Lilu’s Garden, the largest hemp ingredient manufacturer in the Western Hemisphere, announced that its 2019 harvest is on track to yield upwards of 50 million lbs. of hemp or 1 million kilograms of isolated CBD and other non-psychoactive cannabinoids for the wholesale market in 2020 – an unprecedented figure for the industry that remains a highly conservative estimate.
Lilu’s Garden estimates that approximately 20% of its 2019 harvest will be utilized in food and beverage products; 20% will be added to nutraceuticals; 20% will go to pet care; 20% will be consumed by the cannabis and specialty products market; 10% will be added to cosmetics products; and 10% will go to vaporizers and electronic cigarettes.
Lilu’s Garden’s patent pending extraction process has made it possible for the company to process more than 300 thousand lbs. of hemp biomass, which can yield over 20 thousand kilograms of isolated CBD and other minor cannabinoids per day, depending on the potency of the input biomass. These daily production figures would have allowed Lilu’s to process the entirety of the 2018 US harvest alone.
Processing takes place in the company’s 175,000 square-foot plant in Owenton, Kentucky, which can store in a climate-controlled environment millions of lbs. of hemp at any given time with additional offsite storage for millions more. The facility opened in early December 2018.
“Without hemp at scale, there is no conceivable way for CBD products to permeate the U.S. consumer marketplace,” said Tom Guel, co-founder and CEO of Lilu’s Garden. “Knowing this prompted our company to invest heavily in research and development in order to devise a completely new means of hemp processing so we could achieve an industrial scale large enough to supply the market.”
By forgoing ethanol and other solvents in favor of water, Lilu’s Garden’s Aqueous Extraction process eliminates many of the obstacles to scale presented by traditional farming and harvesting methods. Such obstacles include the need for labor-intensive hand harvesting and shucking, and large facilities for drying. Alternatively, Lilu’s Garden machine harvests, bails and direct ships wet hemp right from the field. In addition to reducing labor, time and logistics costs, this breakthrough significantly reduces production costs in the processing facility.
Lilu’s Garden increased its production of hemp for the 2019 harvest by a multiple of 10 to 75,000 acres of hemp – a record quantity achieved by partnering with a multitude of farmers and managing key aspects of the farming including the harvest and logistics.
Lilu’s Garden is the largest hemp ingredient manufacturer in the Western Hemisphere and the only manufacturer processing hemp at scale. With its patent-pending Aqueous Extraction process, it specializes in the production of CBD and other minor non-psychoactive cannabinoid isolates and oils for use in a wide array of market segments including: Nutraceuticals, Food and Beverage, Pet Care, Specialty Products, Cannabis and Cosmetics. With offices in four states, nationwide farming and the largest hemp derivatives production facility in the world, Lilu’s Garden is driving innovation in all facets of the industry, including genetics, nationally scaled agricultural operations, hyper-efficient proprietary aqueous based processing and wholesale B2B distribution.
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Source: Lilu’s Garden