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Five Different Questions With Troy Ivan, CEO Of ExtractCraft – Forbes


Botanicals are our gateway to natures flavors, scents, and medicine. People have been using botanicals for pleasure, nutrition, and medicine for as long as we have existed. Botanical uses started with using the plants in their natural form, or, making a simple infusion or tincture. Later we learned how to substantially increase the potency of botanicals by using extraction. The difference is that natural plant material, infusion, and tinctures hold the scents, flavors, and medicinal values but they can be too weak and/or adulterated with other oils, butters or alcohols to host the collected botanical oils. The only way to arrive at a pure and highly potent end product is to implement and extraction process to isolate only the botanical oil harvested from the original material. The list of home remedies and botanical applications is very long, people use a lavender or chamomile extract for calming. Just a small dab of these on the wrist brings an almost instantaneous wave of calming to the entire body.  The oil from citrus peel can relive arthritis and joint pain in minutes where other medications fail miserably. More dire and serious conditions like cancer, epilepsy, PTSD, depression, opiate addiction, MS, Parkinson’s, and many more are now being treated with cannabis and CBD and this is where intense interest in our home extraction equipment and community really gets stoked. Once people try cannabis and CBD and experience great success, they are quickly confronted with the problems of using extracts. The problems range from price, availability, quality, potency, reliable testing, and contamination. Using ExtractCraft equipment to do your own extraction puts the control of what is going into your body in your own hands.

Troy Ivan=TI

Warren Bobrow=WB

WB: Where are you from? Why cannabis over a traditional business job? Did you go to B-School? School of Hard Knocks? On the job training?

TI: I’m originally from Michigan but spent my adulthood working overseas in the Asian financial markets. In 2012 I left a successful career to redesign my life in a way that I could work and spend more time with my young family. Boulder, Colorado was the perfect place to attempt this redesign and re-engineering of career and family. I knew it would take some time to find where I fit in, so I began patiently looking for opportunities in the local tech startup communities. I came across ExtractCraft in the early when Lee Sutherland pitched the initial seed round at an early morning startup community gathering held at a Longmont coffee shop. I was one of the original investors, contributing nearly half of the round. I wasn’t looking for a cannabis investment at the time and this wasn’t necessarily a cannabis specific product, but the limitless cannabis, CBD, apothecary and culinary applications were just too intriguing to pass up. The more I experimented and researched the applications the ideas opened up and before I knew it I joined the company at the ground level as CEO. My business school concentration was corporate finance, my career experience was in fixed income and credit default swaps in New York, London, Tokyo, and Singapore, yet somehow I found myself camped out in my garage with the original ExtractCraft unit developing a whole new way to bring simple, safe, and high-quality cannabis processing to the masses. My wife obviously thought I lost my mind and the mess of sticky cannabis oil I was continually scraping off myself kind of had me thinking the same.

WB: Tell me about your company? Please tell me about what makes you different? What stigmas have you come across?

TI: When someone asks me “what’s different about ExtractCraft?”, it’s very difficult because the answer is simply, “Everything!” Our equipment, incredible innovation, education and community support, and commitment to blindingly fast customer service with a personal connection makes us a completely ‘different’ package.  We are building ExtractCraft to fit the idealized image of what we believe a company should be. Unlike other consumer equipment on the market we have designed the Source Turbo and EtOH PRO backwards from a starting point of what exactly does someone need to make a high-quality, food-grade extract safely and simply with nothing but the end user in mind. Other consumer level appliances in the cannabis market are mostly off the shelf solutions designed for other applications without regard for the proper processing of cannabis or hemp. The innovation that we put into our equipment makes the very complex operation of reclaiming alcohol at nearly body temperature and leaving behind a pure concentrate as easy as pushing a button. We have transformed the complexity of juggling temperature, ambient pressure, vacuum level, vapor creation, condensation management, monitoring and continuous adjustments from being confusing and complex into an enjoyable and fun experience. One of the things that we developed that makes this whole process simple and possible is the world’s first appliance “Altitude Tuning”. This means between sea level and 9,000 feet you are assured of optimal performance without having to make adjustments for elevation and ambient pressure, you just have to push a single button to start the process. As easy as the equipment is to use, the idea of doing extractions yourself is very foreign to most people so we make an enormous effort to support education and the community to lend a hand every step of the way. Our Facebook user group “ExtractCraft Users Group” is absolutely one of the best places to learn about making extractions yourself. We go out of our way to answer questions personally and make sure that any information presented in the group is absolutely accurate. You will find me personally in that group all day every day, it is an amazing group of people. There is also a great blog (www.extractcrafter.com) to support education on all topics of alcohol extractions with step by step instructions on everything from decarboxylation to making canna candy, edibles, and vape carts. Our support never stops.  If anyone, customer or not, has a question or needs help our customer service team responds at blinding speed with a personal touch that people love. We do all of this because we believe the long-term happiness of the customer is inextricably tied to the long-term success of the company, but more importantly it’s our core belief that we have the responsibility to treat our customers and community with true compassion and respect.

WB: Do you cook? If so, who taught you? Mother? Father? Television Cooking Shows? What is your favorite restaurant? Where? What are they known for?

TI: I love cooking and smoking meat, it’s one of my favorite things to do! It’s probably why I like what I do so much. Extraction is very similar in practice to cooking. The end product is often used in a formulation or culinary activity.  Favorite Restaurant? Kaikaya by the Sea, Tokyo. It’s a great, loud, casual explosion of flavors, sake, and fun. The specialty is ‘Roasted Tuna Rib’ but in reality, is the meat of a tuna jaw bone, it’s incredible.

WB: What is your six-month goal? One year?

TI: The short-term plan rapid expansion. We have been riding the breaks to control our high rate of growth and maintain quality product development. Now, we have happily arrived at the point where rapid expansion is the plan. The Source Turbo has been shipping for 3-years now and is poised for a strong EU/UK/AUS expansion. After a successful launch the EtOH PRO is in its second manufacturing run and will be introduced into the larger distribution channels and off to the races. Lastly, development of our new equipment progressing nicely. We have been working for years to get to this point, there is a lot going on, and it’s now time to grow.

WB: If you could be anywhere in the world, right now where would that be? Doing what? with whom?

TI: I don’t want to be anywhere but where I am doing what I am doing. This is a once in a lifetime chance to work in a newly born market, developing equipment and technology that’s never existed, and teaching people how to make things they never imagined they would ever be able to make on their own. This is what I want to be doing.



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