Isolate Extraction Systems

Kelly Knutson, Founder & CTO

While working in the medical cannabis industry, Kelly Knutson spotted a growing opportunity to bridge the gap in the extraction space regardless of the fact that the cannabis industry was still in its infancy at that time. With a flair for design and manufacturing, he took on the task of developing a system that allows cannabis producers to operate efficiently with profitability as the key goal. Isolate Extraction Systems (IES) today stands tall as one of the world’s leading supplier of botanical extraction equipment. “We morphed the system to include more and more automation, integration and process control, with the key focus of reducing the cost of ownership, mostly around labor and improving throughput and speed,” says Knutson, founder and CTO of IES.

IES’s extraction equipment extracts oils and active ingredients from nearly any biomass utilizing liquid or supercritical carbon dioxide as a solvent. The company ensures a quick and efficient extraction process by designing systems that enable the client to operate the machine without assistance. Knutson highlights the IES systems’ automation that enables customers to precisely control parameters like pressure, runtime, and temperature based on the biomass that is fed into the system. “From there, the machine will run its course from charging the system up with pressure, circulate co2 solvent for the adequate amount of time, and then recovering the gas, which is an added value to everybody,” explains Knutson.

A Client-Centric Approach to Service Delivery

The company offers a variety of botanical extraction systems in various sizes to meet any client’s goal and scale. Clients require flexibility to extract a variety of products, such as cannabis, hemp, nuts, citrus, or other popular oils, and IES is devoted to implementing a system that will suit their needs. Adding into the bargain, the company works diligently to find the optimal solution for each project by first understanding the client’s.

Knutson recalls a client who had difficulties with CO2 supply as well as some preprocessing that was necessary to achieve maximum output due to bottlenecks that weren’t necessarily related to the machine. The team helped them tailor the machine’s process to accommodate the constraints that the customer had within their business. Knutson goes on to say that typically, the IES team walks into a customer’s facility and performs a deep diagnostic on the system to determine why the customer’s yield is declining and works with them to identify areas of improvement to increase the throughput on their whole operation.

With a long-term objective of worldwide expansion, the company aspires to serve consumers in a diverse market. With a track record of selling hundreds of systems in the US, IES is now venturing into the European market. Moving forward, IES hopes to produce all commercial systems from the new manufacturing facility in upstate New York, which is currently in the works.

IES is currently working on a new model that will be launched by the end of the year and would be a universal plug-and-play model that can be easily installed anywhere in the world regardless of voltage. Alongside, the company will be releasing add-ons to the machine, which will allow the creation of more boutique goods while also reducing the amount of post-processing labor necessary for specific products, such as fractional and removal of heavy fats and waxes.

According to Knutson, the firm is dedicated to the success of all clients, and one of the company’s primary goals is to reduce customer costs and lead times. As part of the cost-cutting strategy, the company intends to maintain the same pricing for all of its products independent of inflation or market fluctuations. “We want to provide high-end models at the best possible price, which is exactly what we are doing now and will continue to do in the future,” concludes Knutson.