Hey all. I’ve had a chronic problem that the salves I am manufacturing keep testing out low for CBD potency (on the order of 10-15% below target). I know that I am adding the correct amount of full spectrum oil… My tinctures and massage oils come back within plus/minus 0-4% of the target potency every single time. Has anyone else had this issue? Is it possible that something in coconut oil or beeswax creates testing inaccuracies? Could the fat in coconut oil mask the CBD or something? Thoughts? Thanks!
Density matters.
We were doing everything by weight, until we realized our 2oz jars held held 12 g less salve than we anticipated (compared to our body butter, lotion, which fit 56.6 g in our 2 oz jar perfectly). This wildly thew off our CBD concentrations, had to adjust based the amount of salve that actually fit to the fill line.
There a many variables tho and I’m no expert…
Yes it is possible that there is interfering interactions between your active ingredient (CBD) and other ingredients in the formulation itself. Are you doing in-house testing on this product? If so, then more method development may be needed for this product specifically. Not all methods of CBD analysis will be universal and translatable to all CBD products.
If you are testing at a 3rd party lab, then you may need to discuss the formulation with their team and determine if their typical method of preparation and analysis is going to be adequate for the formulation you’ve been manufacturing.
There are any number of possible issues behind this that could lie on either the formulation side (such as poor mixing, poor solubility/stability) or on the analytical side (sample preparation, method of analytical analysis).
How many similarities/differences are there between the ingredients in the product that tests within specification vs the product that doesn’t? If you have some common ingredients you may be able to initially assume those are not causing a problem with the analysis and focus your efforts on the other ingredients. You don’t need to necessarily tell me these things - just think about them and use them to solve the problem at hand.
I always wonder the same thing, I have bought many cbd lotions, salves, balms and have mixed results. Until I found a slave that worked with my body really well. My advise is to buy products that have been Lab tested by a 3rd party
How are you homogenizing your salves? What are youre non active ingredients?
what temperature are you heating your salve to pour out? You may be burning off a % if it is getting too hot for the pouring process.
This is a massive problem I had when I was a formulation chemist.
It’s tough to get the correct potency on CBD products. Then CBD company executives get pissed because they think a batch of 1000 samples all have the wrong potency. This doesn’t work since 1/1000 isn’t a good representation of the sample size.
What I ended up doing was increasing the CBD amount into the large batch by 5% to account for any transfer loss. I’d rather be at higher potency than the label as opposed to being low and screwing over the customer.
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