Hi all,
I am making a CBD infused sparkling water, and I’ve got everything else in place except the emulsion.
We originally had a copacker making and bottling our product, but had to part ways. The recipes they’ve forwarded onto me have not made mathematical sense and my brain is now mush trying to figure it out when I have zero knowledge about emulsifiers.
We have a broad spectrum hemp oil at 75.93% active CBD. We want to have 15 mg active CBD/200 mL bottle. So for every 100 gallons of water I need 37.39 g of our hemp oil. My question is, how much liquid (30/70 Gum to water) gum Arabic and liquid (unknown dilution, honey like consistency?) ester gum do I need to make this emulsion? @ShearGuy you look like you’ll be my best bet to figure this out.
All I was given from our manufacturer is:
CBD: 0.815%
Ester gum: 0.865%
Gum arabic: 98.32%
Should equal 3.13 lbs / 100 gallons, but when I back calculate knowing 37.39 g cbd oil / 100 gallons of water, I get 10.09 lbs of CBD emulsion needed. Its a huge difference especially when we’ll be making a couple thousand gallons for our first batch!
I just can’t screw this up. Lots of dreams and livelihoods are riding on this and I can’t be responsible for a failure to launch because I messed up the emulsion.
You need to play around a bit at small scale first. Starting off by just making thousands of gallons is crazy, especially if you aren’t very knowledgeable about emulsions in general. I did all of my experiments at 60 mL scale. All hemp oils have different viscosities due to different extraction methods and degrees of post processing, which make a big difference in how they emulsify and thus there is no one size fits all formula for this stuff. How are you emulsifying? High shear? Ultrasonics? High pressure?
It took me months to make a stable sub-micron formulation above 50 mg/mL that didn’t taste terrible or have compliance issues, but the work has paid off. We are launching our beverage in two major grocery chains in CO at every location early July.
Good luck!
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Unfortunately I don’t have months to tinker and perfect it. I have 3 days. We are using a high shear mixer for it. If I even had a place to start would be helpful. 6:1:1?
Try the search function. Youll find many report trouble with homogenizers and emulsions. You’d have no idea of its stability if you’re not using an exact SOP without changes. My half cent is to either rehire your copacker, find an excellent consultant, rework your time frame , or resign yourself to failure.
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I assume that by infused sparkling water, you want a completely clear end product. You will not be able to make a beverage base emulsion that will not add turbidity with a high shear mixer alone. You need to have a particle size of 200 nanometers or less, and the most powerful high shear mixers will be unable to get you much below 600-800. High shear is a great first step to prepare the emulsion for final processing in a high pressure homogenizer. ( I sell high shear units) Gum Arabic and ester gum standard ingredients but that ration your co-packer gave you makes no sense. The gum Arabic vendors recommend 4 or 5 parts gum to oil phase. Ester gum is a weighting agent to keep the oil phase form floating. I agree with what munkdooligan says.
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If the 98 % gum Arabic also includes the water in the mixture it makes a lot more sense.
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How did your emulsion work out? I made a gum arabic emulsion in water and it was stable for about 3 days, and then started separating, I didn’t use Ester Gum though.
My only success has come from “syrup” like products with xanthan gum and cyclodextrin. I’m at week 2 of stability, and all signs point to great. However, once its in water it is only stable for 24 hours… would Ester Gum help with this?
What method are you using to make the emulsion?
So I am no nano-emulsion expert, but I try really hard!
For my emulsions I used a PT3100 polytron high shear homogenizer for about 10 minutes at 30,000rpm to do a rough homogenization and then put the solution on a off-brand ultrasonic homogenizer for 15 minutes. I don’t know the frequency of the waves, but I use an 18mm probe and 60% power.
So far my “syrup” emulsion has been stable for about a month, but when I add it to water it still separated within 24 hours. I have not made a gum arabic, or an emulsion in water, since posting previously.
I just don’t have a deep understanding of nano-emulsions so I don’t want to spend too much money, but would love to learn more. I learned everything through patents and reading my compounding book from pharmacy school (my partner is a Pharm D)
What generator (a/k/a probe, aggregate) are you using with the Polytron PT 3100?
We are using a PT-DA 3012/2 MEC. This is something we purchased years ago, but only recently started using.
A 3012 has a 12 mm generator. You will need something with a larger diameter to generate enough shear for proper emulsification. What is your batch size?
i have had no experience with the emulsifers you are mentioning, but have made stable emulsions with polysorbate 20 and soy lecithin with an ultrasonic emulsifier
I wonder if the guy originally asking got fired?
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