Hi MWA.. Thought I'd write this up for your information on WTA. I don't like to get into arguments and I avoid them, so hopefully you'll find this all helpful and we'll be on good terms.
Perhaps I don't answer all the questions you might have to the level of detail you'd like, but it's an honest effort. There are some aspects of WTA I'll talk freely about and others I prefer to hold a bit more tightly. If I don't answer something, then it's likely I've chosen not to.
What WTA isn't: WTA isn't a concoction of alkaloids added to nicotine in the lab. While this might have some effectiveness if the "right" set of alkaloids was stumbled upon, this smacks far too much of designing a drug for my comfort. It would also be pretty cheap to do since the bulk of WTA (perhaps 95% is nicotine), and the pricing point would by rights be pretty low. It would be a simple exercise of, "add this, add that, done!" I'm not coming near such a "designer alkaloid mix" with a 10 foot pole... even something so simple as say a mix of 97% nicotine and 3% anatabine.
So what is WTA? Similar to snus (where you put whole processed tobacco under your lip), you get the alkaloids that are naturally present in tobacco, but in the form of an e-liquid instead. The trick with WTA is to get the alkaloids out of the tobacco and get them isolated on their own. One might ask, "If you're just getting the alkaloids, isn't this a lot simpler than the work it takes to get nicotine purified on it's own?". The answer here is, "No, it's not". Nicotine is purified from tobacco on a huge and worldwide commercial scale. There is no such huge commercial scale for WTA.
Straight to your question on production cost and pricing. Obviously, this is dependent on 1) the labor time it takes, 2) the volume of alkaloids that can be isolated in that time, and 3) the cost of materials. An automated, large scale commercial process would minimize these factors, but for me to do it, it takes (on average) a good solid 6 hours of manual work. It's only practical to process perhaps 150 grams of tobacco for a yield of only 1.5 grams of alkaloids. Finally, there are the cost of materials and tobacco itself.
That 1.5 grams of alkaloids can be turned into only 75 mL of 20 mg/mL WTA eliquid.
If I were building a business plan (and I'm not), I'd be thinking like this:
So here is a finished material, 75 mL of 20 mg/mL WTA eliquid. If it's priced at $1/mL, I've hardly covered materials and my 6 hours of time are basically free. At $2/mL, I'm working for $12/hour. I do a lot better than that on my day job. It's hardly worth my effort... it's like working for the man overtime and not getting paid overtime. So we come to $3/mL. I've given up an entire evening and poured my expertise (25 years) into the stuff, and I come away maybe $150 to the positive. At least my wife won't kill me at that price.
The banker isn't going to be calling me "Sir" with any sincerity when I make that deposit!
I really hope this helps for perspective on where Jerry is coming from at the present. Expensive? Comparatively, yes. But on the current tiny scale that Jerry can offer, I don't believe anybody is being taken advantage of. If he succeeds (and I hope he does) in getting a viable scale-up going, the batch size goes up, and the per mL cost comes down. Right now, the whole thing is just terribly labor intensive with a vanishingly small yield to show for it.
