How much more can I get for refining terpenes vs selling it as HTE?

I found a nice terpene refinement system for 8500 that I would love to convince my company to buy, however I would like to know how much more money we can get for refining terpenes and selling them rather than just selling the HTE. Im plenty stocked up on HTE and I know refined terps sell for more, but I’m not sure if its enough to make buying the system worth it. We’re in the legal California market

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Do you have a short path setup or any other type of vacuum distillation equipment available to you? If you do I would attempt refining terpenes on a basic setup before asking the company to invest 8.5k on equipment, such as; Heat mantle, boiling flask, vacuum adapter, vacuum pump (diaphragm may be best for this purpose), tubing, and a cold trap/cold finger, (those items shouldn’t cost anywhere near 8.5k if you don’t have them already. You’ll also need a separatory funnel to remove the hydrosol that distills along with your terpenes.)

Show the company that you can in fact refine terpenes from your abundance of HTE, and as far as price goes, I’ve seen a vast difference in price depending on the source/brand and whether it’s hemp derived, botanical or purely cannabis derived. To find the price your company should sell at, figure out how much your HTE sells for, calculate extraction efficiency of terpenes from the HTE, add in costs from operator wage and the time it takes to process then adjust price accordingly. (Also account for packaging, especially if you’re wholesaling through carts.)

As an example, let’s say you have 500g of Star Dawg HTE, each gram selling for $10 wholesale, you have a total of $5000 there (based off 1g distillate cart wholesale prices at 15% HTE.) Let’s say after refining you were able to distill 30%, leaving you with 150g of pure Star Dawg terpenes that you can now add to a distillate cart at a rate of 1% - 3%, selling for around the same price, maybe $2 - $5 more per cart. That’s over 3 times less weight you have to use to flavor your cart, but in turn is also 3x less product available for sale. In order to cover costs of operation and loss of material, you might find a 150% - 300% markup on the finished product to be quite viable. So in the end, depending on the quality of your terpenes you could get $15 - $30/ml, putting this 150g batch of Star Dawg terps at $2,250 - $4,500.

Whether or not that’s worth it is up to you and the company, and honestly that hypothetical 30% yield and $30 price point are extremely generous examples, maybe drop it down to a 12% - 15% average from HTE and $15 - $20/ml. The consistency of this process would be highly variable until things could be dialed in, regarding start material and extraction method. In my opinion, I would do this process for HTE that didn’t fly off the shelves and create a new “top-shelf” cartridge product line, if it doesn’t already exist within the brand. I think you would need a lot of strains available to choose from to really make it work though.

Also, don’t discard the leftover crude oil, that can be added to an existing batch of crude meant for distillate production. Doesn’t hurt to cover any losses with a little extra distillate.

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@terplord420 made some great points. I’d assume you’re just further separating it from the oil/terp solution.

My honest intuition is you won’t see much gain from doing this. HTE is great to flavor with. Having cannabinoids, I don’t think negates value. It’s just calculated into formulation.

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Refining terps from HTE is destroying a full flavor panel to a terpene flavor panel
Since your in a legal state I would leav it as is
If I where you I would invest in a 280 dalton membrane and get the noids out if you wish to have something special

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Is this a thing now?
HTE from fresh frozen cannabis with compliant THC??? I am looking for this for years now!

Or are the current available refined CDT’s already comparable to HTE, if they are CO2 or hydrocarbon extracted?

I don’t know much about the terpene process, but it always seems to me that cdt’s are missing something in terms of flavor, compared to HTE.