Hey! Wondering if anyone can help out on dosing of nano actives. Switching over from distilate, and having a hard time wrapping my head around how to dose accordingly with this new material. Trying to achieve a 50-100mg dose in a recipe that yields 252 pieces. The reason we would like to switch to this product is that with distilate, we cant go higher than 10mg without having a long lasting after taste. Ive included a lab testing of the WSTHC bellow.
Heres a message from the source explaining a bit on how they went about it. Mind you that we do not spray on, but use active in the recipe itself.
Explanation from them goes like this:
I had a company make me samples of gummies using 0.1g of Nano THC.
They sprayed the gummies, so they had to of mixed the Nano with distilled water, then sprayed them.
I had those gummies tested by ******** and the results came back at close to 30mg/gummy, I’ll send the lab report shortly.
I wanted to create a 1000mg bag of Nano Gummies as this is where the market is wanting to see gummies.
In order to do a 300mg bag of 10 pcs, you’d need 1gram of Nano THC.
If I wanted a 600mg bag of 10 gummy, I would need 0.2g/gummy or 2grams of Nano THC.
Here is where things start to get expensive.
To get a 100mg gummie, I need approximately 0.35g of Nano and that would give me a 1000mg bag of 10 gummies.
The key word in all of this is the word SPRAYED, my believe is you would use less of the product is it is used in the actual recipe and mixed into the ingredients vs spraying, where there is a lot of wasted product.
These are my thoughts, I’m not a scientist or a chef so there’s a chance I could be wrong, but logic is driving my hypothesis.
I hope this helps
What we need is a potency on the “nano” thc. If you don’t have one, then acquiring one should be your first step. Don’t take the manufacturer’s COA, get your own.
The spraying is a red herring, and should be ignored if you’re not planning on replicating. Yes, they likely wasted ~50% of the cannabinoids. Possibly more depending on what the numbers they gave you actually represent.
If you can get 50 or 100mg gummies that don’t taste bad using a formulation of distillate plus other stuff, mixed up using some expensive “nano-magic” you should be able to get there with distillate and a bitter bloc. And it should be cheaper
Ive tried making gummies with both and unfortunately nanosized particles of cannabinoids are way worse with the lingering bitter taste than distillates. It would be cool though if the nanosized particles made for a more bioavailable gummy.
Thanks this is some great insight. Have not had any experience with bitter blockers. Will try to find some with our suppliers. Anyone have a source up here in the north?
I’ve actually found that you still have to account for some loss when mixing nano into the recipe. We would get a potency of the nano before hand like @cyclopath was saying, dose are batch accordingly and would find that our final potency of the gummies was only around 65 percent of the desired dosing. As we corrected for this increasing the potency of our nano, our desired dosing eventually was achieved.
Never did we have this issue making gummies without nano. Because of this, we figured the hot gelatin, large batch sizes, and temperature sensitivity of the nano (0 - 100 celsius due to the water content) was our issues.
Just saying, you may need to do a few trial and error runs to dial in your dosing when mixing the nano in to the rest of the recipe. But for sure, way better, and way more consistent dosing of the pieces then spraying.
Thanks! I’m going to get potency clear and come back with that. From the question asked to supplier this nano withstands up to 300F, not sure how true that is. Going to check with another supplier as well and come back with some more info. Thanks everyone for the input so far, great community here on 4200.
Adding excessive water to your candy syrup due to the much more dilute concentration of THC in the nanoemulsion. There is nothing wrong with this inherently, but you may need to cook some of that water off.
Beware of potentially destabilizing the nanoemulsion with prolonged heat exposure. I can’t speak for what the heat stability is - there are a plethora of surfactant combinations that allow you to get a stable and fast acting nanoemulsion. Each of these will most likely have a different thermostability. I would suggest you ask the provider to perform proper nanoemulsion stability studies (such as freeze/thaw, heat shock, etc…) to determine how stable their product is they are selling you. This might help you determine how long and how hot to cook the excess water off.
Going from traditional distillate infusion to nanoemulsified infusion will most likely present some flavor changes due to the inherent bitter nature that comes with both the smaller particle size of the cannabinoids as well as the surfactant combination used to nanoemulsify the product. If you want to avoid extra intense bitterness you may want to run some R&D first to see if you need to make any modifications to the final product. The last thing you want to do is have a good brand with a normal infused gummy that only has a slight hint of the infusion, and then all of a sudden start selling the same product that now taste significantly more bitter due to the nanoemulsified infusion. You may have people who get turned off by that and might start to shift away from your brand.
Great points, thank you. Biggest other concerns we fo have about this is the short shelf life of the active itself and how it reacts with heat. They say 300F but I feel they are exaggerating. Might just try dumping this sample in and sending the finished pieces off to be tested.
This difference may have been about how the testing lab was performing the test on the gummies - which may have been different than how they would do sample prep on the nano-emulsion (they are different matrices after all).
I’ve seen that multiple times at this point. Mass balances - if you cannot find it or its degradant somewhere then its there and the sample prep is missing it.
I remember my first nano-emulsion, the lab couldn’t find anything. And I mean anything. So we had to do some method development in-house and then transfer that knowledge to the analytical lab. You might consider doing this as well. Sounds like you are overdosing your gummies now, wasting material and potentially labeling your gummies with an inaccurate dose.
I had similar issues when using nano for pharma clinical trial materials - smaller sizes get issues with normal prep methods AND emulsions can hide things, especially the encapsulated ones. There’s a couple of papers now about how only a portion of things get encapsulated during these nano-emulsion activities and that what people are seeing in testing is the non-encapsulated stuff, they even call it Emulsion or Encapsulation Efficiency. There’s a really interesting one about biodegradation on cotton and non-cotton adsorbents.
At this point - when I’m looking for a lab to do this testing for me I’m asking how they handle beverage extraction, what their LOQ is for the cannabinoids in question (cause in beverages potency is really fucking low) and then I’m asking if they are running LC/MS or GC/MS or not. The labs I’ve had success with were using a completely different instrument for beverages - you know?
This is making a lot more sense to me now that you bring this up. Several times, we would have our potency of the nano on point before infusion and then find the gummies under dosed after like I was saying. We would even get better potencies later on and backwards calculate the dose of the nano to see if it matched with the labs COA of it prior to the gummies infusion and it would come out to be higher potency sometimes showing exactly what your saying, an inconsistency in testing. I’ll have to consult with some of the labs because I’m pretty sure no one around Montana is doing true nano encapsulation but still have some form of water dispersible emulsion. Thanks for the heads up!
I like to move to using nano thc but i hear a lot of story’s it getting more bitter… And it can not stand high temps as vegan gummie making get up to 100 degrees.
I had great success infusing gummies with Nano. There is a great gummy recipe on here that utilizes coolaid powder and such. The trick is to make a good dusting on malic, citric, and other acidic salts as well as take the time to cure them in a humidity appropriate environment. The dust coating helps work with the bitterness of the nano.
We infuse the gummies mostly with 30mg each. So i was thinking that nano would be a great step forward in skipping the "wait"time for the gummie to work. Been reading it can be as quick as 5 to 10 minutes they start to feel the buzz. Can i ask you what your setup is to make it? I seen so many option on the 20hz machines its hard to pick one. I would be happy if it would run a liter in a hour our so. And i think making the powder form would be better then the liqued way.
Are you asking for the nano formulation or when to infuse it? We would infuse the nano with the hot gummy mix which some would argue that the integrity and nano would retard but in terms of quality assurance spoke otherwise
I’m currently not doing nano anymore but when I was I just had a 2 gallon bulk tank with hose barbs on it and a homogenizer in the bulk tank then had it connected, through a peristaltic pump, to a flow cell on my sonicator. I think it was the Hieschler UP400St.
This was able to cycle through about 2 gallons of nanoemulsion formulation in maybe an hour or so of sonication time, I can’t recall exactly, but even with a small setup like this you could probably make several gallons per day. Once you get your setup, YMMV on sonication time and throughput so I would just run some in-process tests, sample every 15min or so, and then submit them all for particle size analysis so you can determine at what point your formulation has been homogenously nanoemulsified.
