“We started 6 years ago in algae, hydroponic lettuce, hydroponic peppers at University of Guelph. Our journey was never cannabis to begin with. Cannabis showed up all hot and bothered last year. Now it is under some stress because people are realizing growers will ultimately have excess capacity and we are efficiency improvement for them to maintain margins as they shrink…” States Sam Kanes, VP of Business Development and Director at CO2 GRO Inc. (TSXV: GROW), in an interview with InvestorIntel Corp. CEO Tracy Weslosky.

Tracy Weslosky: Let us start by congratulating you. News just out, your Michigan Flower grow trials have just come in. Can you talk to us a little bit about this?

Sam Kanes: Sure. It has been going on for 3 months now. We have had 5 trials do date. All of them show outstanding acceleration of growth and therefore value to future customers of ours. They came in Michigan, the Kalamazoo area. That is the number 3 growing area in the U.S. in terms of greenhouses. A lot of those are flowers. Our first U.S. representative that is with us now full-time as of this week, courtesy of raising some money, is in Kalamazoo. He is going to start there, work his way through Michigan, Ohio and the U.S. Midwest making commercial revenue for us in flowers.

Tracy Weslosky: I will tell you, we love your trading symbol, GROW, G-R-O-W. Can you dumb this down for us a little bit, I had previously understood that say you have 4 crops of cannabis in a greenhouse that you would then have 5 by utilizing the CO2 GRO patented technology. Let us start there. Can you correct me and help our viewers understand GROW better?

Sam Kanes: Cannot correct you because you are accurate. You are also accurate, by the way, the flowers. If you have a 3 month month cycle, we can make that 2 months. You add additional crops in the world of flowers as well as anything else that you want to mature faster than you are otherwise doing. Lettuce we have said now is probably 2 extra crops in California with confidence. They grow 4. We believe we can grow 6 because they are 99% leaves and leaves are what we grow the best and the fastest with our technology. 

Tracy Weslosky: You really had a lot of foresight to get into this particular sector because you can take advantage of the cannabis sector and agribusiness. Is that correct?

Sam Kanes: No. We started 6 years ago in algae, hydroponic lettuce, hydroponic peppers at University of Guelph. Our journey was never cannabis to begin with. Cannabis showed up all hot and bothered last year. Now it is under some stress because people are realizing growers will ultimately have excess capacity and we are efficiency improvement for them to maintain margins as they shrink on a go forward basis down towards other growers of other commodities like flowers and corn and cotton. 

Tracy Weslosky: Sam I understand that CO2 GRO’s most competitive advantage, the key word here is greenhouses. Is that correct?

Sam Kanes: That is not quite correct. Greenhouses come in all shapes and sizes. Some that use CO2 gas will help a little bit in terms of their incremental value. They are averaging about 33% more yield when they add CO2 gas in their greenhouses, but most greenhouses worldwide are porous or in fact open air, like California’s, which we visited a month ago. There you have a million square foot greenhouse, it has not wall. It has not glass. It has no structure.  It is wide open. You cannot use CO2 gas in there…to access the complete interview, click here

Disclaimer: CO2 GRO Inc. is an advertorial member of InvestorIntel Corp.

May 23, 2018 – “The biggest opportunity by far for dissolving any gas into any solution is carbon and carbon for plants and more specifically plant leaves…It is all we do, we help plants grow better. Yes, including buds.” states Sam Kanes, VP of Business Development and Director at CO2 GRO Inc. (TSXV: GROW), in a recent presentation at the 7th Annual InvestorIntel Summit – Buds, Batteries & Blockchain 2018.

Sam Kanes: We IPOed in 2012 and have raised $14 million dollars along the way, most of it in the pursuit of developing, initially the algae market worldwide. It exploded on the scene in 2011 with what you just heard called peak oil. Oil was supposedly on the way to $200 according to CIBC and others. In that market governments got scared, especially American government. They put half a billion dollars into three of their chosen leaders in the world of algae; Solazyme, that IPOed for $1.2 billion. They only had $20 million in revenue when they started. 10 of which was for U.S. military jet fuel from renewable algae. One was called Sapphire. They actually were trialing our equipment at that time and then Algenol in Florida. Two of the three are bankrupt and barely hanging on is Algenol. Solazyme led up to $2 billion dollar value. It sold for $30 million last fall. What we IPOed for was providing them dissolved carbon to accelerate their algae growth more efficiently. We mothballed that in 2014 for a few years. As oil prices did not go to $200. They went to $25. Along the way my partners, John and Aaron, Aaron being up here is going to talk about operations in a minute, they wound up the core of the technology that I actually invested in, in 1999, when Joseph he claimed he is 20-year overnight success. That same year Dow Chemical left Canada and a variety of people and facilities behind and the twice scientist of the year, Craig Glassford, got to keep the technology he was working on. Craig reached out to John Archibald in Singapore and he left a major job out there because he believed in this technology to come back to North America and develop it commercially. He showed up at my door at Scotia Capital where I with five others were convinced after he claimed this technology could accelerate dissolving hydrocarbons in groundwater. Then what I was interested in was called methanol based MTBE. Methanex stock price was falling 90% at that time. I was a Methanex analyst at Scotia Capital. John claimed and showed us that he could accelerate bacteria growth in water by dissolving oxygen instantaneously without bubbles. Boom, I was sold with four others. Here I am 18 years later with John rejoining because the $400,000 he did raise half through me, he got $12 million dollars for that so modest success. 30X over 18 years. The biggest opportunity by far for dissolving any gas into any solution is carbon and carbon for plants and more specifically plant leaves. On that note I will let Aaron get going here in a minute. I just want to go through the market cap and partly why we are here. I got to do this. We are public. TSX Venture, GROW. We are very happy we got that symbol. It is all we do, we help plants grow better. Yes, including buds. Our cap table at the moment is about 40 million shares……to access the complete presentation, click here

Disclaimer: CO2 GRO Inc. is an advertorial member of InvestorIntel Corp.