid recovery. So, in terms of that, if you have 2% CBD you should get 2% weight per weight CBD coming out. If you have 5% CBD should get about 5% CBD coming out weight per weight. So you may have more than that though in the total amount recovered because you’re recovering more than CBD you’re recovering waxes, recovering terpenes, you’re recovering other other stuff like that. So, but a real good rule of thumb in terms of yield calculations is just to neglect the fats and waxes so you’re always going to be kind of over producing, you know, if you’re doing some estimates are okay. And then you’re kind of always over producing kind of hedging your bets on yield and all of that. 

Randall Thompson  34:51
And just so you know, we have a whole slew of calculators coming out. I’ve been working with the team this week and last week and we have them and they will be available on our website. They’re not available yet. So go there. But we’re looking at those type of yield calculators from biomass into winterized crude, winterize to distillate, distillate to isolate, different things. And then we have some advanced calculators that we’ll have available as well. So if those are of interest to you, give us a shout out in the chat as well. And we’ll make sure that you get them ahead of time. And as soon as they’re available, we’ll get them to you. That’s going to be very, 

Dr. Jon  35:33
it’s going to be great. Yeah, because people are going to be able to model for themselves, you know, 

Randall Thompson  35:37
I’m not smart enough to do what he did. But so I use the calculators, and it’s a lot simpler. That’s why we break them out into the multiple calculators. Some of our advanced ones that we are building, have the entire Boom, boom, boom, boom, all the way from biomass to isolate if you want to see each step, but there’s still some, you know, differences as you’re getting that yield how much CBD Whatever is in that biomass or in the crude or from the COA, right? So those are things to take a look at. And part of this whole thing, I’m reaching for these other questions. Another question, oh, wait again, after collecting an extract from a supercritical extraction, if the crude product doesn’t have ethanol added immediately, what is the general degree of deterioration from oxidative process? Oh, wow, wow, say that five times real fast. 

Jon Thompson  36:29
Okay. So if you take beautiful CO2 extract, right, and it comes out and it’s just this golden golden oil, you can cap it and it’ll stay nice and yellow. Okay, if you let it go, and you just let the oxygen come in, you’ll actually can observe over a period of an hour, it’ll turn to an amber color. So it’s actually reacting in the air. It’s pretty cool. So then you know, maybe about an hour and that’s that’s just some of the terpenes reacting with the air. 

Randall Thompson  36:58
You can preserve all you do is put lid on. 

Dr. Jon  37:00
Yeah, yeah, you can preserve it. If you’d like to. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t really hurt it because you’re you’re taking a lot of those waxes out anyway and the terpenes You know, you’re going to be doing other processing down the line. Okay, so, yeah, anyway, so we’ve Yeah, okay,

Randall Thompson  37:15
good. Good, good. Good. All right. And you’re welcome Hussein, for the answers. And Edie, thank you. I appreciate he said, it’s very informative. And every time I spend time with Dr. Jon, I learn more and more, and I’ve been doing this for a while. It’s cool. So thank you, Eddie, for the shout out. He also asks if we have an IESCO2 system. Can you set up everything else to go with it?

Dr. Jon  37:42
Yeah, absolutely. No problem. 

Randall Thompson  37:45
All right. Yeah. Or can you elaborate?

Dr. Jon  37:46
Well, yeah, sure. We can. Well, we can set it up we can get you you know, depending on the size of the equipment that you want, or we can first of all, we can get you all of your all your quality systems up and running. We can get all of your we can get your You’re clearSTILL are your distillate systems, your isolated systems, we can get ethanol removal systems together for you. We can train you on that we can commission everything. Yeah, not a problem at all. We want to talk about advanced grinding with us no problem at all, we’ll get you up and running and actually gets you to the point where you can pass a GMP audits. So that’s something that we really love to do. That’s what we do. So the other thing would be on the front end, if you need your facility designed. There’s a lot of, you know, just like people coming out of the woodwork in there, kind of like, Oh, yeah, we’ll design your facility because we’ve designed other facilities. We’ve been doing this since 2014. And there’s a lot of things that you want to think about when it comes to your workflow. One of the things that, you know, is important that you take to account is the inventory. That’s one thing they really gotta worry about. You don’t want to have a bunch of inventory, stacking up in between each of your different processes, all that is, is money sitting there and you’re losing it. So plus you have to pay taxes on the end of it at the end. So you better make sure that inventory has gone as much as possible. Right. So that’s that’s something, you know that advanced business is called lean manufacturing, and value stream mapping. I have something to say I got a credential. Yeah, I do. I have. Let me see here. I was a certified Green Belt. Green Belt value stream mapper. For the old company I used to work with I am still believer in the value stream mapping and the lean stuff. I mean, a lot of people are like, Oh, well, that’s just Oh, yeah, we’re lean, you know, you know, lean when you see it, because there’s no inventory around. Okay. And usually, you know, you go into a manufacturing facility, you just look at look at all the inventory around you like, Okay, and then they say, Oh, yeah, we’re early manufacturing, or they’re not there. They think they are but they’re not

Randall Thompson  39:58
so and that’s that’s slightly Different than the the old just in time manufacture. Okay. But but just in time is part of that. Okay. So that’s what you you know how much you need for a certain period of time and then you just wear it through but you want more inventory turns, right, get that keep it lean. Right. I love the idea of keeping it lean. Yeah. And and that’s one of the promises that we make to you all the time. And that is, we want to make sure that we’re helping you solve your problems. We love it when you know, we’re hearing about your problems, where are you having difficulties, where are you dissatisfied? And what can we do to come and help you? Now a lot of that has to do with the extraction process and all the whole flow that you talked about earlier? Yeah, which is phenomenal. But we also come alongside people and help them with Avatar client targeting. We go through the whole business process. We look at business plans, financials, many of you are looking for funding. We don’t do that. And just so you know, but we’ve looked at a few business plans as they’re further along, because we want you to be making profitable revenue, right? Anything we can do to come alongside you to help make that happen, including the whole idea of lean marketing, lean inventory, lean manufacturing processes. And last week, if you saw the end, if not go to our other q&a session, which is on replay as well. I think are they up on our YouTube channel? Yeah, James is saying, I think so. And so go to our YouTube channel, like us, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That would be awesome. Yeah. But the key is that we in in that session, we were going through how to help you become more profitable. Okay? And that’s what we want to do all along the way through your processing going to CO2, for example, the reason that we’re CO2 believers is because even though the upfront cost might be a little more, the operating cost, especially right now is substantially less from an operations perspective. And that’s one of the reasons we do it. That gets back to Dr. Jon’s idea of running it lean. Yeah,

Jon Thompson  42:07
yeah, it’s the gift that keeps giving if you’re, if your operations are low cost operations, you know, a lot of people don’t understand, like, your equipment ends up on your balance sheet. Right, exactly. That’s where it ends up. Okay. But then your profit is really, really dictated by how much were your materials, how much was your labor? And then you know, how much gross margin that I get, right? Okay, where did the inventory come into that well, and where did the property plant and equipment come into that? Well, it came in through depreciation expense on your, but very small because they depreciate it over a certain amount of time. Bam. So really, you want to talk about the value of your operation is really is the flow through to the bottom line, which creates cash throughput, okay, in which if you trade off operating expense, for something less money on your balance sheet, you have basically just devalued your business. 

Randall Thompson  43:01
Absolutely, no question. Yeah, I mean capital equipment is capital equipment. And even if it is an appreciating asset, you still depreciate it because you’re allowed to do that. And you can write the depreciation off on your income. Yes. Which is good, right here. We want to minimize tax as a small business, right? pay your fair share, always. But, you know, you want to minimize that outflow and take advantage of every opportunity allowed.

Dr. Jon  43:27
We should do. We should do a q&a just on this because I don’t think people really well, it’s not it’s not necessarily, It’s it’s basic business one, but it really makes a huge difference to to our customers, because what people are trying to do, they got small business. They’re trying to figure out, you know, how to make it profitable. Hopefully, at some point in time, they’re going to be in a situation where someone wants to buy them. And what really matters in that instance, is the cash flow. 

Randall Thompson  43:56
yeah. It’s always about exit strategy, because it Whether you’re looking to sell down the road or not, you may get hit by a bus and now your spouse or your partner has to sell that business. Right? I mean, you got to make sure that you’re planning for that. I mean, I don’t mean to be morbid, but that’s that’s been my world for the last three decades is helping small business owners do that and get prepped and ready for that. So I love the idea of doing a q&a on this.

Jon Thompson  44:22
Yeah, because we business on a one on one or

Randall Thompson  44:25
one of the things I was going to say, though, is even though it’s an asset, it is still can be appreciating, even though you’re depreciating it, and I know that’s true. It’s absolutely true. Yeah. Because you were telling me the other day you had this

 Jon Thompson  44:37
okay. Yeah, well, yeah, it was kind of interesting. We, we got a call one of our there was an issue, basically with one of our customers, they had to shut down for a legal reason. Okay. So whatever it happens, and the the company had they were wondering, okay, well, how can they assess the value of the equipment and they were reaching out to us to help help with that, well, they bought that piece of equipment like two or three years ago. Okay, you know, our prices are always going up, you know, essentially so actually that that piece of equipment with the lifetime even even with a corrected lifetime on it was worth more today than it was three years ago when they bought it

Randall Thompson  45:17
and it was significant. It was almost like 30% Yeah, higher in value. Yeah. afterwards so that is an appreciating asset in this world. So that’s again, that’s more Business 101. Yeah, so I love the idea of doing that. Yeah. Okay. Coming back to a really cool question that I have no idea any answer so this is gonna be fun. Okay. Toby ass Okay, have you evaluated at any atline or inline semi Quan technology to monitor the biomass oil quality? 

Dr. Jon  45:51
Okay at line or in line, okay, semi Quan technology. Okay, semi quantitative technology. Have I evaluated it? Okay, so Okay, this is when I get to pull out my card carrying, you know, I’m a scientist card. Okay, so selectivities the game guys, that’s all there is to it. Okay, so when you have a detector, you know, how will I say this? Oh, maybe this would be a good way to look at it. Okay, you guys can all see the pen here, right? Okay, so that’s the camera now is selective for seeing this pen right? Now watch what happens. Watch what happens here. Now, they’re not really able to see the pen very well, right? Now you’re able to see it. Okay, that’s selectivity. Okay? So, what you want to do is you want to be able to measure for example, you know, the existence of pens and you wanted to be able to do that selectively. In other words, you don’t care about all the other stuff that’s in the camera, okay, you want to be able to measure the pen. Okay, some some detectors can’t see it at all relative to you couldn’t really tell that difference from the rest of them. If you were to say, Okay, what is he holding? You know, and would you even know? Right? Okay? And then some detectors can can actually see, hey, that’s a pen, as opposed to the rest of the background. Okay? So semi quantitative methods, oftentimes have a hard time telling the pen from the background. Okay? So, you know, a lot of times they use like jujitsu, you know, like, what do they call that? I call it mathematical jujitsu. They try to, you know, use mathematical tools to pull it out in make a pattern. So they have a pattern instead of their of a, of an actual selective measurement. Okay? I’m not totally disqualifying that but I’m more of a selective guy. If I’m going to measure something and I’m going to have whether it’s in line or out of line. I want to have something that’s selective because I never know what I’m what’s in that background. So how will I How will I know how I be able to calibrate it if your background is always changing? What if for example, I had a black background, how would you have baby see the pen at all when it was like this? Impossible, right? Okay, so if your variables, your input variables are changing how in the world would I ever have, but if I don’t have a selective measurement, there’d be no way to really differentiate. And I might actually come up with the wrong conclusion. Sure, the question really is, what is the probability that you’re going to come up with the right conclusion or right answer? And then what’s the probability of coming up with the wrong answer? And then what does it matter? Right? So there’s three different questions, it may not matter at all. So who cares? Right, then I’m just throwing the money away, if it doesn’t matter, why measure it? So okay, so that that question doesn’t make any sense. What’s the probability of having a positive, a good positive and what’s the probability having a false positive or false negative? These are the questions that you need to answer when you’re talking about these semi quantitative methods. Okay, and so it’s a complicated question. Kind of a complicated answer. But the bottom line is, I’m a big believer in selectivity, okay. So if you’re going to take the time and the money to measure something, you better be able to zero it, you better be able to have a blank but doesn’t give you an answer. Okay, so the blank shouldn’t give you an answer. It should be like zero, right? Sure. Okay. That’s a problem with these semi quantitative measurements, you take anything and you put it in there, you get an answer. Okay, so that’s not very good. Because I just, I’m more I’m, I don’t, what do you want to call that more, more analytical than others? And then, if you want to, you know, just use HPLC. It’s super simple and inexpensive. And you get the answers that you need. 

Randall Thompson  49:30
So that’s it. That’s a good follow up question. Because there was there was another one asking about testing. When what type of tests do we have? I think you alluded to that earlier as you were going through the flow. Yeah. Where you’re testing? Yeah, but the question is, you just brought up the HPLCs and things and testing, right, where are probably some of the most important places to test.

Jon Thompson  49:53
I like to test every yield process that matters, okay, so we typically test maybe five or six different places with Then the operation. And we would do things like potency, purity, identity. Sometimes we would test for residual solvents. Typically at the very beginning, of course, that’s where you want to make sure there’s no pesticides coming into your operation. Okay, so that is absolutely critical. And then we’ve received biomass from people who say, Hey, this is great biomass, it’s got 6%. And then what oh, we do analysis test on it, and it’s got like hexane on it, and heptane and and people have been, you know, it’s like, it’s literally like, toxic waste. Because they were using ethanol before. And they’re like, Oh, hey, it’s got 5% Well, why is that? 5%? Because they didn’t really efficiently extract it, right? They’re just throwing it in a bag and stick it into the gasoline, pulling it out with gasoline with ethanol. Okay, so it’s ethanol, and then it’s in there. And then so we had to reject something like 20,000 pounds come in on with that. Oh, that’s crazy. Oh, that’s crazy. Yeah. And it’s like, Okay, this stuff is hazardous waste. We’re, we can’t have this in our facility. Even so, I mean, to get rid of that. Where do they have to do it? No, they have to take it down to the dump and they’re gonna say okay, they’re probably not going to tell them. It’s hazardous waste, right? I don’t know what they’re gonna do. Yeah. it smell good. You could sit on fire. I guess that would be when you put in a pelletizer pelletize or make pellets on it. Oh, yeah, yeah, you can make it for the pellet machine gun that would work

Randall Thompson  51:19
but not into burnable lots. Oh, yeah, that was bad.

Jon Thompson  51:22
Yeah, it’s it’s probably probably true. That’s probably Yeah,

Randall Thompson  51:25
we won’t do that. But no, but test it. I think we could do a session sometime on just testing. Yeah, that’d be great. That would be fun. That would be a lot and we have had like a giant rash of people saying yes, Business 101 bring it bring it okay. Because we’ve got a lot of startups on we did the cannabis one on one right. We’re gonna do business one on one and, you know, we love the topics. Oh, yeah. that are coming up. Just

Dr. Jon  51:47
I see someone. Eddie’s asking about headspace GC. Oh, yeah, the headspace GC is basically what it’ll tell you if there’s any residual or leftover solvents like hexane or ethanol or heptane or Something like that in your system. So you want to make sure that you have that, you know, in your process just so that doesn’t make much sense. You know, spend, spend some cash, get the equipment, run the equipment, and you have the answer immediately, and you’ll find out that it’ll pay for itself. You know what a headspace GC runs off? Oh, hmm. I can get some quotations. I mean, we do a couple different things. Randy, for our customers. Yeah. And I mean, I would say that we have, like, sometimes we source sometimes we can source some good used equipment. 

Randall Thompson  52:33
But if they’re going to buy brand new, hundreds of thousands of dollars?…

Dr. Jon  52:37
Na, it’s basically for brand new 60 to 80 grand or, you know, for us, it’s typically you know, 30 to 50 something like that, depending what you got

Randall Thompson  52:47
just a wag Yeah, just throwing it out there. Yes, though. I know we’ve gone this has been a great session today. We got more questions, but yeah, I see their time and I, I apologize. We were kind of on a roll. I wasn’t really Looking at we’ve been on just just an hour and we so appreciate you being here. And now your friends invite your family. This is a business I hadn’t you know your family would be bored to death with this stuff. And by the way, Kathy says hi,

Dr. Jon  53:16
okay, … Hi. Hi, baby.

Randall Thompson  53:21
So anyway, we’re we’re here we love the questions we want to talk to you. At the end of this there is a link to CBD jam sessions. And CBD jam sessions are what we classify as just a 20 minute call where you can call us and talk about whatever issues you’re having right at the time, where are you stuck, and you just get our whole team and we’ll get we’ll channel you to the right guys. The front end guys can answer 80% but if we need to move you in and get questions answered, we’re happy to do that. And we don’t mind if what kind of questions they are. We just want to help you get to profitable revenue, right? We want to help you drive Revenue. That’s what we’re about. Do we sell equipment? Yes. Is that how we make money? Yes. But the reality is, we want to help you. Yeah. And that’s why we do these. These are these are actually fun. Yeah, I really enjoy these. So keep sending in the questions. We’ll be here again next week at noon. Share that it’ll be shared, you know, via email or whatever. So get that. The calculators I just had a reminder, people want the calculators. 

Dr. Jon  54:28
Oh, yeah, those are going to be calculators, please. 

Randall Thompson  54:30
We’re business 101 is coming up. And oh, yes. Interesting. Oh, my gosh. We have tons.

Dr. Jon  54:35
We have tons of content. I don’t know. We could probably do this every day.

Randall Thompson  54:40
I don’t think I could do it every

Dr. Jon  54:43
Well, we kind of do it every day. We do it every day.

Randall Thompson  54:46
We just haven’t done we don’t do it live. But we do it every day. The this is kind of a blow up session with Dr. Jon and it’s really good to get inside his brain. Sometimes it’s scary. But it is it It is good stuff and we still appreciate you being here. Yes, you enjoy your week, stay safe and healthy. And we will see you next week. Take care. Bye now.

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