We’re a small edibles company that produces gummies using distillate. We want to purchase a homogenizer to ensure our products have great consistency. However, we’re having a difference of opinions on how the homoegenizer is supposed to be used.
My partners believe that we should homogenize the distillate in a carrier oil (MCT) and that would eliminate the need for an emulsifying agent (lecithin). After the oil and dist is homogenized together, we would just add that into our gummy mixture and everything will be consistently mixed.
I was under the impression that the whole point was to use the homogenizer with the distillate, emulsifying agent AND the gummy mixture together. Isn’t the purpose of a homogenizer to shear dist into small micro particles and have it evenly suspended by the emulsifying agent inside the gummy mixture?
Am I correct that the distillate is an oil base and the gummy mixture is water based? And that the homogenizer is used to mix these two substances together? Or are they correct that you should use a homogenizer to mix an oil and oil together and then we can just throw it all into a water based mixture?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience to help us settle this debate.
Do you mean you cook the mixture, weigh it before you’re about to dose, then add the dist based on the weight of your mixture? Do you use the homogenizer on the whole mixture after adding in the dist?
No they meant to package the gummies by weight instead of by count because each gummy isnt going to weigh the same but it should all be well homogenized so u can accurately dose it regardless of the accuracy of your molds
I would also check with the manufacturer of the tool and see what they think. I know I wanted to do that with chocolate and they told me it was not a good idea. The shafts on those things are very fragile and expensive I would ask if that’s cool because to me I think mixing everything would be best
You need to homogenize everything together, if you want consistency. Just homogenizing the mct / disty mix wont get you an even mix in the final product, only in your mct disty mix.
Homogenizer are meant to give you an even mix through out your product
I’d assume if you do NOT mix the distillate with the gummy mixture you would have more hot spots with high concentrations of cannabinoids and maybe even some areas of the mixture that don’t get any distillate.
Adding MCT will cause you trouble in getting the right consistency out of your gummies. Try a small batch out (even without a homogenizer) to make sure your method works before going all in on a new process. Gentle heat and even manual agitation will suffice for a test batch. Heat and mix the MCT and distillate (at your preferred ratio) then add while your liquid mix is boiling. Stir well and enjoy (or not because they won’t congeal or perpetually weep).
My suggestion is to bring the distillate up in a small amount of ethanol (no more than 40 ml needed for even large batches). Follow the same methodology as above. The ethanol will allow for easy homogenization even without a homogenizer. Have used this method with great success many times. Potencies on control studies and batch testing always gave us what we wanted.
I am personally not a fan of dosing after the making of any edible. I have also never seen a single kitchen I have worked with do that unless they couldn’t figure out how to properly homogenize the full batch. Even then, the product suffered from a coating of cannabis flavoring (often rather bitter) or a pocket of “oh god, that tastes gross”, which does not lend itself to a successful product. None of those products ever made it to market.
Hope this helps. I know it saved me a metric f-ton of headaches.
I do not have a specific ethanol ratio, but I do have specific things I look for. You want the tincture you make to be loose enough to not stick to the sidewalls of the container so as to prevent transfer loss and throw off your numbers. I also make sure to have warmed the tincture prior to dumping into the product being cooked/made. 20ml of ethanol with 2-4 grams of distillate never gave me any problems, but the beauty of this is that so long as you give enough time to boil off the alcohol, it does not matter how much you use (only matters if you use to little and leave disty in the jar).
And no, I never used lecithin to emulsify my products. I used it in a specific line of tincture to reduce uptake time for therapeutic relief.
Heat up the isolate. It turns to an oil. No need to MCT unless you want it in your product. Then homogenize liquid CBD with your gummy mixture. Add it slowly to prevent the liquid isolate from crashing.
I’ve had it crash when making tinctures. It takes longer because you have to add it slowly. Again I was making tinctures. I would think that adding MCT should be avoided with gummies.
Heat and agitation were all I ever used for tincture homogenization, but then again, I never used isolate to make tinctures. The only thing I have ever had crash out from my tinctures are sugars from the crude used to formulate. I also always formulated in MCT.
Would the gummy mixture be too viscous to be mixed with the dist? If we were to homogenize coconut oil, emulsifying agent (surfactant), dist and some water, then add that to the mixture, would it work the same? So the dist would be sheared into nano particles inside the water before being introduced into the gummy mixture
You do not need to add MCT or emulsifiers to your gummies. You also really don’t need a homogenizer either. Have you even tried a test batch with MCT in it? Forget wasting cannabinoids, just see what happens when you add MCT to your recipe.
After reading this article, we used coconut oil (not the MCT variant) as a carrier oil and combined it with our dist under low heat. This made the dist much easier to handle when portioning for our gummy cooks.
Sunflower lecithin was used as the emulsifying agent in our mixture. As we don’t have a homogenizer yet, we are just blending everything with a commercial immersion blender. Random pieces were selected to be lab tested and we are getting around a 12% variance for consistency.
Otherwise, no complaints from our customers so far. We just want to continue to improve on our product line. That’s why the homogenizer is being considered for our production process. We’re also planning to test with adding some Polysorbate 80 in conjunction with the Lecithin.