Finding The Right CBD Oil Processor For Product Formulation
How to Pick a Perfect CBD Processor For Product Formulation
Congratulations!
You’re starting to get noticed, your hemp/CBD business is growing, and it’s looking like it might even survive the Covid slump.
But there’s just one catch...
Sure, everybody has biomass. And there’s plenty of extracts to go around. Crude, CBD Distillate, CBD Isolate, and any number of other options, are getting easier to come by.
One thing that’s hard to come by is a great CBD processor or formulator.
It often starts out promising. Everyone is “transparent”, and focused on “quality”. Perhaps you even got to see a Certificate of Analysis (which is now plastered all over your marketing materials too).
But then the articles started appearing about fake COA’s, and doubts appeared. Companies started getting sued for lying about what went into their products. And you probably started having questions.
You may have even realized that you never even asked about heavy metals like arsenic in your CBD distillate or CBD isolate.
It’s often confusing even knowing what the best questions are to ask, and a lot of businesses seem to be making up the rules as they go. Whether you reach out to NuSachi for CBD processing and formulation or choose to go with someone else on the shrinking list of companies holding themselves to unusually high standards, here’s 4 questions to help you pick the perfect CBD processor or formulator:
Is your CBD oil processor willing to educate you?
Are they teaching you about what they do? More than just on their website or in their marketing, are they ready to hop on the phone and answer all of your questions?
Do they have business growth advisors, technical specialists, and everything in between on hand? Do they have growers who only work with certified organic materials? Do they have extraction and remediation specialists on hand? Do they have the empathy and creativity to connect with you and understand your business, backed up by the technical expertise to diagnose and solve your exact problems?
And can they explain it to you in a way that makes sense?
Education is critical to success with anything, and the world of Hemp and CBD is no different. There’s a pretty big learning curve, even for companies that have been around for years, because the market is constantly evolving and shifting. We live on that learning curve, as one of our missions is to do the hardest things first.
We believe that companies should be responsible for helping their partners understand what the product is and how it’s all put together. This in turn makes it possible to have accurate dosage instructions and in-context labeling, so that at the end of the value chain, your customers are also educated and empowered to understand how much to take and why.
True education is about passing on the knowledge you are gifted with, so we educate ourselves and our clients to allow them to pass it on to their customers.
Can they verify potency with a CBD Certificate of Analysis?
It’s getting more and more common, but many companies still don’t feel like it’s necessary to have a COA on everything.
A COA is necessary for a lot of different reasons. First and foremost, it’s impossible to stay on the right side of the law if you don’t even know what’s in the extract you’re carrying around. A COA is the fastest way to verify that the strain you think you’ve bought is in fact compliant with your state’s laws and regulations on THC content.
But it goes a lot further than that: there’s so many other cannabinoids and terpenes at play here, knowing what’s in the bottle is key to understanding how your particular extract will perform in the market.
And the market is getting more and more sophisticated every day. Your customers are doing research on more than just CBD, they’re looking at more than 113 cannabinoids including CBG, CBC, CBN, THCA, CBL, CBV, THCV, CBDV… the list goes on.
Besides knowing what’s in the mix for your particular strain, you’ve also got to be able to trust that the COA is accurate. With new lawsuits hitting the news recently about fraudulent testing, have you checked to make sure that your CBD processor or formulator is using a reputable 3rd party laboratory?
Is there proof of purity and safety through a full panel of lab tests?
Once you’ve selected a product formulation that works for your business and has the right potency, it’s time to look at purity and ask a simple question: does your CBD processor or formulator adhere to strict testing for all potential toxins and impurities?
Are there unsafe levels of heavy metals, mycotoxins, or pesticides in your product? If it was extracted with solvents, were those solvents properly removed post-extraction? What kinds of growing conditions did the biomass have? What was the state of the soil? Was the soil tested?
Was your extract, crude oil, CBD distillate or isolate tested?
The bigger question really is, how transparent is your processor? How many times do they do testing, and at what stages in the process? You have a right to ask these questions, and expect a clear, simple, honest answer.
There's no real governing body that's ensuring that you're not ingesting unsafe levels of contaminants in your CBD oil, so it’s currently the responsibility of every individual company to take this upon themselves and prove that they are using safe practices.
This plant is amazing at removing potential harmful contaminants and remediating the soil it’s planted in. We don’t want these substances ending up in our bodies. That’s why we follow or exceed the strictest medical grade standards we can find at NuSachi, and if a standard doesn’t exist, we create it.
NuSachi tests all incoming material, and then after we process it, we have it tested again to confirm that no new undesirables have been introduced. Our focus is on the future, and we are already following the guidelines of tomorrow.
This is part of how we capture the #plantinabottle in its purest form.
Are they going the extra mile and giving you a personal touch?
Can you call them? Do they quickly respond to emails? Do they answer all your questions? Are you satisfied with their answers?
Do they hide information or let things remain mysterious, or do they pull back the curtain and really show you what’s going on to your satisfaction?
At NuSachi, we know we don't have to be this transparent. We don't have to conduct ourselves this way, but we do it because it's who we are. We’re the kind of people who love to create lasting relationships with those we trust, and the best way to gain that trust is to simply tell the truth and make the information easy to digest and understand.
This is only really possible with a personal touch.
One of our favorite things to do is listen to our customers. We love getting on the phone with someone who is entering this market for all the right reasons but doesn't quite have enough knowledge to make an educated choice.
And in that discussion, there's a lot of important education and guidance happening across the entire team. We put a personal touch on it so you know there’s always someone to email or call if you have questions or need help working through a problem.
At NuSachi, we're setting a higher quality and efficacy standard for this plant. We're playing a much larger game. And part of that game is serving our customers in an advisory capacity; that’s why we have a team of NuSachi Growth Advisors on hand to educate, assist, and support you.
