John Goepfert has been extracting for eight years. It started out of necessity to find a solution for his wife, who suffered a back injury. They were looking for some pain relievers that weren't opioid based. This led to extracting salicin, an agent chemically related to aspirin, from organic white willow bark.
His company, American Extractions in Janesville, developed the Whole Spectrum CBD system, which is solvent and chemical free and uses energy, not chemistry, to deconstruct the cellular walls of hemp plants to extract CBD and other cannabinoids from the plant. Through this, his company is able to extract 100% of the available cannabinoids in the plant material.
The company completed a second round of Wisconsin-based funding in mid-2020 to position itself to meet rapidly growing customer and CBD industry demand. The company plans to hire up to 15 additional general production personnel this year to scale growth.
Goepfert recently talked with Wisconsin Inno in an interview that has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why is this system more efficient?
"As we start looking at these cannabinoids the way they integrate into your system, how quickly they act, the fact that they are not addictive, the fact that the relief is very frequently instant once it's metabolized ... it’s a great product. The problem that I saw is the extraction world that I had been in had really extracted materials the same way since the Greeks started doing it. Ethanol extraction has been around since the Greeks. And then, well, it works.
"It doesn't work very efficiently. And if you used ethanol to extract, which is one of the ways, you're going to leave 60% of the available gold or medicine that's in this plant behind. You're going to throw away more useful molecules than you harvest and I'm like 'that makes no sense.' There is a problem with ethanol because it doesn't grab all of the cannabinoids that are in the plant. There's hundreds and since we are in the learning phase, we don't know what each of these do, and we don't know which ones need to be together in order to get a desired outcome.
"So we know CBD relieves pain. What I can tell you is that CBD isolate by itself, doesn't work as well at relieving pain as CBD distillate does, and the difference between the two is that distillate has additional cannabinoids working together in solution. Here, the single silver bullet in CBD works better when it's with its brothers and sisters. We don't know which ones yet so I think you're better off just having them all until we have all of this figured out."
Q: Are you looking at other plants and extracting other molecules for other therapeutics?
"Absolutely. We really are a biotech company. The truth is, if you pick the molecule, we can go in and get it, and we will. We will do it efficiently without leaving fingerprints behind (meaning some of the solvents and chemicals used in other extraction methods. These can never be removed in totality, and as a result, trace amounts can be detected in consumer goods. Over time this can have negative consequences for those consumers)."
Q: What’s on the agenda for 2021?
"We've got some gummy lines coming out, but they're actually good gummies. They're all made with dehydrated fruit. They’re made with fruit pectin. There's nothing that isn't natural. They taste like fruit rollups ... we’ve also got a brand new product line that we've developed, which is a CBD pain foam. It's a water-based product. Because of the amount of energy we're using to extract, we can make stable water and oil emulsions. I don't have to put it in a cream that stains your shirt. This stuff absorbs into your skin and in seconds you'll start feeling relief from the CBD in smaller doses. These are two of the products I'm really excited about."
