CRAiLAR® Choosing Flax Over Hemp?

On September 20th, we announced that after successfully transforming hemp fibers into yarns and fabrics with the desirable qualities of cotton, we would now begin a strategic shift to use flax fibers as the foundation for the next phase of its proprietary CRAiLAR Organic Fiber technology.

So, why did we switch our primary feedstock from hemp to flax?

Our technology was developed to work on all bast fiber crops.  Hemp was the initial focus as it is an emerging industry in Canada.  Flax is a bast fiber crop so the CRAiLAR® process works very well without any modification. CRAiLAR® is a versatile technology and also performs well on jute, kenaf, and other similar crops.  At the end of April of this year, we announced that we had successfully spun not only a hemp-cotton combination but we’d also successfully spun a flax-cotton combination.  We found the CRAiLAR® Flax to be of very high quality and ideally suited for fine knit items such as T-shirts.  While hemp is also well suited for knit garments, the legal issues surrounding the crop in the USA combined with the farming learning curve that will be necessary to begin the agricultural supply chain, make commercialization of this fiber more difficult than flax.

Our recent spinning trials with CRAiLAR® Flax have been highly successful, which further validates the feasibility of flax as a practical, economically viable complement to cotton.  Therefore a strategic shift of
focus from hemp to flax was announced earlier this year.

To learn more about this strategic move, please visit our site to review our CRAiLAR® Fact Sheet.