HighIQ Webinar Series: GrowerIQ Industry Spotlight – Torrcann Craft Cannabis

GrowerIQ Industry Spotlight: Torrcann Craft Cannabis

Here at GrowerIQ, we work with some incredibly talented & hard-working people in the cannabis industry. This month, we’d like to introduce you to an amazing team, from a family-owned business, who built their company from the ground up and utilize GrowerIQ today.

Whether you are a new applicant looking for some tips, or an experienced producer looking for a fresh perspective on the industry, you won’t want to miss our next event.

The Torres family will be sharing their story on entering the legal cannabis market, tips on what to expect, highlighting their operations, & telling us about their experience using cannabis production software.

The event will take place on Thursday, July 27, 2023, at 1 pm EST for all those who would like to attend!

Join us to learn all you need to know about TorrCann Craft Cannabis, & how GrowerIQ has supported their successful journey.

Transcript:

Rob Perry  0:06  

Hi there, everybody and welcome back to another session of HighIQ. HighIQ is a webinar series that we put on here to GrowerIQ in order to to bring together some, you know, some different people, thoughts, activities that are going on in our industry, both in Canada and around the world. The general goal of the webinar series is really just to share these ideas with you know, our existing customers, you know, prospective customers peers in the industry, just to generally raise the quality of our entire industry and, and help each other out. Generally, as we're working our way through it. Today, we're we're, we have a very special session that we're putting together, we're working with our camp today. They're a cultivator here, in Ontario, they are fantastic, they've got a beautiful facility, brilliantly managed and some fantastic product, we're going to they're going to talk to us about some of what some what their journey look like, getting started getting into the industry getting set up with their facility. Market, so what products they've got, you know, how they're, they're moving those products and generally talk about their experience here. And one of one of the hopes we have out of it is that through their experience, a lot of people can learn a few tricks from a group that that has been successful, getting ramped up. And again, this is for both Canada and, and newer jurisdictions as they're coming online. And, you know, one of them that that's ramping up very quickly, people may have seen in the news is, is in Barbados, and you know, fantastic environment in Barbados, for medical cannabis, you know, very strong support from the government to, to ramp up this industry and, and really make it work some great expertise, great climate down there for it. So it's, it's going to be a very exciting jurisdiction to work in, down there. So you know, hopefully, there's some learnings that we can take out of here for everyone watching, and at that, I'm going to pass it off to one of my colleagues here, Ian. So Ian, yeah, please, please take it away.

Ian Callander   2:55  

Thank you, Rob. So my name is Ian Callander. I'm the account manager for Tor kin. So I'll be asking the questions here. And we'll get into it. And I'll do some quick intros. So we have Shannon Torres, she's CEO and president. We have Samantha and Horace, she's VP of Business Operations. And then we have Daniel Torres, VP and master grower. They all do have different titles, but they all pull their weight and get into the grower rooms and get their hands into the dirt when they need to. So they all wear many hats. And we'll learn a lot more about them here in a moment. So I'll we'll get started. And we'll dive right in. And so one of the one of the main net things here, if you want, I guess this is for, for Shannon, if we can get a little bit of a deeper look into the history and the black market days and transitioning into the legal market. How how, what does that look like? 

Shannon Torres  3:55  

And what does that look like for Torcan help transition from the legal market to the legal market? Yeah. So, um, so we have 60 plus years of experience in growing cannabis. And when I say 60, I account for my father's years in the industry. So when I say three generations, it starts from my father, who taught everything he knew and loved about the plant and the business to my brother, David, who's not on the webinar today, who then in turn, passed all of that knowledge down to Daniel, my son, I'm also my master grower. And he loves the plant and obviously, we spent a lot of time learning everything from him. And when the opportunity presented itself, from Health Canada to create they created what they call the micro cultivation license. We determined at that time that maybe that was something then that we could take what we knew and loved from, you know, the illegal market to the legal market, we believe and we still do that there's a lot of knowledge and product and elements to the business that we can bring to the legal market. And so that's what we've been trying to do for the last two years.

Ian Callander   5:12  

Amazing. And with that, there's probably many challenges that you experienced along the way. What were some of those challenges that you faced?

Shannon Torres  5:23  

Um, well, no financing, obviously, I think everybody in cannabis will tell you financing is obviously, almost next to impossible to get. So my husband and I determined that this is something that we wanted to do for our kids, we wanted to sort of give them a legacy. I know that sounds strange, because it's, you know, we came from the legacy market, and we're giving them a legacy. But we believe that every one of us can bring something unique to the industry. And we continue to do that. One of the ongoing issues that this bank or this industry faces every day is banking, you know, you can't get financing, you can't get bank accounts. You have to go to credit unions. The stigma is still there for cannabis. You know, not everybody wants a cultivation facility as a neighbor. We've been lucky so far, that we don't have that challenge because of the town that we chose to cultivate in. And I think the biggest challenge that we had to endure and overcome was the fact that we got our license shortly before the pandemic was declared. So all the legwork that we put in beforehand sort of came to a grinding halt. But we really did believe in ourselves. And we believed in our mission and we we never wavered. We kept plugging, trudging on sort of saying, awesome,

Ian Callander   6:50  

and, and swinging and getting started how with location and facility choice and design, how did that all come about? And then follow up to that, as well as some details about the facility size when you were licensed and what type of operations.

Shannon Torres  7:07  

So we chose. We've actually been on a little lake called Beaver Lake, which is about half an hour north of Nappanee. And we've been here for probably close to 60 years, my family's been on this lake for a great amount of time. So we knew that Nappanee was already cannabis friendly, because they had one of the original medical cannabis facilities located in Napa nice and a couple of other smaller LPS were already up and running. So that's where we decided to start our search. And lucky for us, we found a property fairly shortly into our search that we thought we could make work. In terms of the facility and how we made it work. I'm going to flip that over to Daniel.

Daniel Torres  7:55  

Yes, so the building that we purchased, it used to be a aftermarkets truck facility. So like they would put on lift kits, RIM stuff like that suspension. So it was pretty, pretty dirty when we got the building. So we did a lot of work. We retrofitted it. So it's approximately 6000 square feet, the full facility. But we have two flower rooms. Each flower room is 27 lights, we've got rolling benches in there as well, we have a pretty, I would say pretty big a track system that controls everything to what we needed to do. Doing the retrofit, we didn't outsource much of the work. We did it all. Pretty much everybody had hands on and designing and building out the facility. We do hold the micro cultivation license, so we don't have that big of canopy space we only are allowed 2100 square feet. Right now we're running at about 1600 square feet. And that's including both flower rooms, the bedroom and as well as the mother room. We have a pretty big dry room as well just based off the fact that the amount of plants that we're running in each room, we run about 324 plants a room strain dependent and that's pretty much it. We only really sell bulk flower. We don't package right now in this facility just because we do not hold the processing license at this time. Um, that's something that we're looking to in the future. Hopefully soon enough, we can start that process.

Ian Callander  9:41  

And my next question is How long has grown? How long have you guys been using GrowerIQ and how long we supported your facilities?

Samantha Torres  9:53  

Sorry, yeah, I was gonna say so for grower a few. I've been working personally with GrowerIQ on behalf of twerkin since The very beginning, we did do a meeting with them way before we even started the build-out of our facility just to get a feel for what kind of was out there in terms of software. And we just from the very beginning, we found GrowerIQ to be super helpful, very easy to work with. The program itself was super user-friendly, which was perfect for people who are just getting into the business and learning how to do all of these new internal controls and reporting and all of the requirements that Health Canada has a view which feels never ending sometimes I'm sure to other people. But they have been with us from the very beginning. Even when we got our license, they were the first software that we introduced to our facility. So they have they've they've held our hand every step of the way, which has been perfect.

Ian Callander   10:50  

Awesome. And what what difference using or what what difference has using grower ACU made for you guys.

Samantha Torres  11:00  

Honestly, it's just made everything easier and smoother on a day-to-day basis, especially when it comes to keeping track of everything that you do have to report on for behalf of Health Canada, like any disruption, it just kind of is like a one-stop shop for everything that you have to do. And it makes collecting the data at the end of the month easy for if you are inputting it, I know there's ways to manually input reporting, but thankfully, we've never had to do that. Because GrowerIQ has such an easy option. So as long as you keep track of your information, and you have ways to just make sure everything looks accurate. It's just a one button, download that the information and upload it to Health Canada. So it's perfect. Awesome.

Ian Callander   11:46  

And what are some key features that that you use and like?

Samantha Torres  11:51  

For us, we honestly use it for everything, we use it from the second week how to clone and plan our batch to the moment we sell the product. So like I said, it is a one-stop shop for us. The most useful part is definitely keeping track of inventory. We are a small facility. So it is a little bit easier. We do have less employees. But still, I mean, that also means less people to actually keep track of all the data. And it's basically like having a whole admin team there for you. I would say for me personally, just because reporting is my wheelhouse. That is my favorite feature is how easily accessible it is. And also just how helpful you guys are. I mean, anytime we have a question and your little help, portals are perfect, so nice.

Ian Callander   12:42  

Thank you. And what kind of products are you making? And you mentioned products there? What kind of products are you making? What strains of products and also that you're excited about? And do you have any interesting jinhe heirloom genetics?

Daniel Torres  12:59  

Yes. So right now we have a couple that we've dialed in on over the last couple of years. We have a triangle mints, which is featured on ABA medics medical platform under the gas. It has also it goes overseas to another partner of ours. We do a GRE animals which is a gelato crossed with grape pie crossed with animal cookies. That is another add another partner of ours which is pinners they're located in Bowmanville. It's a rec brand. We were growing a dysfunction junction. But we have put that on the backburner. It's just on ice right now. We find that the triangle mints and the granite walls is doing good enough for us right now. So we're not that's not in full production. But that is went overseas and dependents as well. And upcoming right now we have two flower rooms. That is Island pink Kush. This island pink Kush cut has been in our family. Since about 2012. We were gifted the cut. We had it in the legacy days as at the MMAER and at the ACMPR facilities. And that is going to some of our partners as well. Hopefully overseas, Appomattox is already going to put it on their platform and push it for us. And we might introduce it to pinners as well.

Ian Callander   14:28  

And it's have another one here is there some knowledge of the illegal market and how you learn to transition to the legal market here you have some story that you want to share with us.

Daniel Torres  14:40  

Yeah, so I started fairly young. My uncle took me under his wing when I was about 12 years old. That's the first time I kind of got in the garden and started getting my hands dirty. After that, I kind of didn't really I had a very big passion for it. I can assumed most of my life, I would say, not smoking or anything of that matter. But just generally learning how the plant works, how to get benefits out of it, stuff like that. So I would use like I would, you know, show up late to class on purpose, because there was a thing in high school, if you've got five lates, then you would have to get an at home suspension. So I would do that, knowing that I would be able to go to the garden. So I would have my uncle picked me up in the morning, and I got a day's work out of it. So I was I wasn't learning in school, but I was still learning at the same time. So it was pretty fun doing that. We got to the point where we were in grade 10, grade 11, grade 12. And all my friends were starting to figure out where to go to school, what trades they wanted to get into. And I was at the point in my life where I kind of already knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to get into the cannabis space, but at the time it was medical. So I knew I had a feeling that eventually the way that it was going cannabis would be illegal in my lifetime. So I started, you know, telling all my friends and family that I would be in the cannabis industry. And they kind of looked at me like I had two heads, they didn't really understand it. So it came to the point where like, my friend's parents would talk to my parents and say, Hey, like Daniels saying he wants to grow weed for a living. What is what's up with that. And so my parents kind of just told me, you know, settle down on that stop telling everybody what you want to do, because there's still that stigma, people don't really understand what you're talking about. So after school, I took pretty much any in every course that I could to get certificates and get more knowledge in the cannabis space. And from there, again, I was designated growers after that for ACMPR patients. But it was getting too stressful working in that side of the industry. And there's a lot of things that go wrong in that side. So I wanted to get into the legal side. So I applied at a couple licensed producers, I worked at one and it was one of the first outdoor facilities and Port Perry, Ontario. From there, I went to another facility in Pickering, which is our partner, Abba medics. I was a grower there for a little bit of the time, I helped on the growth team and stuff like that. And just from there, at that time, it was around 2019. So we were already in the stages of getting ready to get our license for our micro. So I was very transparent with them about there's going to be a certain point in this journey that I'll have to leave this facility in because I'm going to open up my own with my family. And they were really happy for that. So thankfully that they they allowed me to continue to work there and build a better relationship with everybody on that side of the of the industry. And thankfully, they now showcase our product on their platform, which is really cool. 

Ian Callander   18:02  

That's awesome. And then you mentioned you just you're working for one of the partners, but can you elaborate a little more on how are you guys working together leveraging strengths with relationships in the industry?

Shannon Torres  18:16  

Well, I mean, obviously Daniel did a lot of the legwork with out of medics. pinners I actually spoke at lift. I think not this year's lift left last year's lift, we're actually met pinners. And, you know, they were very supportive of us. They said, You know, we love to support small craft growers. So and they were true to their word, I reached out to them, and they were all on board. They came out they visited us. We're in regular contact with them. So, you know, we've had some great relationships. We've been lucky it took a while to get there, but we are there. But what we do to try and maintain them is we actually just at the sort of the end of every year we sit down and we forecast out what we think we want to still continue to harvest and cultivate and then which ones we want to think we want to introduce and we share that information with our partners. We're always kicking on doors, you some days you just feel like a door to door salesman, just always out there, hitting the pavement trying to tell people your story and like explain to them what you're doing. So we're always looking for good partners. We have a lot of great ones now. But we really enjoy the ones that our families like us like the Pinares Yabba medics is kind of like a family like we are because you know we have the relationship there with Daniel. So we have good partners now but we're always looking for for new ones.

Ian Callander   19:49  

So awesome. And this is kind of a question that we all you always ask is kind of looking back would you do anything different? And then is there Any advice for groups that are looking to enter this space now that you can give us?

Shannon Torres 20:06  

For me personally, I wouldn't do anything different. The things that really held us back, were out of our control. As we mentioned, the pandemic probably put us a year behind schedule. But we believed in our mission, and we did stick to it. We had a few relationships in the beginning of our entry into the legal cannabis market that didn't work out. But, you know, that's just the industry. And this industry is in its infancy stage. So we're not the only company that is struggling to make it work. There are other companies that are as well. And you just got to, you got to just not give up that just keep kicking the can.

Samantha Torres 20:47  

There are good people out there. Yeah.

Ian Callander  20:51  

And the current state of the market, where are you seeing potential opportunities today, I know you've touched on a few here and there. 

Shannon Torres  21:01  

But, it's honestly tough to predict where the industry is headed, I would love to see changes in how Health Canada allows us to sell our product or get it to the consumer, just with a cultivation license. That's not that easy. I mean, as a prime example, I always use this, we're directly across the street from a small batch craft brewery, where they literally create their craft beer with all their doors and windows open, they, you they can sell it out their front door. In fact, they even have a patio where you can, you know, can buy their product and then sit on their patio and consume it that it will never happen. Or in the foreseeable future anyway, for cannabis, because there's still so much stigma associated to it. I would like to see that change, but will it I'm not sure. I would say definitely try and pursue the overseas avenues that you can and adapt, being willing to adapt your facility with any of the criteria that's required to do so each country is different, but you really do have to keep an open mind because there is a lot of revenue that can be generated by shipping your product overseas, we have taken advantage of that. And we hope to continue to do so. And I would just say if you're considering going or coming into this cannabis space, are you, you know, you've already started the process, I would say start trying to build those relationships beforehand. Don't wait till you get your license, you will get out there. There's tons of cannabis events. You know, we were just at mechanic Golf Classic over the last few days where, you know, you just you get out there you beat people up, tell them your story. You start to make those connections way before you hit that submit button so that you you've sort of got a running start. I think that's what we did. And it did work to our advantage. And I would say definitely, that's what I that's the biggest suggestion I could give to anybody that's starting or considering the industry. Definitely get out there as soon as you can make those connections.

Ian Callander  23:13  

That's awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you all for being here today and sharing your story. At this time, I think we want to hand it over. I know Rob, but I think there's some questions there. I wanted to open it up to the viewers. If they have any questions. We can feel those. 

Rob Perry  23:34  

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and I, there are a few. I think one thing maybe we can do before we get to some questions is I know, I know. There's some facility pictures and maybe some family pictures on here as well. You know, I guess Samantha and Shannon deonna. Take us through sort of a virtual tour of your facility here. Sure.

Shannon Torres  24:00  

So this is the torque and logo that our family came up with. And next slide, Sam Oh, yeah,

Samantha Torres  24:09  

we're trying Sorry.

Shannon Torres  24:10  

There we go. So this is just the Meet the Team Of course, I'm the CEO but as Ian had mentioned before, I find in cannabis titles don't mean anything. We may we wear many hats. SMAP is as we've mentioned before, as our business operations vice president Alexandra is social media marketing Daniels. Master grower along with my brother David Hall is my other master grower and building operations is Mitchell Hillis bug to my future son-in-law. And you know, as we mentioned already before, we're a family-owned and operated business and that's who we are. Next, like Tim. So this is where we started. These are photos that we actually used for our US submission for our application, these are just some clean shots of the mother and propagation room, those would be our cloning carts. That's our vegetation room with the two rolling benches. Daniel, how many.

Daniel Torres  25:17  

So let's do a flip in this room. So when we call debate, so at the end and flower rooms, like I said, we want 324 strain dependent. So we try to get around 20% extra per stage, like per, I guess, station in the facility. So we're cloning around 500, lawns at a time 525. From there, we pick the best ones, and we put them into the bedroom, we transplant them into one-gallon pots, we have four lights in there, each table is five by 10. So we don't really grow them too big in that room, we only get them about, you know, anywhere from 15 to 18 inches. And then from there, we transplant them into our flower rooms. And this slide right here, these are the flower rooms, they're completely identical. We built them identical just so that there's pretty much everything's the exact same, you know, in each room, like I said before, there's 27 lights. So we have three rows of nine, we run 12 plants per section per light, basically, we run so once they go in here, we transplant them into a three gallon. And we bench them out for about seven to 10 days. Right now we are doing soil, we're looking at other options and maybe going into cocoa and doing the prefab three-gallon cocoa bank, just so it saves us time lugging around dirt. Because every couple of weeks, we have to bring in about 20 bales a dirt and it gets pretty heavy. And it's a lot of work transplanting the 324 plants it's takes about, you know, five, four to five hours, depending on how many people can help that day. So we are looking at other options. In the rooms though, you'll notice that there's no irrigation. We don't irrigate our plants at all. We hand water everything. We've been doing it for a very long time. We continue to do it. We brought it over from the legacy days. It's kind of the mindset of if it's not broken, don't fix it. It's worked for us in the past. It's continuing to work for us now. And yeah, so but nutrient-wise, we do run at the end of nutrients. It's pretty standard, I would say across the industry now. It's a great product. And from there strain dependent as well. We run anywhere from eight to 11 weeks. So our dysfunction junction we take it out at about eight and a half weeks and our island Panke we can take it as long as 77 days. So 11 weeks, so it really depends per strain.

Shannon Torres  28:08  

Next slide. Yep, sorry.

Samantha Torres  28:13  

It's not working. There we go.

Daniel Torres  28:14  

There we go. This is the dry room. So if you notice on the ceiling, we have baffles on the ceiling so we actually connect greenhouse tubing plastic greenhouse tubing to those. So our return is on the middle of this picture, you can see the return on the top right. So that's our return air and our air coming into the room is on the ceiling but we run like I said we run vertical tubing from the top of the ceiling down to the bottom and there's holes punched into the plastic. So we have perfect airflow throughout the whole room. And we run anywhere from 14 to 18 days. Depending on how dialed in we can get the drying process in that room. We dry on so we found this product on Uline it it's what it is it's like you've ever been to concerts or clothing stores they have those racks that you can hang on clothes for display. We bought a bunch of those and they work pretty good to dry cannabis on so we just notch the branch and then we hook basically just hooked the branch on to the the metal cage

Daniel Torres  29:42  

And that's obviously Sam That's my sister. She's using the girl right there. So right now, like I said, that's how we propagate. We use cocoa pox And anywhere from seven to 10 days there in that routing dome, we do use so in the back, you can see we have a crazy strain catalog. We just cut it down a little bit. We had about 37 genetics in the facility. So it was just too much to handle. So we dialed it back to I believe like 10 or 12 Right now, and then we're going to get into fino hunting. But this is the bedroom as you can see we push them pretty tight. We do use beneficial insects, we use Colbert, we ordered Colbert every week at the start of the cycle, and then throughout flower we do every other week up to week five. And we find Colbert's very easy to work with as well. If we have any questions, we can call them up. They help out pretty good. So it's good in that aspect. And again, hand watering, hand water everything

Vegar Samuelsen  30:58  

I guess the benefit to you guys hand watering it takes a little extra time. But you guys also enjoy your music while you're working. Yeah,

Daniel Torres  31:04  

Yeah, we're always blasting music in the back, whether it be country or like live buskers around the world or, you know, like house music, whatever we feel that day, we're we're pumping it on pretty, pretty high. Definitely. So this is the flower rooms. The far left is our granite walls. That was I think the second round that we ran the granite walls. So we do run LED lights in the facility. We have B spec LEDs from hlG in our bedrooms, and then we have our specs in our flower rooms. The middle is granules as well. But that's just before we're about to flip the switch to flower. And then on the far right, that is our dysfunction junction really Purple's out, it's got great bag appeal. So that's why we grew it at the start just a little bit. But we found a couple more genetics that push a little bit more weight and a little bit better bag appeals. So we're gonna bring that one back. We're gonna probably bring it back in a couple years. And it's dry room we dry and trim in the same room. So when we take our plants down, we put them in the plastic bins that you see in the back, we put plastic bags in the bins, then Sam takes all the dry weight. Before we trim, then we have a trim crew that comes in for us. They're up to date on all our SOPs, and we run within the facility so we trained them before entering the facility and I've worked with the gentleman prior so he's great guy. We tumble our smalls just because it's going to get milled up anyways and everything else all the top so we do about two-thirds of the plant is hand trimmed and the bottom third is machine trim because we already know it's going to go and do pre-roll anyway so and then these are bud shots. So on the far left, that is our that's our grant Hummels. The middle is so the middle we ran a strain called tangy breath. Great product like grey called terroir. It was hitting like 2627 High Terps but it was all popcorn, all popcorn buds. So nobody wanted to open a bag. Personally I wouldn't want to open a bag and have a half quarter. That's all tiny nuggets. So we kibosh that one pretty quickly. And the far right is our dysfunction junction. That's it. That's their policy

Vegar Samuelsen  34:09  

Oh, you're on mute.

Rob Perry  34:16  

Sorry about that. That's technical issues. It's since 2020 is going on mute. The No that was a great virtual tour. Thanks. And you know, great for for I know we have some international groups on the line. So it would be a bit of a long drive from South Africa to nap and eat so they managed to get a bit of a virtual shell going through Organa Graham, what year Sorry, there was some background noise there I think or it was someone it might have been a question. Oh is that's that's possible? Yeah, let me anyway, I have one question before we are a couple of questions before we start opening up to the audience. And, you know, we get them, get them in other places as well. But, you know, this is a question for Daniel. You know, there are, you know, you took us through some of your your growing process. I know, they're their growers and aspiring growers on the line is, what would you if you had to pinpoint a couple of steps in the growing process that you thought were kind of the most critical, you know, are a couple of activities that you thought were the most critical towards final product? What would you what would you say they are? And you know, do you have any, any tricks or tips for dealing with it?

Daniel Torres  35:51  

So yeah, definitely learn the genetic that you're growing. First, like First off, it can always get better never think that's the best it can be. Because there's always more genetic expression of the cannabis plant can show. I would say, Yeah, never stop learning critical points within the actual stages. Definitely a lot of critical state steps in flour. So you know, keeping your VPD in check on the vapor pressure deficit, if that gets out of whack, your plants won't drink, stuff like that, as well as dry back. So it's a little easier to run dry back, running irrigation. So there's critical steps. And certain weeks, you want a certain amount of dry back to let the plant fully express itself, of course, or try to get that full expression out. So we try to anywhere from try to keep about 50%. I'll say 50 to 60%. So I don't want to tell the exact number for the first three weeks, and then about 40 to 50 for weeks, four to six. And then we go back to a certain percentage for the last little bit to really dial in and really get that genetic to show itself. But definitely, environments, number one, environment has to be on point, if you want the cannabis plant to grow inside properly. It's not like outside, you know, you're basically replicating the environment. So you have to be on point with that. Very, very cool.

Rob Perry  37:29  

And I know is you mentioned I mean, your family has been at this for a very long time you have some genetics that you've been working with for Shannon did you say it was you know, since like the 70s or something is that

Shannon Torres  37:46  

We actually declared seeds that my father had and gift it to my brother and they've only ever been in a jar. And it says in his handwriting and it says 1960 Wow. So we have a lot of heritage seeds. Yes. But those I think are the ones that we were most interested in. I'm sure Daniel will be you know, hunt with them at some point. We have no idea what they are. It's one of those little mystery bags used to buy at the candy store as a kid 25 cents you don't know what you get. We'll just see. Just for fun. 

Rob Perry  38:25  

Very nice. That was gonna be my question. Daniel was how were they to grow with that? Have you? Have you tried them out yet? Or that?

Daniel Torres  38:32  

I haven't tried anything out yet? No, no, we have to be honest, we haven't bought any seeds in this facility yet. We brought a lot in we brought over 7000 seeds in I think over 200 genetics that we brought in and seed form. And then 37 or 38 and live plant material. So for the first couple of years, we were just trying to stay on top of all those genetics was a pretty big hassle in itself. You know, we were cloning new mothers every four weeks. So there was a lot of like right now I believe we're on Round Eight or nine of some of the genetics that we have. We are looking into other options of you know, biobanking them out of out of this facility so we can get some room in the facility to actually do some fino hunting. There's a couple genetics that we will start to fino hunt right away. Some being some of the genetics my uncle and I have crossed together over the years. We're looking pretty forward to that stuff, but nothing has been popped yet. Unfortunately, it's coming out of the times coming soon.

Rob Perry  39:38  

Nice, nice. Well there. There are a few questions coming. Coming furiously from the audience here. You know if you know I don't want to cut anyone off if they had a couple of things I want to discuss but why don't we Why don't we jump into some of these You know on. So Daniel, since we've been hitting you with a lot of a lot of good questions here, you know, here's one. Do you guys do any Lolli popping big to foliations when flipping to flower from

Daniel Torres  40:14  

The edge? Yeah, so we do. So we clean up the plants, and veg, we do a quick cleanup on the bottom of those about the bottom six inches. And then when we flip to flower, roughly about two weeks in, we clean up the bottoms as well. And then on day 21. That's a standard, I believe everybody does it. So I have no problem saying that day is day 21, we do a heavy defoliate I have a new strip. And then as well as day 42. We do another big heavy strip. And that's pretty much it, we run double trellis, sometimes triple trellis depending on how chunky they're getting. But yeah, we do clean up the plants a lot. That's a big focus of ours as well, we don't pop the plants, we don't pinch them, we do something a little different, we just take when they get to a certain size, we take top two leaves off, depending on how tall they are maybe the top three. And what that does is it forces the nodes underneath to actually stretch up to get pretty much even with the other top nodes and the top of the canopy. So we still have about, you know, 10 to 12 dominant branches off each plant, but we do not ever pinch the plants. Okay, only our mothers, we only pinch, we aggressively taught the mothers because we need high output and run about big mothers per genetic. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Perry  41:51  

That makes sense. No, very cool. Another question here? I don't know. Maybe we can give Daniel a break? I don't know if there's whose best physician answer this one. But is there a plan to do outdoor as well? You know, you're you're correct me if I'm wrong. You're 100% Indoor from from what I've seen at the moment? Yeah. And would you ever consider it that outdoor either in the short, short run? Or the long run? And have you ever had Have you ever done outdoor before?

Daniel Torres  42:26  

I actually started so like the first time I ever did anything was outside. Okay. And that. So to be honest, I I burned them the first six that I was allowed to do because I thought you know more nutrients, the bigger they get. I was total opposite. So I went back a week later, and they were completely cooked. So I learned my lesson very fast about that. But outdoor, there was a we do have space potentially to do it behind the building. But the biggest issue would obviously be smell. We don't want any proximity. Yeah, you know, it's tough to do it on our property. But in the future, you know, if everything goes good, maybe we could consider that. Possibly buying another plot of land. But there's too many variables to be honest outside. And a lot of it, it would go to extract or byproduct of of cannabis, it wouldn't be ingested, like, you know, the vape pens and stuff like that. But there's definitely we're open to options, of course, how we can expand the business. But right now, no. Right now it's trying to expand on to this building. That's probably our biggest priority and getting a processing license. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Perry  43:50  

No, that's, that's fair. Um, I'm just reading through a couple other questions here. There are a couple more from South Africa specifically that we'll get to but here's another one. What do you do with your trim? I guess you do you destroy it. Do you?

Daniel Torres  44:14  

Do we destroy luck? Unfortunately, we don't have any buyers for it. So gets our secure storage isn't that big by any means. So when we get to a certain point, we have to we have to destroy it all unfortunately, yeah. 

Shannon Torres  44:30  

Which is, which is painful because we would really like to find a buyer for our trim because it piled up for a long time and we were desperately trying to find a home for it. Because it's it's valuable. Craft quality trim. So, but it just got to the point where we couldn't keep it any more so

Rob Perry  44:50  

Yeah, no, that's fine. A curiosity went Do you have a preferred distraction method? Do you do incineration or kitty litter? compost and

Daniel Torres  45:01  

Water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Round and throw it in the garbage. Yeah.

Shannon Torres  45:10  

Yeah. Locked secured garbage has to be locked. That's for Health Canada, or?

Rob Perry  45:15  

Yeah, it's it's true. I think the cannabis industry has been good for the kitty litter business.

Vegar Samuelsen 45:26  

And I have a question as well, just to kind of touch on, but you know, your team, you have some some resources devoted to marketing. Right? And that's kind of not we don't always see everyone doing that. And what are the like, advantages you guys have experienced? By doing that? I mean, you know, I looked at your Instagram, and it's like, so lively, and it's fun. Do you know, is it a passion project? Or is it does that bring a lot of good things towards your business as well? Just kind of, you know, is it worth has it been worth doing that? I know, some people just don't really have much of a presence. You know, maybe they're still waiting on a website even. But, you know, I'm surprised sometimes it goes a long time you see companies out there that just kind of have neglected that aspect. It's not everyone's full array.

Shannon Torres  46:13  

Well, we did always want a good marketing platform. So we built our website fairly early. And we're pretty proud of it. Alex, who I believe is on this call. My other daughter, Alexandra, but not on the panel today, runs our marketing program. And it is a passion for her. She enjoys it. She always puts together little videos and bad shots and bounces the ball for brother and sister and they. But I think it is something that you either really enjoy and really want to do. Or you're it's just not your it's not your thing. But she does in fact, enjoy. I think she does a great job. Shout out to Alex. I mean, if

Samantha Torres  46:54  

I could jump in, though, too. Personally speaking, I do come from a sales background. And I do think that it's also I mean, for other people watching, like it is important to show who you are and what makes you stand out and different from other people. And people like to use social media to kind of feel like they have an inside view of who we all are as not just to our cam, but as individuals to and they like to work with people that they know, right? So if you can get yourself out there and show people who you really are and what makes you unique that helps a

Vegar Samuelsen  47:27  

Lot too. You definitely get a sense of the family and that you're enjoying your work and having fun and just Yep, good vibes. 

Samantha Torres  47:36  

Yeah, we say that a lot actually. Good vibes only.

Daniel Torres  47:41  

Yeah. Thoughts with a facility sign? Yeah, whiteboards, everything. Yeah.

Rob Perry  47:49  

That's awesome. Oh, and I guess, you know, related to that. You know, and it's not only cannabis that this occurs, but you're a family business, right? You're you're a family working together every day is which is different from, you know, some other businesses? Yeah, how, what are some of those dynamics that that play into it? You know, is, you know, there's always a lot of history there. And then you know, you can finish work and then you know, you're having Christmas dinner together the next day, you know, you know, what do you thought,

Shannon Torres  48:28  

Okay, well, that's exactly how it unfolds. Generally, we do try and leave work at work. When we do get together as a family. It creeps in and then we have to stop ourselves. No, no, this is family dinner. No, no business talk, no talk and talk. As we say, and honestly, I don't regret doing this at all. There's, there's good days and bad days, like every business sometimes the eye raised, I always like to say that I raised I proudly raised three very strong children. But now working with them every day can sometimes be counterproductive because they but for the most part, honestly. It's been great there. They've been close their entire lives. So and they are still to this day. So work hasn't interfered in that in any way. They still learn to love one another every day.

Shannon Torres  49:24  

No Boundaries. You just gotta work hard to set boundaries.

Rob Perry  49:27  

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's you know, whatever, whatever you guys are doing there. It's it's working out in terms of product and the quality or facility for sure. So maybe the there are a couple more questions and comments, some good news. Someone wants to buy your trim. So we get those details later on. You know, I'll make sure it makes sure we save them and we'll get you guys connected. Thank you. You know, and and they're there. couple a couple other comments from South Africa. You know, some of the one of them, I guess, is one that you touched on earlier. You know, this is someone who's looking for financing. You know, you touched on the issue of financing in the cannabis space, right? Maybe you have any suggestions for people who are looking for financing, you know, in banking support and that sort of thing? Or is it really, you know, you're, you're on your own almost for someone that,

Shannon Torres  50:37  

Um, to be honest with you, it was not easy to find financing, we did manage to secure some financing not a lot, but just enough, and it is out there, it's more of a high-interest loan, as opposed to a, say, a mortgage on an older property. We happen to know a mortgage broker, and he was able to find us a company that would give us a loan. So they are out there. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, I can certainly share any of that any of the contacts that I have, I'm more than willing to share to help out. I know, I feel the pains, the growing pains of this industry. So And strangely enough, there's always people on LinkedIn that are looking for projects to finance in cannabis. So I don't know that if it's as hard as it was, it's getting better. The major banks in Canada won't give you money. That's, that's a no brainer. That's a hard stop. Know, for sure. The smaller ones will. Yeah,

Rob Perry  51:37  

Yeah, for sure. You know, and, and that's been helpful, as is more avenues spoken up with, you know, traditional credit unions and that sort of thing. For I, you know, some of the questions for groups overseas. Just wondering, I can say, to sort of save some time, it's typically it's hard to get international investment. You know, so people are reaching out looking for great Canadian mortgage broker to help out in Europe or South Africa, it'll probably be pretty challenging. Just say, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just saving some efforts there, but and trying to help out someone as it can't even get a credit card for the banks. So it's, which is true. And last question, international partnerships. So is that something that you would ever consider is partnering with a group overseas, maybe sending your genetics there, your finished product, you're you're growing or managerial expertise is?

Shannon Torres  52:47  

Absolutely, we do have international partner for our dried flower, but we're always looking to it's one of the reasons that Daniel and my brother David scoured the industry before we got our license and brought in as many genetics as they could. Because, you know, you only have to one day to declare your genetics when you get your license. So in hopes of sharing those with other LPs, whether they be in Canada overseas is always something that we wanted to do and our expertise, growing, managing software, whatever. I mean, yeah, we know this industry, we know how hard it is. So yeah, we're always here to help in any way that we can.

Rob Perry  53:31  

No, that's, that's fantastic. And, again, being able to, you know, speak to have coming through the whole having come through the whole process to the other side. I think as soon as a couple of your bud shots went up there, I think there were a lot of comments. Oh, can we work together? Yeah, which is, which is a testament to, you know, people people understanding what what what it all takes? You know, so we're down, we're down to the last minute or two, I think we've gotten a lot of questions, there's still a still a few more coming. But, you know, I, you know, we can't run too much over but I'd sort of like to like to thank everyone for coming out everyone for attending. And, you know, Shannon, Daniel, Samantha, any, any last words to the industry, there aspiring groups that are trying to get into it or, you know, just peers of yours that might be watching.

Shannon Torres  54:39  

I would just reiterate that, you know, start getting out there early, start networking, and if you're it's really something that you're passionate about, and you feel that you can bring some good quality to the industry, then go for it. Don't let the naysayers deter you. And, Further to that, I would just like to say Thank you guys for creating this platform and allowing us to share our company and our story to everyone. I'd like to thank everyone that joined. We love to tell our story, and we love to get it all out there.

Rob Perry  55:14  

Oh, that's fantastic. And there were a few members that we're looking to connect with you later on, I'm assuming is that's not a problem, Shannon, and

Shannon Torres  55:25  

It's not a problem. Happy to help you. Fantastic.

Rob Perry  55:29  

And same with us. As always, we're happy to chat, if you'd like to get in touch with anyone from from torque, and well, we're happy to get you connected. And I will hopefully see you next time on the next the next HighIQ webinar.

Rob perry  55:47  

Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Bye now.