CBE’s Post-Harvest Manufacturing List: Remediation – Cannabis Business Executive

Producing clean cannabis products is crucial for any operation looking for long-term success. The ability to pass state-mandated product safety tests determines whether your products get to market or if your facility gets dinged with a failed test violation and a potential process audit from regulators.

Seeking to lower the risk of a failed lab test derailing production plans, some cultivators leverage remediation technology to ensure microbial contaminants (and THC levels, in hemp’s case) are within allowable ranges. There are many systems available to correct microbial contaminants and high THC levels (hot hemp).

To help guide growers in their potential remediation technology search, Cannabis Business Executive has compiled a shortlist of options currently available on the market. (To learn more about each company, make sure to read the linked company profiles.)

Willow

Hitting the market in 2016, Willow’s gaseous ozone remediation system was one of the first remediation solutions to hit the cannabis market. WillowPure, the company’s system, uses pure ozone in a contained system to kill microbes such as yeast, mold, aspergillus, E. coli, and salmonella.

Willow’s systems have gone through upgrades over the years, and today’s WillowPure 20 system can process whole and milled flower, as well as thousands of pre-rolls per run. Willow also offers WillowPure 5, a smaller version for small-batch producers, and its WillowPure 360 unit, which operates using a rotating drum to improve ozone coverage, is its largest capacity unit (but cannot process pre-rolls).

As opposed to other remediation systems, Willow does not sell its units, rather it leases them to operators to minimize the risk of units appearing on second-hand markets (using ozone does come with some worker safety considerations, with the biggest risk coming from a leak from the system or its plumbing). “What I didn’t want to happen and what my team didn’t want to happen is see these WillowPure systems on the secondary market,” Willow CEO Jill Ellsworth told CBE. “That’s why we put this lease program in place…. If a cultivator doesn’t renew their lease, that machine comes back to us, we refurbish it, and we get it back into the market.” 

Operators can expect to shell out between $5,000-$7,000 per month to utilize a Willow unit, with the lease fee including maintenance and servicing.

VJ Scientific

A newer player in the cannabis microbial remediation space, VJ Scientific uses ionizing (radioactive) X-ray radiation to kill microbial and other contaminants. 

Backed by 30 years of experience in X-ray technology, VJ Scientific’s cannabis solution exposes the cannabis (and any potential contaminants) to X-ray levels high enough to destroy the contaminant’s cellular DNA, but low enough to not impact cannabinoid or terpene content. Mark Clemons, General Manager at VJ Scientific, explained to CBE that despite the common belief that X-ray and ionizing radiation systems leave traces of radiation on the cannabis flower, that misconception is “totally untrue,”  he told CBE.

A 2022 National Institute of Health (NIH) study “showed that X-ray treatment of Aspergillus contaminated cannabis flower at 2.5 kGy has minimal effects on THCA, Delta9-THC and terpene concentrations.” At approximately 8kGy, cannabinoids and terpenes start degrading more rapidly, according to NIH study results.

Despite only being available in the market for less than a year, the system is already being upgraded after user feedback. Among other soon-to-be-added features, the company is looking to automate the process so “you can put eight or 10 bins or bags in it, and the machine is going to automatically pass the completed remediated cannabis out, and a new batch will go in automatically. So as long as you keep that carousel of bins loaded, it’ll run 24/7,” Clemons described.

Being new to the space, VJ Scientific is still working through its retail pricing but is currently offering significant discounts to operators willing to share operation data with the company so it can continue to validate and improve the unit. Such a partnership can make this system the most economically feasible for companies looking to own their remediation equipment vs. leasing.

Ziel

Another microbial remediation system manufacturer that uses radiation to kill contaminants, Ziel’s systems leverage non-ionizing radio waves. These radio waves activate the water molecules within the cannabis cell walls, causing them to oscillate at a speed that generates heat that kills the contaminants with minimal terpene loss.

The system can only process batches of up to six pounds, and because the process uses heat, it requires that biomass have a minimum moisture content of 8%. However, a batch usually takes 15 minutes to complete (depending on the run settings), so growers can expect to be able to process up to 160 lbs. of flower per 8-hour shift.

Ziel’s purpose-built for cannabis APEX 7 system retails for $304,000 and comes standard with a 1-year warranty (extended warranties can be purchased for an additional $24,000 per year). That purchase price includes a Ziel representative visiting the cultivator’s facility to “install [the system], assemble it, commission it, [and] train the people,” in a four-day process, Ziel CEO Arthur de Cordova told CBE.

Ziel believes it is well-positioned to dominate in European markets, especially Germany, with de Cordova noting that cannabis products treated with ionizing radiation can experience approval times of up to 18 months in that country. With Germany mainly being a medical cannabis importer, de Cordova is already seeing adoption climb with medical producers in Canada who are looking to expand into the EU. “All eyes are on Germany,” de Cordova noted, because “how Germany evolves will be how all of Europe evolves.”

Root Sciences

An outlier on this list, Root Sciences is not a systems manufacturer, but rather a retail distributor of a variety of extraction and post-harvest systems. But the company enters the remediation conversation with its two THC remediation systems.

THC remediation is almost exclusively used by the hemp industry to avoid sending “hot hemp”–that is hemp that tests above the statutorily defined 0.3% THC limit for those crops–to the testing lab where it will be flagged and the crop potentially lost.

Fadi Yashruti, Root Sciences co-founder and CEO, told CBE his company offers two distinct systems to reduce THC content to hemp-qualifying levels. The first uses heat and water to degrade the THC into different compounds in an easily scalable process. The catch, Yashruti said, is users need to be mindful not to overly degrade the THC, as doing so “causes some problems because you have some isomerization, and then you can start pulling out sugars that can gum up the distillation [equipment].”

The second system strips the THC through chromatography used on crude oil and “mother liquor,” the leftover substances from the CBD crystallization process. This mother liquor contains THC, but also other cannabinoids that can be used by hemp producers. The chromatography system pulls out the THC from the other ingredients, “and we can take whatever’s left over and we can put that back into the CBD isolate and you have more of a broad spectrum CBD distillate,” he explained.