Hello, and thank you for joining us. I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community at BevNET Inosh, and I'm pleased to welcome you to the Nombase Podcast. Don't forget to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community.
It's where you can find episodes of this podcast, and so much more. Cannabis food and beverage is one of the most complex corners of the industry. Turning oil-based cannabinoids into consistent, great tasting products isn't easy.
Today, we are joined by Michael Flemmens, Executive Vice President of Research and Technical Business Development at SoRSE Technology.
With more than 25 years in regulated industries, Michael has helped guide the research behind emulsions, stability testing, and formulation practices that make cannabis products possible at scale.
In this conversation, we will dig into what stability really means, how dosing accuracy is achieved, why bioavailability matters, and the trends shaping the future of cannabis, food, and beverage.
Michael, it's so great to be chatting with you on The Nombase Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.
Great to be here.
Well, I really am truly so happy to have you here. You've had a really amazing and extensive career path before you were working in cannabis.
You were involved in everything from patented cancer treatments and biomaterials to FDA drug filings and security technologies, approvals for food ingredients. What led you from there into cannabis food and beverage?
I think I've looked at my career as trying to work in industries where you can make a difference or in some way, shape, or form. Help people at large.
So, whether that's from a medical perspective or even in the food space, better tasting foods, slightly more affordable for the mainstream consumers. But basically everything has been about improving the quality of life of people.
Well, we're certainly going to get into the problem states in cannabis food and beverage in a little bit. But before that, I would love for us to be able to orient ourselves to SoRSE Technologies.
2:25
Take us behind the scenes and help us understand what do you all do? What does the team look like? And how do your specialists bring a cannabis food or beverage to life?
SoRSE in its infancy started in the recreational market in Washington state.
There are people that can benefit from a enjoyment perspective as well as a health and wellness perspective. From the different cannabinoids, but not everyone wants to smoke.
And so there obviously is that path where you're looking to provide a non-smoking alternative for people to be able to get these cannabinoids.
And that was the interesting approach for me, breaking away from the smoking aspect, because these compounds do provide, whether it's just relaxation or sleep, but there are some people that do derive some very generous medical benefits from the
cannabinoids. And so it was like, how can I help these folks get these molecules that they either need or want or desire in a format for which they need want or desire?
Yeah, I mean, it's been revolutionary, especially for folks who are in various states of pain. But to your point, smoking is often antithetical to health.
Certainly being able to access these compounds without having smoke them is hugely helpful for the folks that need them. So when do brands come to you and come to the SoRSE team in their ideation process of building a cannabis food or beverage?
Do they already have the formulation? Are they working on the formulation? How far are they in the process?
And then what do you do when they come to you?
It's sort of a mixed bag. You're going to have some companies that approach us that are already fairly well adapt at producing food or beverage products. And they need really minimal assistance.
They're looking for a high quality input material for their cannabis beverage or other applications. In some cases, we have some nascent people that are just getting into the space. You know, I really want to gravitating the space.
I want to make these kind of products. I've never built a food product before. I don't know anything about regulations.
I don't have any manufacturing.
So, it can be as simple as a transactional exercise where we're simply a supplier of input materials to the whole soup and works where we help brands with formulation development recipes, you know, finding the most appropriate packaging materials,
marketing, find them a manufacturing site, in some cases even help with distribution. So, I say it's a bit of a mixed bag, but we will, SoRSE sort of exists to provide the resources and expertise for people as much as they need or as little as they
need. need.
5:41
I touched on a little bit in the introduction, one of the most difficult challenges of working in the cannabis industry and putting together a cannabis food or beverage, and that's turning an oil-based cannabinoid into a great tasting, consistent,
safe product. What piece of the puzzle does SoRSE do in that challenge?
So the cannabinoids as a species of molecule sort of exist as they're not, I necessarily wouldn't translate them as specifically oil, as most consumers think of oil, that most people think olive oil and canola and that stuff.
But they have a very similar chemistry, so they do behave as oils. They tend to be a little bit, well, traditionally they're quite thick and resinous in nature.
What SoRSE does is take these cannabinoids, and for lack of better terms, the magic of chemistry and process is we're able to sort of convert these oil-based materials into a format that plays well with water-based systems.
Most of the things that you would gravitate to or buy and consume in the grocery store, most of them have some constituent component of water.
So we're talking about pretty much everything in the grocery store minus a few things is going to be water-based. So how do we drag these oils into a food and beverage product?
And the easiest analogy I always say is that if you look at salad dressings, there's a component of salad dressing that's an oil, right? So some are very stable and you want them to be stable all the time. Some you need to mix and shake before use.
But essentially, all of these types of products are figuring out how to drag an oil into a water-based system.
You also talked a little bit about the thing that drew you to this part of the cannabis industry and the thing that's sort of been like a guiding interest throughout your career has been figuring out how to problem solve and offer better solutions.
Why is it so hard?
The cannabis specifically, like if you think about traditional sodas, a lot of the flavoring systems in a traditional soda are an oil-based system. So many of them use an emulsified system to help create the finished product and provide stability.
We add another layer on top of that when we start to talk about cannabinoids, because instead of thinking about things that simply it's there or it's not, these molecules have a half-life.
Much like you wouldn't want to drink a soda that's 10 years old, you may not want to consume a cannabis beverage that's 10 years old. And it's not from a taste perspective necessarily.
It has to do with the efficacy of the molecules that you put in there. So, the cannabinoids do change over time, they degrade. So, where we try and instill the thought process is, you're not creating a soda, you're creating a functional beverage.
Analogous to an energy beverage or a protein beverage, where these things change, their active molecules were consuming them for a very specific reason beyond just the taste.
We need to ensure that when a customer goes to the store and pulls the product off the shelf, and it may be seven, eight months in age, that the molecules, the efficacy is still the same as it was in day one.
So, for most of the food and beverage space, this shift into almost a supplement area is a bit of an unknown for them. And so, our task was, how can we create a product that most food and beverage companies are familiar with?
So, ease of incorporation and similarities to constituent components they're already using, but now add on this extra layer of preserving the efficacy of the molecules that we're intending to deliver.
And so, that's a rather unique challenge that exists in some cases, in the pharmaceutical or medical space, but not traditionally as pointed inside of a food and beverage product.
And I would also think it's a unique challenge to need to comply with all of the food safety standards that you would have for a food or a beverage, but also maintain the efficacy of a functional ingredient like cannabis, which is even, I mean, so
many levels above trying to work with something like, I don't know, caffeine or alfianine or like other functional ingredients because of the nature of that ingredient. How do you maintain those food safety standards when you're working with a food
Again, in the gray world, we'll call it of cannabis food and beverage right now, it's a really interesting challenge.
There is no set guidance or regulations for the cannabis as an industry, like it is not officially regulated currently by the FDA.
It's not officially regulated by pretty much any of the governing bodies, but our hope and thought process is the fact that these things will eventually become part of the unregulated space.
If we had to imagine if we were trying to sell this type of product to an established food and beverage company, and just to throw out names like Nestle or Coke or Nabisco or those kind of companies, they're already used to having checks and
balances. There's all this regulatory stuff that they're already currently doing to manufacture their existing products. So we decided to develop similar analogous standards when we produce. So are we producing in a CGMP environment?
Is the facility registered under NSF or any of the other governing bodies?
So we're going to build the product with all of the bells and whistles that would be necessary in a regulated market, even though the current market doesn't necessarily call for it.
And to that end, when we originally founded the company and staffed up, it was a very clear directive that we were going to pull as many resources and folks out of existing regulatory spaces now, because they already have that understanding.
I think there's a collection, we're probably over at least 200 years of experience inside regulated food and beverage space at SoRSE.
So that was our approach, is staff it, build it like a food and beverage company, even though it is currently not required.
So you're building cannabis, food and beverages as if, who knows, maybe one day, you know, Nestle or Mondelez might buy them.
And I would think that, you know, not only does that probably help the brands that you work with maybe prepare someday, depending on how the industry goes for acquisition or, you know, being able to scale, you know, at great lengths, but also for
consumer safety. I mean, we talked about the fact that so many consumers are using cannabis for issues other than recreational ones and maybe a little bit hesitant in general.
So knowing that what they're consuming is food safe is probably a big deal, right?
One of the impactful things that sometimes people forget is that like, if you're new to the space and you're building a brand, it may not be required right now, but you're building this brand, I would assume, either because you want to run this
company for the foreseeable future or you're looking for acquisition. And it's important to know that when you start this journey and this adventure, that you want to use the highest quality, safest ingredients you can, because you don't want to
build your brand. And then someone approaches you for a potential acquisition and you look at them and they go, well, my ingredients aren't up to snuff, right?
I've now got to go redevelop my entire brand, my formulas, my recipes, to make them compliant with the current expectations where that wasn't met before.
And so, you can see some brands sort of unwind themselves in the fact that they didn't pay attention to the fact that this could be regulated or couldn't pay attention to efficacy. It's beyond the importance of measuring potency at time zero.
Now we've got a product on the shelf that's seven, eight months old, like, how's my potency looking now, you know, kind of thing. So, it's a double edged sword.
It's like building the best brand you can, but also having a look down the road into the future and what's going to potentially be required of me and can I tick those boxes?
So, you mentioned using the highest quality ingredients and we're talking about safety.
15:24
In the food and beverage world, I feel like that's often synonymous with clean label. And in food and beverage, that can mean things like avoiding partially hydrogenated oils.
For some folks, they bring it down to natural flavors and gums depending on how strict you are. Is there such a thing as clean label for cannabis in food and beverage? And what does it look like?
Clean label is sort of a catchall.
The clean label just means, what does it mean? Does it mean everything needs to be 100 percent clean? Well, some brands think if I can make it as clean as possible, that's clean label, and that's perfectly acceptable.
So our approach has always been, we prefer to look for things that we already know have predicate use in the space, that already have existing regulation around them. We know what the usage levels are of these materials.
And then we have tried as a matter of course, is to avoid anything that we already know, either from a regulation's perspective, but also for brands, I think even more importantly, from a consumer perspective.
Like to not include things that consumers are now paying attention to, like looking to avoid these heavy synthetics, looking to avoid certain chemistries or certain type of products. And the food space has always changed.
So we're now living through the natural dye colors, right? So and we're replacing these synthetic dyes with natural colorants. And so our approach is like, we'd rather not switch.
We'd rather stay with something we know is not going to be objectionable, either from a regulation or from a consumer standpoint. And doesn't mean you can always avoid, you know, have a perfect escapement from things.
No, but it means you just do your best. Because the other thing you want to take into account is that when you're looking at additives, clean label of additives, it may have something in there that you don't like.
But if your additive usage level is, you know, a part per million, it's really not something that everyone really needs to be concerned with and regulators will usually agree with that. So it's just about choosing the best course of action you can.
When I think of some problematic additives or maybe processing methods, the first one that comes to mind is, I think it's hemp D8, which I've heard uses solvents to extract. Is that, what do you know about that?
I feel like I've heard about it a number of times, but I don't completely understand why, you know, hemp D8 is different than D9 and why a solvent that seems to be problematic is used to extract that.
Some of the cannabinoids do get a bad rap. D8 and D10 happened to be two of the biggest ones that get the bad rap. They are naturally occurring compounds inside the hemp plant.
The challenge with industry is that those molecules don't exist in a high enough concentration to make it commercially viable. So you may need to extract, for sake of a hundred tons of hemp, and which D8 represents only a fraction of that.
And it's still like you'd have to extract partition off the D8. So what some people have figured out is that you can convert CBD to these D8 and D10 molecules.
It's sometimes though, for lack sometimes of that regulatory background, you don't understand that some of the processes by which you convert the CBD to D8 and D10, the regulators aren't going to find favorable.
They may have some inherent challenges with the chemistry or the process or the ingredients that go into those materials. And then classically, when you look at D8 and D10, there's simply not enough material in the United States.
So to have the volume of material they need, now it becomes a synthetic, because it was converted. And was it converted from a natural material? Sure, it was.
But the process by which and the fact that you're actually changing the molecule, now you've entered into synthetic chemistry realm.
And from an FDA perspective and not speaking for them, but just based on experience, they don't like that out of the gate without a whole bunch of extra safety data testing and number of all these clinical trials that you're going to have to go on to
show that the synthetic process by which you're creating this molecule doesn't introduce unintended harm. It's in some instances, given the cannabis industry as a whole bit of a black eye, because we're focused on the Delta 9 molecule.
There are some people that have sensitivities to D8 and D10. And so it's sort of in the gray market. Our focus as a company has been predominantly focused on D9.
We've played around with D8 and D10 if a customer has asked us, but it's not a core offering from our company.
You know, I certainly think you have to be a little bit of a cowboy to be involved in the cannabis space because, I mean, so many factors, the legality, the sort of unchartered territory.
So certainly it's an exciting space and it seems like things change all the time.
21:19
You were talking about stability a little bit earlier, and I want to move back to that because it's such a huge piece of what brands need to nail down.
Again, in this space where it is sort of like the wild west, that's one of the most important factors to get right. But when we say stability, what are we even talking about? Is it like the amount of THC is the same or D9?
Or is it that the D9 is as potent? What are we talking about when we talk about stability?
There's really two big buckets that when we talk about stability. The first one, which is incredibly important, is the stability of the cannabinoids themselves.
Like preserving the potency that you intended to deliver into the product, which is then intended to deliver to the consumer. So how protecting the cannabinoids they are, unfortunately, they are a natural product. They are prone to degradation.
Much like no one has been able to have refrigerated milk that lasts for four months. But you can do things to tetra-pack milk. But so stability of the cannabinoids itself is of primary concern.
But then when you're presenting a food and beverage product to a consumer, you never know, are they going to consume the whole thing? Is it all in one shot? Is this a multiple dose product?
Am I sharing it with friends? Those kind of things. So the second bucket really is about preserving stability of the cannabinoids.
When we talk about homogeneity of the cannabinoids present in, when we talk about beverage, you want that fluid volume to have a very consistent amount of cannabinoids from the first sip to the last. And those two present inherent challenges.
And so I've seen products where it appears that the potency was preserved, but unfortunately, their emulsion had broken and was all now at the top of the beverage.
So when you consumed the first sip, you were getting all of it, even if you hadn't intended to.
And in other cases, we see, sometimes you can look if someone makes a beverage that has 10 milligram label claim, and in two months, now you're finding seven milligrams in the can.
So they haven't, but it may be homogenous, but they haven't preserved the potency.
So you really have to wear, you have to think about both things when you're building, and it's the stability of the potency, stability of the uniformity in the product that you're delivering to the consumer.
I mean, I can certainly see how, from a consumer perspective, if I take a couple sips and I get all of the milligrams of D9 and those first two sips, that's a huge problem and I wouldn't touch it again.
Or if I get nothing, I can certainly see how that's an issue. What about from an investor perspective? What are investors looking for when we're talking about uniformity and stability?
The investment approach is more about a risk tolerance or than it is to the money that flows into the cannabis industry.
They obviously want the brands that they invest in to do well and that the brand's doing well is repeatable consumer experience and repeat sales.
So the stability and homogeneity does tie in, but it's a few layers beyond what their traditional thought process is that they're usually accounting exercises at first and then everything else comes later.
For brands sometimes, we need to focus on the things that come later first and worry about the money second.
Right, absolutely.
25:15
So one of the reasons, as far as I understand, that folks are interested in cannabis beverages, you get the effect a little bit faster.
So there are so many folks who have given up alcohol and you're at a social gathering, you're at a party or something and you want to have something.
And it really is more of an experience for an experience kind of thing if you're with people who are drinking alcohol. Why is that? Why do cannabis beverages hit faster than edibles?
Yeah, I mean, we all know that was the escapement from smoking 20, 30 plus years ago.
It was always like, I'm going to make can of butter and I'll make brownies or cookies. Or then the proliferation of gummies took hold. And they're still very viable products for people.
But the challenge with delivering that dosage through those type of products is your body first needs to break down the delivery system itself.
So when you consume a gummy, the only way you can get at an infused cannabinoid inside the gummy is your body needs to first break down the matrix or the gelling matrix that was formed to create the gummy.
So whether it's pectin or agar-agar or carrageen, whatever the gelling nature is, that takes some period of time for your body to digest to release the full load of cannabinoids before you can get uptake into the bloodstream.
With beverage, that issue doesn't present itself, right? It's just water. So the body doesn't need to break down the water.
All they need to do is to work on the cannabinoids. So, you know, still fastest route of getting it into your bloodstream is smoking. Unequivocally, that's the fastest route.
Beverages are a close second. It's not a big lag between smoking and beverages for a lot of people.
But then there's sort of a quantum shift where you can go from fairly instantaneous in smoking to perhaps a 10 minute onset time in beverage to maybe now we're talking 45 minutes to an hour for an edible product.
So it's the fastest working form of cannabinoids if you choose not to smoke. And that is the appeal for a lot of people.
The other advantage is that beverages many times have a very predictable offset because we're not breaking them down and we're not getting this slow feed into the body.
It may be 10 minutes on and all of a sudden an hour and 45 minutes later, you can feel it coming off.
So being able to know that like, hey, I went to a party and I was being social and I had something, you know, you don't want to get in the car and drive. So you'll be able to know when you've come off, much like, you know, but that problem can exist.
If you eat a couple of gummies, you're never sure when they're going to stop working. So maybe you just spend the night at your friend's house kind of thing.
28:29
You know, one thing I can think of that is less of an issue with edibles than it is with beverages is the flavor with an edible.
You know, it's one thing that you eat and then you're kind of done. If it tastes a little bitter or grassy, you know, it's over in 15 seconds or whatever. But with a beverage, you know, you might be sipping that for an hour.
Again, if you're at a social gathering, what are some of the ways that you help brands eliminate some of the issues that come with working with cannabis and their formulations so that they have a delicious product?
Again, it's a really interesting sort of bifurcation of the market. There are brands and consumers that look for a little bit of the cannabis flavor noise.
So they want a background note of, oh, I know this is a cannabis product because I taste the cannabis. I haven't met too many people in my life that relish the thought of consuming 16 ounces of bong water.
So we try not to make it super, super strong. But there are people that gravitate toward that taste. So there are products that go for that taste.
For many folks, they don't want the taste. They want a cleaner, gentler, kindler approach. They want the flavor of the beverage to shine through, not the flavor of the cannabis.
And it's sort of about strategies and process where you can sort of mitigate or preclude those off-notes from sort of evolving in the beverage.
You know, you can overcome some weedy notes if you go heavy on rosemary, put a bunch of sugar in, or other strategies. But a lot of people don't want the sugar, and they don't want these really strong. They want to drink cucumber water, you know.
So in that case, you want a very delicate system that doesn't have the cannabis notes, so it lets the cucumber shine, but still works. And so that's sort of the game.
One of the first questions is, when you're developing this beverage, what kind of flavoring systems, you know, what sort of your brand going to be? Is it delicate, gentle, light flavors, sort of like seltzer waters, like minimally flavored?
Are you going for full sugar sodas? Are you going for cocktail mixers? So that helps the supplier then identify which product is probably best for them.
So it's as much of a market pull as it is anything else as to what you do for the flavor.
I guess I would say I'm not interested in drinking 16 ounces of fang water, but also though, I feel like if I'm passing up the alcohol, I also don't want to drink 200 calories worth of sugar.
So I can see how creating a formulation that tastes good and kind of has that middle ground of tasting maybe a little bit like cannabis, but doesn't have a lot of sugar is really important.
But that really does seem so much harder to me to accomplish in your kitchen. We see so many brands who have a family recipe that they might even create their bench top formulation in their kitchen.
To me, it seems so much more difficult to do that with cannabis because of all the reasons we just discussed. What does it take to turn a founder or a brand's idea for a product into a scalable product and formulation?
The classic hurdle that some brands put in front of themselves is to develop all the flavor systems, get the beverage perfect, and then add the cannabis.
You're like, well, I'm sorry, but we're going to have to go back and maybe not severely tweak, but adjust the formulation.
So it's important for brands, especially established brands that already have products in the market and are trying to build a companion piece or a line extension. In that case, we have to start with where they were the existing product.
But if it's a new brand, it's like, don't fall in love with your flavor before we put the cannabis in, because it would be the same as if you introduced a couple of milligrams of salt or a couple of milligrams of sugar.
It's going to impact the flavor. It's just everything that you put in a system changes the way your palate perceives that flavor.
And so if you've got an existing brand, then we can, well, it might take some tweaking and we could probably get it pretty darn close.
If you're a new brand developing stuff, then let's put the cannabis in it first and then build the flavors on top of it.
So, you know, if we're talking about product formulation and operations, certainly the manufacturing process is quite different with cannabis beverages than it is with just regular beverages.
What are some of those big operational challenges that you see for cannabis beverages and how do you ward them off as early as possible so they don't become an issue and affect a brand's ability to scale?
The effort of the cannabis, the suppliers of emulsified cannabinoids has been to make this a seamless process for beverage manufacturers. So provide them product in a format that they're used to using.
You know, if you're adding liquid to a liquid, most beverage manufacturers are used to adding flavors. So there's like, build the product that has some, there's close of a similarity to the existing steps that you're doing.
Now, the one complicating factor for this is the fact that if the supplier is not paying attention to the free oil, so remember, the cannabinoids are oil again. So if in your manufacturing process, you have any polymeric lines.
What's a polymeric line?
A poly, yeah, like a plastic hose. If you're filling lines are plastic, or your transfer lines are rubber, and there's quite a few of those in traditional manufacturing, beverage manufacturing setups, you don't want the cannabinoids to stick.
So that poses a big problem for carryover for co-manufacturers that are making non-infused products and infused products.
One of the most critical attributes is to insure that when you're done with your infused product, you can clean and you can get it all out of there.
Because you don't want to transfer, even if it's a low level, you still don't want to transfer any material to a non-infused product. And for most commercial beverage manufacturers, that's the single biggest challenge, is how do I clean it?
How do I ensure that I'm not getting transference or a carryover into my next product or my next customer's product? And so I think that is, many times the root of it is the biggest challenge in a manufacturing environment.
35:47
I'm sure that compliance and legality, it affects the trends that shape cannabis food and beverages significantly.
But also, trends from across food and beverage in general, I see affecting the cannabis food and beverages that come through the BevNET doors. You know, I see functionality being added to cannabis beverages, caffeine, certain flavors.
What do you, I mean, you see so many cannabis food and beverages come across your desk. What are you seeing in terms of trends? And what do you think might have staying power?
Again, it's a bit of A and B.
So you have some folks that are creating infused products and adding additional functionality into them just to be differentiating in a market, right? So like, well, this is the first infused D9 beverage that has Lion's Mane and caffeine and protein.
You know, like you're doing it just to be different. Yeah, sure. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Especially if you have, if the consumers buy it, you've got a winner.
Sometimes, though, the things that people are adding are all a bit counter to like, most people that are consuming, a lot of people that are consuming cannabis beverages are looking to take the edge off or relax or, you know, sort of unwind a little
bit. Much like, much like people consume alcohol, that glass of wine at the end of the day is perfect for starting the home phase. Now, you put caffeine in it.
Well, now, you're countering, you know, like, I personally am not going to be looking for a cannabis beverage that's caffeine it, because if I wanted a caffeine, I'll just get a caffeinated beverage.
People are adding things that are sort of taking away from the effects, and it's not a malicious thing, you know, they're just trying to be different and provide, you know, maybe you want a microdose of cannabis in the morning and some caffeine to
get going. There's a place for that, much like, you know, you could make a cannabis beverage that has chamomile and CBN in it to help you sleep.
So I think there's a place for those things, and some of these more niche applications where you have, here's your morning cannabis beverage, here's your evening cannabis beverage, those are starting to get some foothold inside of the beverage
market. I see how it's going to be interesting to see where it lands as far as everybody else throwing anything and everything under the sun in it. So I haven't seen a Cambucha THC yet, but I'm sure that's coming.
I'm sure it's coming. And last question for you, because I know this is a huge part of the manufacturing process, and even the formulation process. How about cannabis technology?
How are you seeing that evolve?
A lot of it is going to be hard to predict. None of us have a crystal ball, and know what the FDA is, you know.
But my hope and the way I at least operate, and many of us at SoRSE operate, is with the thought that this is going to become a very regulated industry.
But trying to read the tea leaves and figure out what the FDA is going to make us do, or make the brands do, or what kind of testing is coming. I mean, we certainly can draw parallels from existing things in the market.
We know that this is required of this brand.
But I think there are some new components now that the FDA is going to have to wrap their hands around, or any regulatory body is going to have to wrap their hands around, that preservation of potency, hitting label claims.
Even inside the food and beverage space, there's a great deal of latitude with calories that's five or ten. There's no six calorie beverage, right? So I don't think the FDA is going to be cool with the, oh, you can do a five or ten.
We don't care if there's anywhere in between. No, if you said a ten, they want it to be ten, or, you know, 9.5 plus or something. So it's going to be really interesting to see how the scheduling goes, how the FDA regulations go.
It's going to be a certainly evolving market. I think we can predict, sort of predict where we think it might go. And in some cases, we've been pretty close to accurate.
In some cases, we were like, didn't see that one coming. So it's going to be certainly an interesting ride. This is definitely the roller coaster.
Right now, we're enjoying the, we're enjoying the, not the downslope of the roller coaster, but it's coming.
It's certainly coming and really in a space where sometimes it feels like there are a lot more questions than answers. It's so great to have folks like you around to shed some light around so many of the questions that all of us have.
So Michael Flemmens, thank you so much for joining us today from SoRSE Technology on the Nombase Podcast. I learned so much and, you know, absolutely fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for joining us.
And for everybody else out there in the audience, thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.
