"Revolutionizing the Cannabis Industry with Cannabis Robots" Sorting Robotics is an industrial automation company in the cannabis industry. CEO amd Co-Founder, Nohtal Partansky joins Dan Humiston to talk cannabis robots. He explains how their flagship product the JICO Robot, injects cannabis concentrate into joints to produce a consistently infused pre-roll product. He shares his company's vision, to improve the quality of products in the cannabis industry by applying a sophisticated approach, which helps operators and customers produce better products. Produced by PodConx MJBulls - https://podconx.com/podcasts/raising-cannabis-capital Dan Humiston - https://podconx.com/guests/dan-humiston Sorting Robotics - https://www.sortingrobotics.com/ Nohtal Partansky - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nohtal/ Recorded on Squadcast - https://squadcast.fm/
"Revolutionizing the Cannabis Industry with Cannabis Robots"
Sorting Robotics is an industrial automation company in the cannabis industry. CEO amd Co-Founder, Nohtal Partansky joins Dan Humiston to talk cannabis robots. He explains how their flagship product the JICO Robot, injects cannabis concentrate into joints to produce a consistently infused pre-roll product. He shares his company's vision, to improve the quality of products in the cannabis industry by applying a sophisticated approach, which helps operators and customers produce better products.
MJBulls - https://podconx.com/podcasts/raising-cannabis-capital
Dan Humiston - https://podconx.com/guests/dan-humiston
Sorting Robotics - https://www.sortingrobotics.com/
Nohtal Partansky - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nohtal/
Recorded on Squadcast - https://squadcast.fm/
[00:00:00] Today at MJ Bulls raising Cannabis Capital, we are joined by Notans, the c e O of Sorting Robotics.
Notal, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Dan.
Well, I appreciate you being here, sorting robotics. This is a really, gonna be an interesting interview. Well I think it's probably my first interview with a robot company. You're the premier industrial automation company in the cannabis industry, which is, it says a lot. I mean, this is a pretty interesting, and I guess maybe just the first thing that that comes to mind, looking at your background is, What need did you see in cannabis that compelled you to quit your job as a rocket scientist to launch sorting robotics?
So there's a few steps between working at NASA and then getting to sorting robotics in cannabis. We initially started in a different industry doing e-commerce inventory and management. And that's what I was doing when I was working on the [00:01:00] Mars rover, like kind of moonlighting with the startup and then, and then eventually going full-time and then eventually trying to find a much bigger market or.
Where we could apply our robotic skills. And and kind of the market back in 2019 when we moved into cannabis was very, like, that was, right after legalization in California and there really wasn't a lot of automation and the ones that were there just. We're not well done. Like it didn't feel very thoughtful.
It seemed like a lot of people were taking products from other industries and trying to hack them together to work in cannabis. And automation never really does well when you do something like that. And so that's where we saw the deep need. And then we noticed that these huge companies like the Siemens, the Honeywells of the world weren't servicing.
And any of the cannabis providers the same way they service, the the Tyson Foods or the other c p g companies of the world. And, and that [00:02:00] just, kind of rang true. , me and my other co-founder were into cannabis and And we had the, like, pretty positive disposition and we saw that there was a pretty deep need for a sophisticated solution.
And that's what we decided to do. We decided to walk into the cannabis space use that as our beachhead niche for building out fully automated process technology stacks. And that's where we are.
That's a really great story, and you mentioned C P G. And how that, that's it's been automated for decades it's normal there, but it's not normal in our industry. And I think first thing people think about is this, robots are gonna steal my job. But the reality is a lot of the work that the robots are doing are. Are jobs that people don't really wanna do or either are maybe not capable of doing, or just like flat out backbreaking jobs that, like you said, nobody wants to do. I saw on your website though, , the machine that you have for inserting rosin
[00:03:00] Mm-hmm.
into blunts. Maybe you can explain to everybody exactly how that works.
Yeah. So that's our flagship product. It's called the GCO Robot, J I K O. And it's effectively a very, very fancy Injection mechanism. So, we, we participated in helping build a plant touching entity back in 2020. And it kind of was like the manager of this co-packing facility. And so we learned a lot of problems that the industry has in California specifically, which is a nice representation of the rest of the market.
And one of those was. Infusing joints or infusing pre-rolls in some way. And And it was just like a mess back then. Like people didn't really know how to do it, and it was this like new skew that people didn't, they really quite didn't understand. And there's this huge barrier to entry because it was kind of messy to do and very inconsistent.
And so we decided to take that information that we learned on the plant touching operational side. [00:04:00] And pull it into the robotics side and build a device that can consistently and efficiently inject cannabis concentrate into joints to not only, cheaply do this infused joint skew, which is the fastest growing market segment in the whole cannabis industry.
But actually just make a better product. And that's something that I think you have to look at the industry from a more calculated perspective in terms of how well you build things instead of a volume perspective. And I think in the beginning it every industry is like, we need to make money to survive.
And then there are sophisticated operators that come in and spread that sophistication throughout to the industry. And I think we're one of those where we, we take a pretty deep pride in like helping our operators and our customers just make better products by applying like a very [00:05:00] sophisticated approach.
Well, in this case, it's not just quality. , the beauty of what this robot is able to do, is it a, it's able to produce quantity as well at super high quality. So , your quality is better than somebody that's doing it by hand and it's. More efficient can, can produce more than people that can do by hand, , that's the part that I think PE companies need to appreciate.
I, I think there's a real opportunity to increase your ROI , with this robot.
Oh yeah. We've seen that a ton of times. Like we've we've converted some customers to having their manually handin infused pre-rolls to using our machine, and they went from doing. A thousand a day to doing 4,000 or 5,000 a day. And so, like we have several customers all over the country and North America and in Canada, one customer who we helped out was a big co-packer and.
They weren't doing infused at all because they were [00:06:00] just like, the labor is so much the square footage requirement, which is something that people don't think about. Like when you're in a licensed cannabis company, square footage is extremely expensive. And so it's something that you have to think about.
And they're like, yeah, we can't do it cause we don't have the space, we don't have the people. It's just like not a feasible thing. But then they. Acquired our system and now they have three of them and they're one of the biggest co-packers in Canada. So
That's, that's, that's a great story. , and those three machines are probably taking up less space than what the, their old team was taking up.
They need like 40 people to make the equivalent throughput.
Oh my gosh. , you mentioned the labor and I think , a lot of cannabis companies right now are struggling to find labor, so this is another thing is , that's not an issue anymore because you don't need that volume of staff in order to do it. I think that's probably another important piece that sometimes people overlook.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, just, yeah. That's actually something I dealt with [00:07:00] personally when we were running the co-packing company in Oakland. It was very difficult to find people to do the job, what we were asking them to do. I mean, maybe you'll find manufacturing companies in China or India, there's a plethora of people, but we're in a very different country with very different culture and very different standards of living.
And yeah, people don't. Want to pick up jars and put them into boxes and do that eight hours a day, or they don't want to inject pre-rolls by hand and do that eight hours a day. It's like a mind numbing task that you have to do it very consistently and getting someone to focus on doing that consistently eight hours a day, five days a week, is near impossible.
Honestly, like, like,
Yeah, and then, and then it leads to turnover. It adds extra costs and then there's all the payroll costs associated with it. It's a nightmare. I know you have a few other products and I, and I, and I'm gonna have all the links on our [00:08:00] website for people to, check out your other products and talk to you.
But, but before I let you go, , this to me just seems like an investor's dream because you're creating a product that is. I, I, I just think it's gonna, the opportunity to expand this company is just gonna be enormous. And we're just talking about one application in a supply chain that has hundreds and maybe thousands of different applications that you guys could fill.
Is there gonna be an opportunity for investors to participate in your growth?
Yeah, definitely. We're actually gearing up for our fundraise in May. We'll be doing yeah, kind of a nice, a nice follow on fundraise to really set up this year for a very explosive growth next year. And it's a good timing for us too. Last year we almost tripled our revenue from 2021 into 2022, and this year it seems like we're on track to double, at least.
So. Things are definitely moving [00:09:00] in the right direction after a few years of grinding.
Well, this isn't a concept anymore. This is actually an up and running product. , you can touch it, you can feel it, you can smell it. It's there. And that's why I think that, your timing on this one is gonna be great. And I, and I suspect that a lot of people are listening right now, will want see more information and to, to do that, I'll have it all in the sh in the show notes.
I'll have links to Sorting Robotics and. Whether you're looking to , help. Make your facility more efficient, or if you maybe wanna talk about possibly partnering up or investing, I'm sure somebody from the team would be happy to, to speak with you.
And man, I'm really appreciate you being on the show today. And this is a great thing. It's feels long overdue, but I'm glad somebody actually has stepped up and, and taken a chance on this industry with your technology and your expertise. So thanks for doing this.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, people out there need some help and they need someone who's not gonna screw [00:10:00] them over, so that's like, that's where we're here.
Well, I'm glad you're here. Thanks again for being on the show. .
Cool. Thanks then.