How to Find a Cannabis Testing Laboratory

Instead, food and beverage infusers generally buy bulk cannabinoids (often in the form of THC or CBD distillate), which they add directly to their products. Thus, an edibles producer that trusts its bulk cannabinoid supplier and the supplier’s lab is in a far more stable position than they would be as a grower bringing products to a testing lab and hoping to learn the thousand pounds of cannabis flower they produced this growing cycle is strong enough to sell. Yet, as always, trust is the issue: Can you trust the lab your supplier used?

Brandon Wright, a pioneer in Canadian edibles, became an edibles producer following a 2015 Supreme Court of Canada decision that found that medical cannabis patients had the right to produce and possess cannabis-infused foods and beverages. When Canada green-lighted ingestible and topical cannabis products as well as cannabis extracts in its second wave of adult-use legalization last fall, Edmonton, Alberta-based Dynaleo, Wright’s company at the time, was among the first legal edibles producers in Canada and remains the country’s largest. Though Canadian cannabis producers are subject to a single national regulatory compliance standard, Health Canada’s demands are notoriously rigorous. For that reason, Wright counsels companies to implement their own high standards and be ready to do plenty of testing.

To avoid a discrepancy in THC percentage between your producer’s lab and your own, Wright says to try to use the same labs as your supplier. “Another way to avoid that kind of discrepancy is to have all of your inputs tested at your lab prior to using them,” says Wright. “This way, the same entity is measuring what goes in and what comes out.”

Wright tells producers to be conscious of this issue when drafting contracts and include language to account for discrepancies between a company’s lab and the lab of their cannabinoid supplier. This contract language can dramatically reduce the incentive to inflate, he says, and instead drives incentive for consistency among labs.

Looking for a Lab

When selecting a lab, Wright suggests that manufacturers familiarize themselves with basic cannabinoid compounds and how they break down so that they’re able to ask questions of potential laboratory suppliers. “I’ve seen lab analysis papers that say simply [percentages of] ‘THC and CBD’ as the only two cannabinoids or terpenes tested for—no testing for THC-A, THC-V, and so on,” Wright says. “Understanding the chemical makeup of your inputs helps screen for good producers.”

Additionally, there are more complex concerns to bear in mind. For example, overcooking CBD can lead to a high percentage of a different isomer of the compound, says Wright. The end product has the same molecular weight, but some consumers believe its medical effects are slightly degraded. A lab that can’t discuss such issues should be avoided.

Finding a lab you’re comfortable working with is much easier in a federally legal marketplace such as Canada. In the U.S., large multi-state cannabis operators (MSOs) are not allowed to move cannabis products outside the boundaries of individual legalized use states.

Like Wright, Fox advises MSOs to find labs they can rely on rather than looking to another company’s numbers. “In every market where you’re operating, you work with several different labs. You figure out exactly which is the most reliable and go with them. Even if the lab result isn’t necessarily a number that you want, that really doesn’t matter. You have to go with the most accurate.”

Yet different states have different standards—and not all have the same labs. If a producer operating in Colorado, Washington, and California finds a trustworthy lab to work with, that same lab might not operate in Maine, Illinois, or Michigan when the producer decides to expand into those states. “You would have to find a different lab to work with [in those states], and they might not have the same testing protocols or regulatory requirements that your other lab does,” Fox says. “Even when you’re using the exact same methodology and the same non-cannabinoid ingredients in all of your state markets, you still have to worry about issues with product uniformity in the final product.”