We’re hosting an Ask Me Anything event on Wednesday Dec 13th, 2017 at 11am MST with Joel Twaites from @RemoNutrients to answer all your nutrient questions.
Click here to add the event to your Google Calendar or download and open this attachment to add to Outlook and other calendar programs. Remo_Nutrients_Ask_Me_Anything.ics (1.2 KB)
Joel Twaites is the General Manager for Remo Nutrients and has been working directly alongside Remo (The Urban Grower) since 2006, learning the methods and techniques for world-class cannabis production. As General Manager, his duties have included developing and fine tuning nutrient recipes, managing online operations, coordinating marketing and sponsorship campaigns, and branding/packaging design. Remo Nutrients’ formula was designed to harness the benefits of both organic and synthetic ingredients, providing a clean and cost effective option for producing some of the highest quality cannabis, no matter the size of garden.
Joel is a graduate of the University of the Fraser Valley with a degree in clinical kinesiology. He has more than ten years of experience working as a healthcare clinician, ranging from rehab services, to educator, to high-end medical equipment sales.
I just popped on to the board and I’ll be available to answer any questions you may have for the next couple of hours.
Just to start things off with the question from @nick. We started as a company back in 2005 focusing primarily on our online video series teaching other growers the methods for producing competition grade cannabis. things started to take off and our online community grew to over 100,000. We initially wanted to get into the production side of things but with the money and aggressive nature of the canadian market, we decided that nutrients would be the best option for putting us in a position to work directly with large commercial producers. Instead of going to old route with nutrients by charging exorbitant prices for inexpensive salts, we priced our line to be appropriate for both smaller and large scale producers. People have responded well, and we’re currently have more than 300,000 people following us online.
A lot of hard work, and reinvestment into building our brand, not our wallet size
Our testing facility has always been Remo’s personal grow. 1800 (600x3) sqft of flower rooms with 600sqft of veg/propegation. Things have since changed with regards to the size (remo moved to another house) but he was our tester prior to releasing the product.
With regards to testing the formula, while producing, we have a 23 step quality control process to make sure the concentration is accurate. Every product that goes out the door has to complete this before being sold. As for research testing, right now we have 4 different grow styles and hydro systems running only our line. We try to make sure that if there’s grow hardware on the market, we’ve had a chance to see how our line works with it.
Line clogging has always been an issue with irrigation (especitally with 1/4" line). We filter all of our products through a 20 micron filter before bottling to reduce the potential for line clogs. As for whether it works, we have extensive tests on fertigation systems like dosatron and have had almost no issues (no serious ones at least). Our feed formula has equal dosing of each product, meaning if you are running an injection system, you just need to set them all for the same rate and let it go.
As for the minor issues, we have a large organic component in our kelp product and flavor enhancer (Velokelp and Nature’s Candy). These have encouraged some biogrowth in irrigation lines, but aside from periodic line flushing, this doesn’t cause a lot of problems if managed.
More/higher ppm is not always better (higher ppm programs typically have less effective ingredients)
There are some ingredients that cost pennies on the dollar, and other that are very expensive (know the differnce when it comes to the cost of your food line)
If the manufacturer won’t tell you how the product works, be cautious.
Hi @RemoNutrients. When talking about the history of your company you mention your online viewers. Have you found social media to be the most effective way of advertising your product? What are some of the biggest challenges in getting people to use your products?
Flow rates will be dependent on the size of container you’re using. In other words, if you’re running gallon pots, you don’t want them flooding. Over watering is worse than underwatering so when setting your rates, start below what you think they need and work up.
For large scale applications, we have a calculator in house that translates ml/G to pump stroke rate (1/35, 1/100, etc). We just need to know some basic specs and we can determine exactly how much product you need for a full cycle and how fast the pumps need to be set.
The only consideration with outdoor vs indoor is the potential for rain. If you live in an area that encounters rain, you would need to manually adjust your rate of watering.
It’s the BEST way to advertise. You create a loyalty you can’t get with other forms of marketing. In fact, a lot of other styles become annoying. We don’t do print ads for this reason. Firstly, no one reads magazines anymore, and secondly, when you flip through a magazine and 65% of the content is ads, it’s literally worse than watching cable TV. We can put out a videos and hit 50,000 views in a month. It would cost us thousands of dollars to run the same kind of numbers on other outlets.
The biggest challenge is that there are a LOT of nutrient companies. When you go to a show like MJBiz and there are 650 booths, when 10% of them are nutrient companies, that’s 65 different companies. Kinda hard to differentiate yourself. Also, the idea of try before you buy (samples). Our competitors give out samples like crazy and we get a lot of requests to “research” before buying. We do provide samples, but when we’re already price competitive, it hits our bottom line if we don’t convert these customers.