“It’s very rare in a soda or a beverage product to have a compound with such a hydrophobic load like the cannabinoid,” Dr. Scialdone says. This is a problem because can liners are equally hydrophobic, and “like dissolves like,” so the less stable the emulsion, the likelier it is for its cannabinoids to leach into can linings. He notes that beverages could instead be sold in glass bottles, but that might not be desirable to producers for a variety of reasons, including an increased cost.
Product Quality
A deeper problem, says Harold Han, PhD, is the quality of the beverage base into which the emulsions are being dissolved. Dr. Han, founder and chief science officer of California-based cannabis-infusion specialist Vertosa, says compatibility between beverage base and emulsifier is a physical issue.
“Some companies say they’ve solved the water-solubility issue,” Dr. Han says. “Yes, you can dissolve many [cannabinoid] emulsions into pure water. It dissolves fast, the flavor is pretty good, and it has pretty good onset. But the water isn’t your product; your product is coffee, juice, apple cider vinegar, red wine, rosé. Those products themselves have complex chemistry, and you’re infusing an emulsion, which has a complex chemistry also.”
Potency, says Dr. Scialdone, is the No. 1 most-desirable attribute in a cannabis product, but maintaining potency may negatively affect important factors in a beverage, such as flavor or mouthfeel. Yet Dr. Han stresses that maintaining potency requires controlling chemical as much as physical factors. “Chemically, THC has a structure that oxidizes easily, turning it into [non-psychoactive cannabinoid] cannabinol (CBN),” Dr. Han says. “You lose potency that way. To mitigate that, if you’re producing a THC-infused beverage, how are you going to control the oxygen levels in the package? If you can’t eliminate it, what kind of antioxidant mechanisms can you embed or design to fight oxidation?”
For this reason, Dr. Han says, it’s much easier to make a THC-infused soda water than it is to make a THC-infused rosé, which he calls “a complex system.”
“Rosé is from the grape, and it’s fermented,” Dr. Han says. “It has proteins, it has iron, which tends to accelerate oxidation. You may then need to think about how to fight that oxidation.”
That’s before the more pressing problem of sticky cannabinoids exiting their emulsions to cling to hydrophobic plastic—a problem Dr. Han says can be exacerbated by the high heat and pressure thermal processing required to kill microbes and prolong shelf life. “This is not rocket science,” he says, “but it’s a special science. It’s complex. Inventing an emulsion is easy. What’s hard is stably putting it into a base.”
As a problem, the loss of cannabinoid potency is an indicator of how incredibly new legal cannabis products are. Legal cannabis beverages have existed for fewer than five years, and, on the illicit market prior to state-level legalization in the U.S., they barely existed at all.
Dr. Scialdone, who spent 25 years as a chemist for DuPont, sees unstable cannabinoid levels as the result of hurried product development. “Typically, what happens in the cannabis industry is they don’t really do the full development of the product; they just try to rush it out the door as quickly as they can in order to recoup some of the dollars they’ve spent on doing so.”
Product development, Dr. Scialdone says, is expensive, and it can take a multitude of iterations to arrive at a commercial formulation even before companies begin testing the product in a can.
“It’s a difficult process when you’re trying to do product development and product launch simultaneously,” Dr. Scialdone says, but that’s essentially what producers have been forced to do in their haste to be first-to-market with infused beverages. “In product development, you want to fail early and often in the prototype development stage. [If] you fail in the marketplace after you’ve put a bunch of products out there and find out you’re losing potency on millions of units sitting on shelves and in warehouses, that’s an expensive failure.”
What the Future Holds
However, Dr. Scialdone is optimistic about the future of cannabis-infused beverages, provided a few factors in the industry change. First among them, he says, is the lingering stigma traditional businesses feel in working with cannabis companies. In Canada much of this stigma seemed to disappear after legalization, but he says it remains a problem in the U.S., where cannabis is still federally illegal. That stigma is changing, however, with each new state that votes to legalize medical and adult-use cannabis. Many expect some form of federal cannabis legalization within the next few years. As the stigma begins to thaw, Dr. Scialdone sees hope for partnerships with traditional food packagers and aluminium manufacturers he believes will resolve other factors that might hobble the rollout of cannabis beverages. Most of these stem from the disconnection between cannabis producers and traditional food and beverage producers.
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