KIND: Congratulations. I know you folks don’t step into anything lightly and I’m sure your new live rosin product is something PAX fans will be eager to consume.
Tim Pellerin: It’s cool, disruptive innovation and the product is super interesting—live rosin with natural terps and THC, and we’ve been trying for a long time to make this. As you know, live rosin is the purest form of cannabis. Solventless hash oil, essentially.
KIND: In terms of quality shoppers, I know you're making cannabis connoisseurs' holidays very sweet.
TP: The job was essentially to take the highest grade cannabis flower, freeze it at peak harvest, without chemicals, just ice and water to get the trichomes off the plant, and create the ultimate cannabinoid and terpene profile for the output. It’s like what would be the dream flower for our machines?
KIND: Based on the history of your company—all those years of innovation—I’m excited to try your take on flower.
TP: We did a tremendous amount of research with production and found the opportune partners to source out and manufacture locally-sourced cannabis. Our flower has to meet qualitative and analytical standards for us to do anything. You don’t make great wine without great grapes and we had to make sure the live rosin, of course, met the high expectation of our award-winning vaporizer hardware.
KIND: Obviously putting on a new hat isn’t something you’d take lightly. How long has the live rosin been in the works?
TP: At least eighteen months. We first launched in California as a test market in our backyard, sourcing production and processing with our partners to make sure we can hit a disruptive value for the consumers offering incredible full flower cannabis experiences.
KIND: It’s kind you’re dropping this while the kids are out of school, again in Ontario, and stress levels of adult consumers are at a COVID high. What made you decide to even get into flower?
TP: Just giving the consumer a more direct line to PAX innovation and availability. I think a hallmark of PAX has always been listening to consumers and they say purity and potency are the most important factors in selecting a flower, and we want to make sure consumers have that, with every PAX hit. In essence, we brought all the benefits of rosin with adding THC to the product in precise ratios to make something disruptive to the sector—a whole flower experience from PAX for PAX, with the potential in our rosin, as well, for the entourage effect.
KIND: We’ve both been at this for a long while. What do you like about your job?
TP: Trying to bring exceptional cannabis experiences to life through innovation and elevate those experiences. I love that I’m at a 10-year-old company with a start-up mentality. We change when the consumer tells us to and I love being able to go where the pucks are going, not where it is today.
KIND: So that meant creating your first live rosin product.
TP: We’re not stuck in traditional paradigms. We evolve. And by the way, that mirrors the consumer. We’re teaching people, and people are teaching us, to differentiate resin and rosin and all this just enhances the cannabis experience for not only today’s consumer, but also tomorrow’s.
KIND: It’s really cool, dude. You add a lot to the industry.
TP: We also learn from the industry. Do you sense a theme? It’s listening. We listen to retailers and wholesalers and I think we have the best products on the market—bar none—and this new launch just prepares us for where we might go next.
KIND: Where is that?
TP: Test everything and make sure we have this right and then continue to lead the industry in terms of performance. It’s fun to see the heart and soul of our company on shelves as this fantastic, disruptive, innovative new product that consumers are going to love and, I hope, stick with as part of their cannabis experience.
The PAX Live Rosin with Natural Terpenes and THC recently launched in Ontario and is available at OCS.ca. It will be available across Canada in early 2023. Stay tuned to Kindmagazine.ca, for regular PAX updates.
BK: It’s a little bit dated.
CH: The oldest person in the world is 119-years-old. She was born in 1903, the same year the Wright brothers first flew. In one life, we went from the Wright brothers to where we are now. The Industrial Revolution worked great, but it’s unsustainable. I want to feed people in a sustainable way and that’s BioHarvest. How can technology improve the quality of life of ten billion people in an efficient way?
BK: You’re isolating the bits of the plants that are most beneficial and then growing them at scale?
CH: It’s biotechnology extraction, and it uses less power, less land, and less water than traditional farming, which of course I respect and certainly understand since I grew up on a farm.
BK: At KIND, of course, we got excited when we heard you talking about weed.
CH: All the potheads got excited, and it’s cool, it’s not illegal. I’m interested in the medicinal health application for the active ingredients in cannabis for things like pain reduction, anxiety reduction and PTSD treatments. I don’t know if you’ve ever grown pot, but it’s hard.
BK: Why, have you grown pot?
CH: No, I’ve never grown pot, but I grew up on a farm and grew lots of things. Pot is just one more plant.
BK: Have you tried it?
CH: I served in the military for 25 years and was an astronaut for 21 years and things that decrease your ability to function in highly technological environments? Not a good idea.
BK: So, no rolling blunts?
CH: It’s never been part of my life, but my kids obviously … and lots of people around us. I think it’s fine, it’s legal, it’s just part of society. It’s like coming out of prohibition, like people thought alcohol is all bad—even though lots of people were drinking alcohol. Friends of mine have a cottage and there was a prohibition judge from Detroit who spent most of the year punishing people for having alcohol and then he’d go up to his cottage in the Muskokas so he could have alcohol all summer.
BK: Hypocrite.
CH: People are just like that.
BK: What do you think, in your lifetime, is the holy grail for our next frontier in space?
CH: The big question is: are we alone?
BK: Aliens.
CH: Think about the sheer overwhelming number of planets and the enormity of time. It would seem to indicate a high probability that there’s life somewhere else.
BK: There has to be.
CH: But the reality is we’ve found zero evidence.
BK: But do you think there is?
CH: It’s a big existential question. Discovering a new life form could add to our understanding of life itself, and think of it the other way. If we can’t find life anywhere else, that should redouble our efforts to support this rarity—this incredible improbability of events that happened. If we’re the only evidence of life, let alone intelligent life, that we can detect anywhere, then we have a huge responsibility not to squander it and not argue about the stupid things we tend to argue about.
BK: Be kind to each other, exactly.
CH: The other thing I’m interested in is how, when I was born, it was impossible to fly into space, but now we’ve successfully had people living on a space station since 2000. Having human life living in places other than Earth is the next logical step and the moon is obviously the next stepping stone.
BK: Human beings colonizing the moon.
CH: We left Africa maybe 80,000 years ago. We got to the Americas maybe 18,000 years ago, New Zealand 1,000 years ago and got to space 60 years ago. People don’t equate that to the future, but we’re on the cusp of being able to live on a planet besides Earth—and the moon is only three days away.
BK: Something to dream about.
CH: It’s what I dreamed about. We’re on the cusp of doing stuff we’ve been imaging before history was even written, right now. This summer, look up at the sky and focus on how lucky we are to live where we live.
