The Key to High Quality CBD Products

The world of CBD is indeed a complicated one and finding a company you can trust with products you can rely on for you and your family is critical to having a positive, healthy experience. It is vital that consumers educate themselves about how to identify high-quality CBD that is both safe for them to use as well as properly labeled to make sure you get what you pay for – and that education starts with the Certificate of Analysis.

As a remediation crop, hemp plants are incredibly well adapted to remove harmful chemicals from their environment. While this makes it a valuable plant to clean up waste sites, it also means that anything that touches the crop has the potential to appear in products made from it, and in turn end up inside your body. This includes harmful pesticides, heavy metals, herbicides, residual solvents from extraction, and biological contaminants picked up along the way. The Certificate of Analysis is produced at the end of extensive testing from a verified third party lab that indicates the final product you buy is free from any of these harmful contaminants.

We perform a full battery of tests, including microbiological contamination, heavy metals, potency, and residual solvents to make sure that the products you buy from us are as close to nature as possible. Additionally, we make these Certificates of Analysis available any time to you on our website because we believe that transparency in what we do is the best first step to help build trust with you.

In this multipart post, we will go through in detail the different components of our Certificates of Analysis to help you understand the results and read them properly to give you piece of mind that our commitment to healthy, effective products at Kyoto Botanicals will never waver.

What’s In a Certificate of Analysis

There is a lot of information in a CoA; below we will outline broadly the different pages as a baseline before going into each one in much more detail in follow up posts.

Potency/Cannabinoid Profile

These are the naturally occurring compounds found primarily in the flowers and leaves of the hemp plant that consumers are seeking today for their health and wellness benefits. This test is vital to confirm a couple of important facts about the Kyoto Botanicals CBD product that you are buying. First and foremost, it tells you that there is at least as much CBD in the product as the label claims. The second key piece of information on this document is the percentage of THC in the product. A small amount of THC occurs naturally in hemp, but per the 2018 Farm Bill, hemp extracts must contain no more than 0.3% THC on a dry weight basis, so the CoA should always indicate a percentage of THC below 0.3%. Other cannabinoids that are benficial to your health – such as CBG, CBN, and CBC – are also in our products, and our CoA will tell you exactly how much of those are present as well in the product you buy.

Microbial Contaminants

This test is used to make sure our products are free from microbiological contamination such as salmonella, E. coli, yeast, and molds. These microbes tend to make us sick, so we take every precaution in our production facility to keep it clean and up to federal and state standards to ensure that our finished CBD products are free from these contaminants.

Residual Solvents

Once the hemp plant is harvested, it must be dried to a specific moisture content and then processed in an extraction facility to pull out the beneficial phytocompounds – cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids, etc. – that provide the health benefits millions of people seek. This presence for us utilized alcohol to extract these compounds which we then remove from the finished extract. This test ensures that we removed all of the solvent that we used to extract the CBD oil so none ends up in your finished product.

Pesticides

Pesticides are a fact of life in large-scale agriculture, amd while we test for pesticides in our finished product to give you piece of mind, due to hemp’s remediation crop properties and its ability to suck up and retain anything and everything from its environment, we do not use pesticides in our fields. Rather, we rely on natural means to keep the plants healthy to make sure our hemp is the best in the world.

Heavy Metals

Lead, mercury, and other heavy metals are well known to be extremely bad for our health. After we test our soil for heavy metals to make sure they are absent before we even start growing, we test our plants as well as our finished products to be certain none of these harmful elements end up in your household. The results of this test illustrate that our finished CBD products you buy are free from these contaminants.

Mycotoxins

Mycotoxins are harmful chemicals products by certain kinds of fungi that develop on crops either before or after harvest if the crops are not cared for properly. Our crop is tended by the best hemp farmers around and our precise drying process ensures our finished hemp plants are free from fungi. Just to be safe, we test our finished CBD products for mycotoxins so we can all be as healthy as possible.

Kyoto Botanicals High Quality CBD

We strive to sell the best CBD products available that are as close to nature as possible and we are able to do that because of the rigorous testing we put our products through before we deliver them to you. Transparency is vital, so we pledge to give you the exact copy of the CoA as we receive it from the lab so you can rest easy that it is from an accredited lab in Colorado and that you can see the original results for yourself.

Please note that batch results are subject to change due to variations in each plant, each growing season as well as production. CoA’s across products and across batches may appear to show a higher level of a particular compound than you might expect, such as THC. This fluctuation across batches is expected, but know that we will never sell a bottle above the 0.3% legal limit for THC or one that has less than our stated amount of CBD in that bottle.

Stay tuned for part two where we will go into each section of our Certificates of Analysis and walk you through each data point...