Testing Edibles For Potency

Hey all. Anyone have any labs or devices they’d recommend to test your edibles/concentrates for THC %? I routinely make batches of canna-oil by baking down trim or trashy rosin into coconut oil, so the potency is always changing. I need to find a way to measure the % from batch to batch to make recipes consistent. Heard horrible reviews of the t-check, so was leaning towards finding a lab that’s friendly about mailing products in. Anyone have any experience with this?

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Find yourself a cannabis testing lab in your state. Most of them do edibles and can help with this no problem. HMU with a DM about your specific state and I’ll make recommendations of people I’ve worked with where I can.

If you want to do it in-house - either an HPLC or GCFID or GCMS will get you the information you seek. There’s a lot more than an instrument you’ll need for edibles though. You’ll also want to get the equipment to do the weighing, freezing, grinding, vortexing, and SPE separation. Plus the calibrated pipettes or other volumetric devices. And the standards to run calibrations on the instrument.

Can be a pretty pricey endeavor to do your own in-house testing. Well worth it - but still.

No one lets you mail THC products around cause that would be illegal. But you could mail in hemp products to many labs in the country.

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this can be quantitated (reasonably well by most operators) with an SRI-GC FID. new you’re looking at $10k + accoutrements.

which will get you reasonable close on your formulated edibles. Actually testing the formulated edibles is a bigger hassle…because you can no longer just dilute and shoot.

if you’re in a rec or med state, 3rd party testing should be available, and is generally the best solution for most small scale work.

The lab would love it if your sample was the input oil before going into edibles… They might give you a better price on the one off test

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dSPE is not needed for potency by LCUV, even with edibles there is not much interference on UV. But if it is going into an MS, then probably would want to clean it up somehow or dilute the hell out of it. Cant see why you would want to do potency by MS though considering UV is rock solid for that. But I agree that an inhouse lab is not really worth the setup costs unless you are needing alot of testing.

However, I could see one of those near-IR devices being the cheapest way if you really wanted to do in-house. Purple box? or something being one product… no sample prep, just press the probe to the sample and get a concentration. With something as homogeneous as infused oils, you would probably get a trustworthy reading on it. Whereas I would not trust that same device as much on flower or finished edibles.

Testing the oil is the surest way to make sure your edibles are consistent. You know that concentration and dose per edible unit accordingly.

There are matrix effects that make testing the actual edibles far more problematic.

This^^

Just get very good oil with a COA next to it, or get very good oil and test yourself if you’re worried of fake COA’s and use that tested oil for edibles. Imo, testing edibles themselves is a waste but also good for R&D so you can ensure you’re infusing properly.

Testing the oil itself is better