If I were in your shoes, with a budget of $100K, I would focus solely on in-house testing of cannabinoids and terpenes. I would spend $25K - $30K on a newer refurbished HPLC, $20K - $25K on a newer refurbished GC, and ~$25K on all the ancillary lab equipment, supplies, and consumables you will need for these two instruments. Then pay a good consultant to (1) get both instruments up and running properly, on-site, for their target analytes, (2) optimize and write the SOPs for your analyte extractions, sample prep, and the instrument methods, and (3) train your lab techs how to use and maintain the two instruments properly. $100K won’t get you much farther than this.
Your company owners are sadly mistaken if they think the CAPEX required for a comprehensive 3rd-party testing lab is less than $750K.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on AAS/ICP-OES as a viable in-house instrument for heavy metals. Lower sensitivity and throughput, but significantly less expensive. Pairing that with a heated block digester, instead of a microwave digester can easily save you an additional $20K as well.
I’m with you that an ICP-MS/Microwave Digester + Consumables is 100% out of the cards for this budget as far as regulatory oversight is concerned, just wondering if this could be a potential solution for those looking to save $$$ on in-house Cat3.
We can also add spinetoram to that list (or any spinosyn derivatives for that matter), even things like imidacloprid isn’t very GC friendly (from my experience the only way I was able to quantify imidacloprid via GCMS was to use standard addition because I don’t think it completely vaporized at the inlet or maybe there was other matrix interference).
But the list for pesticides or other chemical residues that are not amenable to GC is bigger than people might think it is.
@Studio42 Definitely take Magister’s advice. I’ve spent almost my whole career prior to cannabis doing analytical chemistry, even with the equipment you have consumables, ensuring methods are validated properly enough to trust the results, cost of standards, etc… 100k won’t get you very far.
Yeah, if you really want to test a lot on one system, though it won’t be idiot proof, get an LC/MS/MS/MS system. You can do potency, the full panel of pesticides, terpenes, and if you’re clever, a specialized chelation method for your heavy metals that you run through your mass spec (though will be finicky), probably not residual solvents though. But this has a much higher running cost than a GCMS system.
It depends on what your needs are, I’m assuming pesticides, potency and terps. If you need compliance tests, it’s probably not worth the money because some of these systems are a pain in the ass. Your budget is likely too small for what you’re doing.
Also, someone may correct me, @MagisterChemist, @SoStupendous, @IonStorm, or anyone else; have you had success in the past running a full panel pesticide testing on an LCMS or is it preferable to split between an LCMS and GCMS?
Best to split - if you have the ability. Some just don’t do good on GC some just don’t do good on LC. Knowing which ones you are looking at helps this a lot.
You can get a LC-FID/MS and a GC-MS and the immediately surrounding equipment for under $100k, probably all used. Those at least hit cannabinoids, and some number of terpenes and solvents. Pesticides and metals are not in your budget.
But no matter how you slice it, $100k does not build much of a lab. Someone involved is gonna have to take a deep breath and get realistic about what these types of endeavors cost.