By Anna Guy
The cannabis market is Canada, still in its early stages as a legal entity, is already showing great growth. When the federal government passed the Cannabis Act in October 2018, Canadians were finally able to legally access recreational and medicinal cannabis. The “second wave” of legalization, which happened a year later in 2019, opened up the market to edible cannabis, extracts, and topicals—think gummy bears, chocolates, and beverages, all types of products that require extraction solutions.
Adam Temple is the CEO and founder of Evolved Extraction Solutions, one of Western Canada’s pioneering full-scale, modular extraction solutions companies, providing end-to-end services to help cannabis producers with extraction solutions.
Evolved Extraction Solutions is the reliable, go-to partner for cannabis oil processors producing any type of extracts for “anything that contains cannabis as an ingredient,” says Temple. “We sell the equipment to process the cannabis plants into those ingredients to then go into consumer-packaged goods, really any product that is made downstream of the harvest of the cannabis plants for our partners.”
Evolved Extraction Solutions
It was 2016, and Temple and his brother Liam Temple (COO), and friend Matthew Erickson (CRO) were interested in learning how to build their own personal extractors. Temple jokes he put his degree in “backyard engineering” to use to building multiple extractors for botanical extraction—specifically for the extraction of oils from the cannabis plant.
The team discovered a real challenge in sourcing all the necessary parts required. “There was not really anywhere to get the parts and it was very, very time consuming to order everything from the US and overseas to piece the whole thing together,” says Temple.
Detecting a burgeoning need that coincided with the beginnings of the legalized cannabis market, the team started to stockpile parts, and Evolved Extraction Solutions was officially born. Initially headquarted in a 500-square-foot garage, the demand for its services was so great that the company moved into increasingly bigger spaces three more times in the next 18 months.
“Originally, we had this idea that we’re going to sell all these parts exclusively online,” says Temple, “but because it’s actually quite a complex purchase, and one that is very customized for the user, we have a lot of different components and tools that customers are using to set up their extraction processes, so the business model also needed a complementary brick-and-mortar presence.”
The team set up a warehouse in Maple Ridge, BC, and started attending conferences such as Lift & Co., where industry members invited people to see the entire show room, where they stock and distribute hundreds of products from the industry’s top vendors, and see the team’s capabilities to engineer and manufacture peer-reviewed, sanitary processing equipment.
“Based on their specific requirements, we advise our clients on how to create the best plan to get their extraction process online, generating cash flow and scaling up into the future,” says Temple. Businesses who come to Evolved Extraction Solutions are educated to evaluate the relative benefits of the two dominant extraction methods under consideration by many players in the cannabis industry — ethanol and C02 — on the basis of an analysis of capital costs relative to plant material throughput.
The team is expanding its horizons south of the border and overseas, having launched the
new EV-MASS Solution — a turn-key ethanol extraction process that can be customized to the client’s unique needs.
Helping clients thrive
“Our clients’ end product goals are really the most important thing that we work on — asking all these questions and really understanding the whole scope of the customers’ projects,” says Temple. “We put together a turn-key package that allows them not only to start producing their consumer products, but also have a plan in place so they can scale their production and continue to use the same equipment — we call that a ‘Scaling Plan’ and it allows them to minimize how much equipment becomes obsolete at the next level scale.”
Temple says many Canadian licensed producers started as a vertically integrated business model, growing large quantities of cannabis that require a need for multiple stages of processing. “No matter the end product that a consumer or that a producer wants to make, there’s an ideal process that will be the most efficient process for getting them from biomass to consumer-packaged goods.”
