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ne of the most exciting new companies the Cannabis industry has produced of late is TruSteel, an extraction solutions company and manufacturer based in Grass Valley. If extraction is part of your business plan, this is a company you need to know about. In terms of hydrocarbon extraction, we’ve come a very long way in a short time. First there was open blasting, then came selectively adapted and modified botanical extraction equipment and cooking hardware, then eventually the first closed loop systems were built in the late 90s. Fast forward a couple decades later and we’re looking at an entirely different landscape in the world of Cannabis concentrate production. What was originally pioneered and shared by the nerdier (and maybe braver) Cannabis connoisseurs has now been rocketed into the next dimension with the help of recreational legalization. These days, in order to run a legal lab you have to satisfy multiple state, city and county agencies, having them sign off on your facilities, operating procedures and equipment before you can obtain a license. And even after jumping through the hoops to get licensed, many continue to operate in the same old fashion they always did - not realizing that we are living in a new age and the game has changed. Today, data is everything. Every aspect of a process can be traceable and essentially nobody is taking advantage of all the data you can capture while extracting Cannabis. TruSteel saw the gap in the market and have stepped up to fill it in a big way.
We caught up with Ray Van Lenten, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at TruSteel, to learn more about the company, their hardware and why it’s so revolutionary in the extraction world.
jUly 2020
Q&A | Ray Van Lenten
TruSteel Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
THE CUTTING EDGE Exploring Automated Scaled Extraction at TruSteel | Grass Valley, CA How would you quantify TruSteel as a business? We like to think we’re shifting more towards a solutions based company, rather than a product based company. We pride ourselves on educating our customers and working with them to get them exactly what they need. We’re an OEM - Original Equipment Manufacturer. We have found necessities in the Cannabis and biopharmaceutical extraction market and aim to fill that gap with a standardized product. How and when did TruSteel come to life? I founded the company in 2015 and made a lot of connections, having figured out how to make distillate early on when the tech was still underground and information on the subject was not widely available. I handled a lot of toll processing contracts and built a really great network that way. AB266 came into play in California and legalization started progressing. My interests shifted and I got bored processing. The most exciting part of it for me was building bigger, newer, more efficient machines. We incorporated in July 2017, just Andrew and I, in a 2,800 sq. ft. warehouse. Our first product was a 12x28 jacketed vessel, a really simple but versatile product. At the same time, I was experimenting building falling film evaporators to replace the rotovaps we’d all been using. With each order of vessels that
came in, I’d get a few new parts and pieces to build the prototype falling film. I demoed the first unit and someone bought it on the spot! At the time, this technology didn’t exist elsewhere. I knew we could change the game and so we set out to build the first five production model AV15s. After those sold quickly we began working on the bigger, fully automated AV30 and it’s just taken off from there. What type of equipment is TruSteel currently manufacturing? Our main focus is around the cold ethanol extraction market, but we also specialize in post-refinement techniques such as short path distillation, chromatography and color/pesticide remediation. Our equipment was designed around the industry standard basket centrifuge flow rates, so we focus mainly on systems to support this. We have an inline solvent cooler with adjustable temp down to -55 C, filtration, solvent recovery, decarboxylation and wiped film evaporators - all designed to be able to run stand alone, or we can package them together with tanks and all the pumps and process piping necessary to build one big networked system. These usually range from 100-300lbs per hour, but we can do anything from 15 up to tens of thousands of pounds per hour. We’ve also designed our machines to be compatible with pretty much every liquid (at room temp) solvent for maximum versatility.
