There are investment pitches that require you to understand geology, biotechnology, or semiconductor architecture. And then there are investment pitches where the first question is, “Hang on. You want to sell what?”
Power Leaves Holdings (NASA.C) belongs firmly in the latter category.
The company’s proposition is that coca – yes, coca, not cocoa – is an enormously underutilized agricultural commodity because almost everyone associates the plant with the cocaine alkaloid extracted from it. Power Leaves says it can separate the two.
Working with Indigenous growers in Colombia, the company has developed a supply chain where the controlled alkaloids are removed and destroyed before Power Leaves turns the remaining material into extracts for food, beverage, nutritional and agricultural applications.
If that works commercially, this isn’t another beverage company trying to invent a new flavour. It’s potentially a new global ingredient category.
Which is a hell of an investment thesis, but also a rich fertile field for unadulterated bullshit.
Let’s start with an admission; I’ve had coca coffee. Sold out of a mushroom dispensary in Vancouver, it made my gums tingle and my have given me a minor energy boost, but I wouldn’t put the experience above a decent espresso.
That said, there is an underlying product that doesn’t involve cocaine. But its cocaine adjacence requires the asking of several questions before we jump in as investors on this newly RTOed vehicle.
So let’s ask ten.
1. Is Power Leaves actually real?
A surprisingly useful place to begin.
Yes. Power Leaves isn’t a freshly incorporated shell with three stock photos of Colombian farmers and a Vancouver mailing address. There are operating facilities, employees, Colombian activities, Indigenous relationships and years of corporate history behind the company.
More importantly, Power Leaves survived the period after this artefact – the Power-Leaves-Corp-Pitch-Deck-March-2023 – was produced. I had to dig tht file out of the code of their website, and it’s useful because we’re examining a three-year-old pitch with the benefit of hindsight.
Plenty of private-company decks promise an imminent revolution and quietly disappear when the money runs out. Power Leaves didn’t. After a couple of false starts, it ultimately completed a reverse takeover transaction in August 2026, bringing the business into the public markets.
That doesn’t mean the business works, mind you. But it does mean there’s a business here to investigate.
Question one: passed.
2. Can you actually legally sell coca?
And there’s your investment thesis. Because if the answer is simply “no,” you can stop reading.
Power Leaves argues that international narcotics controls apply to coca leaf and cocaine alkaloids, but that decocainized coca extract is different. Its system has Indigenous partners removing and destroying the controlled alkaloids in Colombia before Power Leaves processes the remaining material.
That distinction isn’t something Power Leaves invented for a financing deck. Decocainized coca flavouring has existed commercially for a very long time. Hence that mushroom dispensary cafe experience for yours truly.
The interesting part is Power Leaves’ attempt to build a broader commercial supply chain around it. That’s potentially a moat.
But I’d still want the receipts.
If the legality of your business represents half the investment thesis, don’t give me three paragraphs explaining why your lawyers think you’re right. Give me the legal opinions. Give me the Colombian authorizations. Give me the export documentation. Give me the U.S. import classification.
Make the regulatory folder so boring that nobody can possibly misunderstand it.
Verdict: believable, but we’re going to want to verify everything.
3. Does the Colombian government actually want this to happen?
This gets interesting. Colombia has spent decades fighting coca production with eradication programs while rural communities keep growing it because, economically, coca works.
President Gustavo Petro’s government has openly discussed creating legitimate commercial alternatives for coca-growing communities. Power Leaves fits beautifully into that policy direction.
Instead of telling farmers: Stop growing coca.
The proposition becomes: Keep growing it. But not for the highest return industries – we’ll just sell it into legal industries.
That’s potentially transformative, but while the illicit trade exists, it’s going to be a plan B for most farmers until it hits global scale.
The 2023 deck goes further, however, suggesting Power Leaves was included within Colombia’s national development plans and enjoying significant government support. I’d like to see exactly what that means. Government liking the idea of commercial coca alternatives isn’t the same thing as government endorsing Power Leaves.
But if PLC really has embedded itself into Colombia’s transition toward legal coca commercialization, that’s a significantly more valuable position than simply owning a processing plant.
Verdict: potentially a major strategic asset, but show me the paperwork, bro.
4. What’s stopping someone else from doing exactly the same thing?
Now we’re getting somewhere. Because discovering a market isn’t terribly valuable if Pepsi can replicate your operation eighteen months later. Power Leaves says it has a 15-year exclusive agreement with the Nasa Indigenous community.
The company also claimed recreating its position would require more than $10 million and three years.
The first statement can be verified. The second smells distinctly like investment-banker mathematics.
I’d ignore the $10 million number and examine the agreement itself.
What exactly is exclusive? Which territory? Which products? Which Nasa authorities signed? Can another Indigenous organization sign with a competitor? Can the agreement survive a takeover? Can either party terminate?
Because if the answers are favourable, this might actually be PLC’s most valuable asset.
The factory can be copied. Relationships, legal precedent, community trust and a 15-year supply arrangement are much harder to recreate.
Verdict: potentially the moat.
5. Have they actually built anything?
Yes. This is another point separating Power Leaves from the average conceptual microcap.
The 2023 deck described the Cohetando manufacturing operation, Colombian processing infrastructure and FDA/INVIMA registrations. Subsequent company developments indicate the facilities were completed.
One important distinction: FDA registered does not mean FDA approved.
Promoters occasionally enjoy allowing those two concepts to become blurry when they aren’t.
Still, physical processing infrastructure plus regulatory registrations represents considerably more substance than a PowerPoint and a patent application. Power Leaves has spent money building the plumbing required to attempt this business model.
Verdict: mild pass.
6. Does anybody actually want to buy the stuff?
And here we hit the first serious speed bump. The 2023 deck proudly announced 13 letters of intent.
I have an LOI to become starting striker for West Ham United. I wrote it myself this morning.
An LOI isn’t revenue. It’s not necessarily a purchase order. And depending on its terms, it may not mean much more than somebody saying, “Yeah, we’d be interested in talking about that if you figure out how to do it without an Escobar at the wheel.”
Power Leaves subsequently announced commercial arrangements, including a Canadian agreement involving 2,500 litres of extract. That’s better.
But here’s the number I care about:
Repeat customers.
If Coca-Cola, a nutraceutical manufacturer, or an agricultural company tests your product once, congratulations.
If they order it every month, you’ve got a business. The commercial thesis ultimately lives or dies there and we don’t see that, yet.
Verdict: demand appears real enough to investigate, but show me recurring sales.
7. Are these margins remotely believable?
PLC’s 2023 numbers were spectacular. Around 80% margins on extracts, 85%-90% on essence, 50%-60% on fertilizer.
If Power Leaves can actually produce those economics at scale, forget the coca story for a moment. That’s an extraordinary manufacturing business.
But extraordinary claims require spreadsheets.
The pitch deck doesn’t adequately walk investors from a kilogram of coca leaves through processing yields, labour, extraction, packaging, transportation, insurance, regulatory compliance, wastage, distributor margins and customer acquisition to arrive at 90%.
That’s what I’d want now, not the theoretical margin, but the realized gross margin.
If commercial production validates anything close to those original numbers, my interest in PLC increases dramatically. But if 90% becomes 34% once reality enters the room, the valuation model changes completely.
Verdict: Hard numbers needed, as this could make the investment thesis, or kill it.
8. Are they getting carried away with the science?
Yeh they are. Boy howdy, are they. This is where somebody in the marketing department needed their PowerPoint privileges temporarily revoked.
The deck talks about coca as a superfood, antioxidants, nutritional applications, appetite suppression and potential health benefits. Guys, it’s been a decade and we still don’t have insurance companies paying for medical marijuana, or CBD energy drinks at the 7/11. Grandma isn’t pounding coca gummies at the old folks home.
It also pitches agricultural products capable of producing up to 30% higher crop yields.
Maybe. But show me the trials. Thirty percent higher than what? Across which crop? How many tests? Where? Under what conditions? Independently replicated?
There’s probably a perfectly interesting business selling coca-derived ingredients without needing to wander anywhere near disease prevention or miracle crop yields. In fact, overselling those claims damages the credibility of the stronger parts of the story.
Verdict: discount the promotional science until independently demonstrated.
9. Did management deliver what it promised in 2023?
Here’s the advantage of discovering a 2023 pitch deck in 2026.
We don’t have to speculate.
The deck expected the Cohetando facility, first U.S. export and fertilizer launch around Q1 2023, followed by facility expansion, the first commercial sale and nutritional extract launch in Q2.
The corporate journey clearly took longer than that roadmap suggested.
Power Leaves ultimately reached the public markets through its RTO in August 2026. That delay doesn’t automatically bother me. I’ve covered enough mining companies to know that if corporate timelines were legally binding, half the Vancouver stock market alumni would currently be serving consecutive life sentences.
Things take longer. What matters is why.
I’d want management to put the 2023 timeline beside what actually happened and explain every significant variance. What was delayed? Why? How much did it cost? What was abandoned? What worked better than expected?
That’s far more useful than leaning on a three year old deck and no news releases posted to your site since 2024.
Here’s my issue with the above, taken from the Power leaves investor page; that timeline gap between 2024 and now, and the absence of any follow up from those two year old releases.
- You presented a flavouring at a conference… did it sell?
- What happened to the 2024 RTO plan?
- Where’s the completed health research?
- What happened to the cannabis plan?
Verdict: management has some explaining to do.
10. So what’s the actual investment thesis?
It’s not that coca is cool. It’s not that Pablo Escobar documentaries get clicks.
And it’s definitely not that a leaf traditionally associated with cocaine suddenly becomes a trillion-dollar superfood.
The investment thesis is much simpler.
Power Leaves may have established an early legal, regulatory, Indigenous and processing position in a commodity that has effectively been commercially unavailable to almost everyone for generations.
That’s interesting.
If PLC can demonstrate that its legal structure is durable, its Indigenous agreements genuinely provide exclusivity, multinational customers will repeatedly purchase its extracts and those spectacular gross margins survive commercial-scale production, the company could possess something genuinely unusual: first-mover advantage in a potentially enormous new ingredient category with significant regulatory barriers to entry.
And those regulatory barriers are particularly interesting.
Usually regulation is something investors discount companies for.
Here it may eventually become the moat.
Every legal opinion, Indigenous agreement, government relationship, export approval and year spent navigating Colombian and international regulations makes life more difficult for the second company attempting to enter the market.
That’s the bull case.
The bear case is equally straightforward.
Power Leaves could have spent years proving that something can legally be sold without proving that enough customers actually want to buy it.
Forget the trillion-dollar addressable markets.
Forget the superfood claims.
Forget the 90% theoretical margins.
Give me four numbers:
Litres sold. Revenue. Realized gross margin. Repeat orders.
If those numbers begin moving sharply upward, the weird little Colombian coca company suddenly becomes considerably less weird. And potentially considerably more valuable.
I just think, if they were, we wouldn’t hear the end of it.
— Chris Parry
FULL DISCLOSURE: No commercial involvement.