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Andy
Day we are talking cannabis extractions with Jeff. He has been very kind enough to give us some of his time to explain a little bit about what do you thinks is going to come up in the extraction space in 2023. Jeff is a longtime cannabis extraction specialist as well as a leading voice in the cannabis extraction space on YouTube, you can check out his channel in the link below. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome Jeff and my co host Dean and hope you guys enjoy the show in your obviously your specialty is the extraction space. Do you expect to see some sort of growth next year or you think it’s going to stay stay kind of stable? Yeah, I

Jeff
mean, for the medical guys, the guys with a separate licences, there’s obviously more guys starting to export. And a lot of that is shaped by the requirements of those different legislations. So guys getting a little sharp at it, I do think there’ll be some contraction, but guys that are not successful that are not operating in a very lean manner, because it is commercial in that sense. I think for extractions, specifically, we will see probably a few more extraction facilities coming up. There’s only about three that are fully licenced it’s a very arduous process, getting the licencing over the line for international exports. Because very often, this is guys looking at, you know, the highest levels of GMP, good manufacturing practices. I think it’s still very restrictive when it comes to responsible adult use. So the one thing that is the biggest gripe and we keep seeing over and over is this discussion. And we’ve seen, you know, individuals that are advising the office of the presidency, like golf struck them discussing how do we make it more inclusive, and a part of this is going to be a high powered political move, you know, I think the courts really shaped the way forward. And we might have to go back to the courts to get, you know, prognosis going forward on how to enable trade, because we want to see trade domestically, not just only patient access, but I can discuss those trends as well, if you want to dig into it. Perfect.

Dean
Exciting, I really hope we see some kind of movement, but with relation to sort of the popularity or the popular kinds of extraction within South Africa. What are we currently seeing as sort of the most popular? And do you expect to see any changes? Or are there certain trends towards specific kinds of extraction? For 2023?

Jeff
Yeah, so I’d say the commercial guys will pretty much heavily focus on industrial ethanol extraction, there is some research sites that are also going for supercritical look, the terpene profile, your pool of hydrocarbon and or supercritical is always way better. So that’s definitely a factor. But I think what a lot of the clients are looking to do is focus on distillate and then enrich that distillate and surprise, just bulk distillate to the market. And that seems to be the focus, it’s pretty easy to control ethanol, there’s no parameters. There’s a limited amount of tweaking, but I think as terpene profiles become more important internationally, we’re going to see a push back to hydrocarbons and push back to maybe versions of supercritical selectively used for like tooth extraction. I think that’s what you got to always balances like, what are what is the efficiencies? And then the benefits of those kinds of systems is those cute closed loop gas based systems are very good long term, because with a solvent like ethanol, you do have losses of 2% maybe per run. So it’s all about how long you’re operating for. And it’s hard to give a 10 year horizon in any business as volatile as the cannabis industry. Yeah.

Andy
On that you said you want they want to enrich the Deselect. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that? Yeah, 100%.

Jeff
So typically, with chill there for now, and I don’t like to refer to cryo, because it’s negative 86 or cryo Tim. But typically guys would work at negative 40 degrees Celsius. And then negative 40 degrees Celsius is to really have the high solubility of the cannabinoids, and you will get limited solubility of the terpenes as well as waxes and lipids. Now what will happen is you’ll still filter from there and you would basically distil and get oil but that oil will still have contaminants. And that’s where you go to things like short path distillation, and then also what form distillation. If you’re scaling that to make it more repeatable. What that does is it drives you closer to like an 85 90% quality. And then from there, you can take steps like you can follow the nucleation reactions for crystallisation. Or you can do chromatography where they’re chromatography helps in narrow and improve the enrichment. You really get a product that’s highly enriched, especially if your market is I mean, like an ICER, that grade material, as you would typically stop a crude you know, once you’ve cleaned up your crude, you might sell on the distillate, especially for these EU GMP facilities, you might say it’s gonna go, Yeah, your trip to Portugal, you supply bulk crude, they then refined in their facility of the appropriate regulation. And often they can move that on to German markets or the markets,

Andy
or you suspect they’re going to bypass a little bit of those do that extraction locally as opposed to sending the crude over to say Portugal and then them selling it on to the EU GMP facilities. What do you think they’ll start doing? So which meant process? Yeah,

Jeff
we already have enrichment. Yeah, I know you guys interviewed years labs as well. So they already has your final product enrichment. So it’s good to see that because that’s technique be more challenging. And we also have another extractor that’s busy, you know, producing crude. So it’s a matter of, you know, where do you want to position yourself. And it’s also relative to the requirements rate from a regulatory standpoint. Because if there’s only one way to get into that market and it is specifically EU GMP, you’re going to have to put it through a facility to further process in that environment. And then audit process is gonna go back to you know, what were the standard said all the different sites.

Dean
Very exciting for the for the South African market, especially on the tes labs, we’ve seen some cool products come out of them quite recently, sort of on the on the global on a global kind of front, maybe not so much on on South Africa. What kind of trends do did we see during during this year? And what do you think kind of the kind of trends we’re going to drive through into into 2023? Maybe more related to the international market?

Jeff
Yeah, sure. 100%. I mean, Australia has been a hyper growth market. And in 50,000 patients, look, there are CBD products that do pull into those numbers. So it’s not just a high potency THC clients, but it is a massively growing market. And it’s got good access for the TGA, which is the regulator. So they run in that really well, Israel still it’s it seems to be kind of more stable in Israel, and then hit its 100,000 Plus markets. Same with Germany. I think the biggest trend everyone is talking about is, you know, will Germany succeed in getting EU law as well as the INCB to recognise their position on commercial trade, not just for medical and scientific purposes. And I think this falls back to the UN treaties because, you know, it’s very awkward. It’s outlined in the UN conventions. You know what cannabis can and cannot be useful. scientific and research is fine, but commercialization is where it normally hampers. We saw Canada basically say we’re gonna go ahead independent we’ve seen Thailand this year, say, Look, we know our laws are a little iffy in terms of what’s presented. But we’re gonna let it roll, you know, roll the dice. And we hope that Germany will commercialise successfully and not fall back to a position like Malta and Luxembourg, where their love for home cultivation. Because we have seen it I mean, there’s nothing wrong of enabling home cultivation, it’s a great thing had happened here as well. But the problem comes is we’re still not able to trade. So no one can actually start to trade because it’s still treated as an illicit product in that setting. And that creates a lot of confusion, it creates a lot of uncertainty. And then we get this disparity between regulation and enforcement, you know, because we have regulations that say one thing, and then we have stores proliferating everywhere, they technically fall into a very grey area, but you could argue it’s a black area, you know, and that’s the thing is let’s just set up legislation to enable adult use, similar to what Germany has done. And Thailand moved on this very quickly. So if Thailand can move on that argument, I think we can Thailand arguments or tourism, cheap labour. Good, good waiter. That’s exactly reminiscent of South Africa.

Andy
Yeah. I was just wondering, like, with regards to extraction, or is there do you expect to see, and I didn’t mention at all, it’d be asking something like this, but do anything with regards to like H HC, and delta eight? I mean, those are so big in the American market? Is it by chance? I just don’t know why we don’t see it here coming out of places like GDS, labs and other extraction facilities. In SF, if that’s even legal.

Jeff
So So to your point, I think the challenge here is the enforcement in the US is a lot tighter, which means Yeah, we can sell Delta nine products, and you can run away with it, and Gaza, realistically extracting them and selling extracts. And there’s, you know, it’s one way though, those are the realities, which means, in the US, it’s by proxy dogs trying to work around state labour legislation. And they’re using things like the farm bill of 2018, to say, well, Delta eight is a hemp derivative. And my such we can argue the legality. hhcs is synthetic, which means we can also argue there that it’s not delta nine, yeah, the enforcement is so poor, then why not just run of the Delta nine products, because it’s cheaper, probably locally to do that than it is to import HHC and delta A products. And I would say, it’s actually probably better because I don’t like synthetics if they’re not properly cleaned up on the extraction, because the problem comes is you drive a chemical reaction, you create all these unknown byproducts. And it’s the byproducts that end up deteriorating your health. And that’s the concern, I’d write a natural product that contains Delta nine, that’s far safer, the safety profile is way better than starting to push synthetics, because we’re trying to bypass laws. I mean, let’s be honest, that for me is a concern. So I think the regulatory environment and enforcement needs to improve because I write I have people have safe access to botanicals, then illicit, you know, synthetics, which is really where a lot of the problems start to stem from

Andy
printing. Yeah, Jeff, it’s, it’s hopefully going to be a good 2023 I do think you’ve got sort of the same wavelength as us we quite optimistic about it. There’s obviously some massive hurdles to cross and To figure out but I think we will get there. We may be replaying some of this too though it’s the end of 2023. To see if how close we were to, to getting it or not, which will be quite exciting. But yeah, just for your time today and for coming on and sharing your thoughts, and obviously your wealth of knowledge. Just thanks for joining us. And we hope to see you guys see your TV on another show soon. Awesome. Excellent.

Jeff
Keep up the amazing work love the shows,

Dean
I always love having Jeff on his knowledge base of extractions try so hard. He’s got incredible, incredible knowledge and also his global knowledge of goings ons. It’s also always powerful, you know, so excited to see,

Andy
I think he’s upped his game a bit. Because I felt really, that Yeah, I mean, I have become a bit detached from from sort of the very industrial side of things quite since I suppose since the Expo last year was the last time we really like dive dive into it quite quite so deeply. So it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s nice to see that that. I mean, the wealth of knowledge today was was all new, all interesting. I think I need to do some, some more research and homework.

Dean
That’s my that’s me, that’s the difficult part of the cannabis industry, because it’s such a massive industry, you can be a professional in a small little space, like, you know, maybe it’s home cultivation, or indoor cultivation or extraction. And then when you really, if you want to try and delve deep into every single one of them, it’s you’ve got to just spend so much time researching because there’s just so much knowledge available. And that’s, I suppose, also one of the challenges with having to run something like like what we do on the show, you know, you’re constantly having to research topics, to try and bring light to conversations, and it just sometimes gets so technical. And there’s always something new to learn in. Yeah, in cannabis.

Andy
It’s encouraging because, like, if, if the industry starts pushing from that standpoint, I mean, that’s what we’ve been trying to do for years is break down the stigma and and show people that it’s a professional industry. I mean, Jeff’s that pitch me of that it’s like, you know, profession through and through. And as I guess it is saying with us, we really want people to start seeing like this is a massive, massive thing for our country, you know, that it could be a massive thing for our country already has empowered already has created jobs, as you guys have seen on previous episodes, but it’s just the depth on and the skill sets and the things our country can learn. It’s still you know, it’s it’s so much and it could be so much good for everyone. And yeah, we’ve had of legal growing market in the home for for quite a few three, three years now. And nothing bad has come of it whatsoever. It’s like, if that’s not proof enough that it’s like time to legalise I don’t know what it is. But yeah, anyway we guys are on we are we on time and I do appreciate you guys watching all the way to the end. You guys are really helped us keep going. Please help do support us on Instagram or the other channels really means the world to us. We also on tick tock from time to time. You guys can check us out there and yeah, as always a pleasure. And check you guys next week.