Solvent extractions can work as well, Dr. Wise says, as long as labs are willing to be adventurous and try multiple solvents beyond the standard formulations. She suggests trying five or six different solvent systems to determine which one recovers the most cannabinoids.
But above all, Dr. Wise stresses, this problem isn’t the end of the road for infused-chocolate producers, or producers of infused products with high fat content. The challenges in testing chocolate, she says, are complex but, nonetheless, manageable. “As a producer–processor, there are a few things you can do in working with your lab.”
Legal Obligations for Manufacturers
Helene Hopfer, PhD, the Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Food Science at Penn State’s Department of Food Science in University Park, Penn., talks about the issue of cannabinoid levels in terms of legal protection for consumers—and legal obligation for producers. “To the FDA and USDA, if you add something to a product, and consumers will pay more for that reason, you have to demonstrate that the added content is actually in there,” she says. “This is especially an issue because you’re adding something with a certain claim. If you want to add something to chocolate—to spike it or enrich it, like vitamin D added to milk, you have to actually be able to accurately determine how much vitamin D is in that product.”
She says that ingredients in chocolate vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but there’s little consumer interest in whether one brand contains more vanillin or sugar than another; however, “from a consumer protection point of view, if I claim there’s 10 mg THC or CBD in my product, I need to demonstrate or measure that,” she adds. “Then you encounter this problem that you can’t get that cannabinoid out of there.”
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