Hemp THC Testing 101:
The cultivation and legal sale of hemp products is a growing industry. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and State Agriculture Departments are paying attention to ensure that hemp products meet legal standards. This means that all CBD products should be tested for THC levels before they’re sold to consumers.
Testing your hemp products to ensure they meet legal standards is important.
Testing your hemp products to ensure they meet legal standards is important. The cannabis industry has seen actors who sell products with THC levels above 0.3%, pushing regulators to take action which impacts most companies. If you’re selling a product that contains more than this amount of THC, you can be liable for federal prosecution and million-dollar fines per violation.
In addition to making sure that your CBD product doesn’t contain too much THC, it’s also important that it contains enough cannabidiol (CBD) so as not to get passed over by consumers who are looking for something with high levels of CBD but low amounts of other cannabinoids like CBN or CBG or terpenoids like linalool or myrcene which contribute effect and flavor profiles to plant varieties.
Hemp and CBD products are highly monitored by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and State Agriculture Departments.
In order to ensure the quality of your hemp and CBD products, they must be tested by a third-party lab. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) verifies the quality of products that can be bought by consumers. State Agriculture Departments ensure that THC levels remain under the legal limit during cultivation processes. Finally, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) also checks the level of THC in hemp crops and communicates with labs on-farm test results.
It’s imperative for companies success to remain compliant with all three agencies, plus others that may apply. This ensures that the company gets through the cultivation process with a compliant product ready for the markets.
The FDA has tested some CBD products and found that they contain levels of THC far above the legal limit.
The FDA has tested some CBD products and found that they contain levels of THC far above the legal limit. The agency urges consumers not to buy any health product that claims to be “CBD or THC” if it doesn’t have a label specifying what’s in it, or if it does include such information but fails to meet legal requirements for either substance.
The FDA also warns consumers not to purchase any product from an unlicensed seller online; these products may be counterfeit or otherwise dangerous. If you’re concerned about the safety of your CBD product, talk with your doctor before taking it on a regular basis (especially if you have other health conditions).
THC and CBD in hemp can change throughout the cultivation and harvesting cycles.
CBD and THC levels can change throughout the cultivation and harvesting cycles. The amount of cannabinoids present in hemp is dependent on many factors, including:
- The part of the plant that’s being tested. Some parts of a mature hemp plant contain more CBD than others, so if you’re testing leafy material versus an oily flower, expect results to be widely different!
- When it was tested. If your company is using lab-tested products from different batches or harvests at different times during their production cycle, then there’s no guarantee that every batch will have identical levels of cannabidiol (CBD). Additionally, some companies might choose not to test every single batch individually but rather average out all their samples together – this can cause further discrepancies between batches if one has significantly higher or lower concentrations than another.
- The post-harvest process. If a company involved in the drying, curing, and storing of cannabis does not take adequate processes to ensure quality, the entire commercial viability of a batch may be at risk. This is because cannabis is perishable, and as such has to follow established food storage benchmarks detailed in the food industry. One of these is monitoring water activity levels, which is a metric that predicts the growth of microbial growth in cannabis batches.
The only way to know for sure if your hemp products contain THC is to test for it.
The only way to know for sure if your hemp products contain THC is to test for it. This can be a difficult and expensive process, depending on how you go about it. If you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on lab testing and want more control over the results, then a portable THC tester may be right for you!
A portable THC tester allows growers or manufacturers of CBD products (like flowers, biomass, oils, or edibles) to test their products before shipping them off to retailers so they know exactly what’s going into each bottle or package – and whether or not those bottles have been tampered with during transit.
When shopping for a THC tester, you want to ensure that you won’t be charged for every test you run, that cannabinoid reading levels are within legal and commercial parameters, is portable and easy to use to minimize the training time for employees to operate the tester.
You can test for THC levels with a GemmaCert Pro.
You can test for THC levels with a GemmaCert Pro in only 5 minutes, without having to ship out samples anywhere. GemmaCert has almost 10 years of experience in the cannabis testing market, with the largest database of chromatography to spectrometry cannabis sample analyses.
The GemmaCert is a countertop device that is easy to use and helps growers monitor their product throughout time. It’s non-destructive, which means you can test whole flowers, trim, and extracts without damaging the sample being tested.
Being non-destructive enables cannabis and hemp companies to estimate the lab results that can be obtained from a given sample, and also run internal research. For example, a company can select two random sets of flowers from the same batch, follow the same protocol to dry the flowers but then switch up the curing techniques. The company will be able to test flowers from these two batches during curing with a GemmaCert, compare their performance, and create data to back up crucial business decisions, like curing techniques.
In the case of hemp, non-destructivity allows hemp farmers to monitor THC in their plants by applying early harvest and quick drying protocols (GemmaCert Customer Success can help!) and then running research protocols at the late stages of drying and throughout curing to ensure that the product that gets shipped out is compliant with Federal regulations.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why you should test your hemp products for THC. The most obvious is to ensure that they meet legal standards, but there are other reasons as well, like conducting internal company research. Testing can also help you identify if there are any issues with your product before it reaches customers and saves you money in the long run.