If you’ve never been to Humboldt County on California’s north coast, it’s an unusual paradise. Huge redwoods tower over the barbecue grill in the backyard, flowering trees bloom with gigantic blooms, and lush rainforests sit side by side with sandy beaches.

The Pacific Ocean, turbulent and unpredictable, beckons visitors to the coastline littered with fallen trees and rocky islands within easy reach.

There’s a bit of magic to it, and somehow the Kraken and Bigfoot don’t feel like a fairy tale in Humboldt’s often savage wilderness.

This is the background to Case Mandel and Lizandro Salazar V’s connection to cannabis.

Before launching the county’s first licensed plant extraction company, they spent years trucking in old-growth forests, tending secret fields, and learning first-hand why the Emerald Triangle is the best climate for cannabis cultivation in the world. .

Mandel has already had success with Cannadips, the country’s first cannabis and central business district dip.

As the brand continues to grow, he and Salazar are building a new extract company. They use single-source, quick-frozen, sun-grown buds to form the base of their line of active resins, Arcata Fire.

In this exclusive interview, we speak with Mandel and Salazar to find out their inspiration, strategy and what’s next for their award-winning line of active resin extracts.

Cannabis and Technology Today: When did you realize you wanted to launch ArcataX?

Case Mandel: I was the first among us to actually get involved in hydrocarbon mining, although Lizandro and I were using bubble bags a few years ago. I bought one of the first closed loop extraction machines built in the early days of hydrocarbon extraction.

I met my wife after working in a traditional extraction market. She gave me an ultimatum – if she’s going to continue spending time with me and hopefully start a family, I need to stop working in a market that could jeopardize my freedom.

Luckily, I just finished my MBA and California just passed its Proposition 64 legalization of entertainment, so I’m taking my skills to new legal markets. My first step in building a business was doing what I do best and connecting people. I went out and found capital partners as well as partners for cutting edge custom extraction equipment. Then I brought my high school best friend Lizandro [Salazar] Design and manage projects. He took action and we were able to become the first legal, operational extraction facility in Humboldt County.

Lizandro Salazar V: That moment was a little different for me. I work under a cultivating premise, actually building from scratch. Everyone is cultivating, but no one has a license, because many people are applying, and the application will go very far at that time. We went downstairs to breakfast one morning and a whole bunch of sheriffs, state water authorities, natural resources, fish and wildlife…all of those people were there.

Next thing I knew I had a shotgun in my face. Long story short, they let us go, but we ended up being the first farm to be raided in the Humboldt County application process. Seeing this, I thought to myself: wow, legal cultivation is a bit sketchy. We need to look at manufacturing as a potential next step.

Not long after we started, we realized that the industry was commoditizing at breakneck speed. Within a few months, we saw prices start to drop, and as that drop started to happen, margins changed and competition increased.This is where the real transformation takes place ArcataX As a crude oil manufacturer, ArcataX became a premium reactive resin manufacturer.

C&T today: What is unique about what ArcataX does in the industry?

LS: We are one of the few companies that actually goes to the farm and harvests the crops ourselves. We set out to implement these harvest SOPs, all to maintain the freshness of these aromas and characteristics to represent the smell of the plant as it grows.

Due to the size of our facility, we are also able to harvest and freeze and extract these materials in a fraction of the time – sometimes on the same day. If you’re harvesting 2000 square feet and it takes two months to extract, that’s cool, but we harvest a few thousand square feet and extract the next day. We were able to take these gardens from their most mature stage all the way to an almost finished product in a very, very short time.

And then we started seeing data on these oils, which were extremely high in terpenes, extremely diverse in types of terpenes, and even terpenes that you would never see anywhere else. Then we realized it was really special.

C&T today: The ability to get your product to market faster – is it a result of the specific technology you use, or the scale of the technology you use?

LS: I like to think of it as a perfect storm, meeting the right people and developing the right genes at the right time and place. It’s the technology next to SOP.

And then we started really digging in — not only how fast can we extract this material, but how pure can we make it? This is where our solvent-free process becomes one of our fundamental components.

We use certain solvents because they are selective in attracting these particular cannabis compounds. Then, all solvent in the finished product is recovered to undetectable levels.

C&T today: Why did ArcataX choose to pursue reactive resins, in particular?

LS: The plant itself has a code, or a recipe, or a certain fingerprint that it emits. Every strain and every plant is different. In that code, there are good and bad. With our extraction process, we can extract what we think is the best part of the code.

We don’t want to break the code into small chunks.We want to make sure it’s cohesive because Terpenes The profile, the amount of potency and the type of cannabinoids, cannabinoids and flavonoids, and all these other compounds… these are all part of the symphony, and the symphony experience has brought us award-winning results.

The role of the living resin is to capture the essence at the moment of harvest and preserve it almost intact. When you open a jar or get hit, you basically get the experience as if you walked up to that farm, squeezed that flower, and smelled it yourself.

C&T today: Most of ArcataX’s feed ingredients come from microclimates. Why is this important to you?

LS: Plant and animal systems generally work better when the diversity of different species occupies different parts of the three-dimensional environment.our farm Usually surrounded by acres of forest. Our farmers often grow large numbers of different types of species around their gardens that bring in predatory insects that feed on pests.

When it comes to soils, many of our farmers have been building their soils for decades. These soils are native and rich in nutrients. Due to the water table and proximity to rivers, many of these soils have the ability to absorb water at night and then drop during the day. Our best farmers don’t even have to irrigate.

C&T today: You launched Arcata Fire earlier this year and won first place in the Live Resin Cartridge category at the Emerald Cup. What do you think makes your product stand out among the judges?

CM: Our win with the judges represents the incredible amount of starting material we’ve been able to gain from the relationship we’ve developed over the past two decades.

This material, combined with the SOPs that we have developed for hundreds of thousands of pounds of extract, gives us an advantage.

LS: You hear a phrase across the industry: set fire, set fire. You can’t get a good finished product unless you start with something good. Arcata Fire comes from our best quality crop and we don’t sell it to anyone else because we crave it so badly. It’s all single source, which means they all come from the same place. It’s all single batch, which means I don’t mix different strains together. All are 100% active resin, which means that all ingredients in each product are 100% from quick-frozen material.

All these little things come together to create a place where consumers will say, “Wow,
This is the best cannabis product I’ve ever eaten,” we see almost every day now. It just took California by storm and we’re proud of it. ?