You probably already noticed that CBD products can be quite pricey, and now you’re wondering… how come? Why is CBD so expensive if it’s “just a part of a plant”? Is it the production and extraction that makes it so expensive or are there some other magical forces at work here?
Well, there’s a little more to CBD than you might think. Let’s jump right in!
High Quality Full-Spectrum Extracts vs. Cheap Isolates
We treat our CBD as a premium ingredient. We use only the highest quality extracts, to make sure you’re getting the best parts of the hemp plant and the most out of our products. You want cheap CBD? No problem. There’s plenty of companies that offer cheap CBD Isolates from China. But that’s not us. Not only do we make sure you’re getting exactly what’s on the label, but we also want to give you the highest possible quality products, which simply wouldn’t be possible if we were to use cheap CBD Isolates.
The hemp plant also contains a lot more amazing compounds than just CBD (read more about the Entourage Effect here), which wouldn’t be present in isolates . This is the reason why we always go for quality rather than choose the cheaper ingredient. Because you deserve the best.
We really want to make sure that we won’t get you high
As much as we love a good full-spectrum extract - there’s just one part of the plant that we can’t use. You guessed it. It’s the psychoactive compound THC! In our extraction process we not only make sure that we’re below the legal limit, but that we’re WAY below the limit.
All of our extracts undergo a special step that removes the THC until only trace amounts can be found in the finished product. We don’t want to get you high - and this is why our products contain less than 0.01% THC.
You could almost say it’s “Hand Made”
It’s the year 2020, yet there’s still a lot more manual labour involved in getting from seed to the best full-spectrum hemp extract than you might think. All of our suppliers have to meet our highest quality standards, to make sure that we use only the best raw plant material used in our products. For you that means that you can count on getting only the best of the best. For us quality comes first, second and third.
Wherever possible we try to source our raw materials from smaller suppliers that we get to know personally and can vouch for. Sure, it’s a ton of fun to work with small such passionate, caring and detail-oriented suppliers like that, but that also means a lot of work on our side.
European Hemp Strains are Low in CBD by Law
If you want to grow hemp in the EU you can’t just go ahead and throw any seed into the ground, let it grow and harvest the plant. Unfortunately there’s a lot of regulations and legal hoops any producer has to jump through just to be allowed to cultivate hemp. For example, did you know that there’s a set number of industrial hemp strains you can grow in the EU? These hemp strains contain just a fraction of the CBD compared to the strains that are being cultivated in the US and Canada, which is one of the more important factors contributing to the higher price.
The now famous cannabis strain “Charlotte’s Web”, for example, shows a whopping 17% CBD, and “Harle-Tsu”, a strain created by the Humboldt Seed Collective, rocks a CBD concentration that exceeds 20%, according to the producers.
EU-certified industrial hemp strains, on the other hand, have a CBD content of anywhere between 5% and 8% in flowers only. But since our extracts are made mostly from leafs, the CBD concentration we’re currently working with is just around 1% CBD. By that calculation alone we would need roughly 20 times the amount of hemp to produce the same amount of CBD compared to our friends overseas. And it doesn’t stop there.
Even though we’re using a highly modern and sophisticated CO2 extraction method that doesn’t use any chemical solvents, we still can’t extract all the CBD from the raw material. We can only extract about 70-85% of the CBD that’s present in the plant itself. A long way from the older and more “chemical” extraction methods, but there’s still quite a bit of CBD we can’t access just yet.
To make a long story short, to produce a single 10ml bottle of our amazing 10% CBD Oil we need to process almost a whole kilogram of hemp (800g to be precise).
The Most Gentle of Extractions - Using CO2
Speaking of extraction: our CO2 extraction is not only one of the most advanced methods of getting those incredible cannabinoids out of the plant, but we also want to take our time with it. We run our extraction in small batches over a longer period of time. This way we can be sure that we’re extracting the most out of what mother nature put into hemp, meaning the full spectrum of cannabinoids. And yes, you guessed it. The longer something takes, the more expensive it tends to get. The same goes for our careful extraction process.
Swiss quality in more than just watches
Let’s take our Sports-Gel as an example. The CBD that’s used to produce it comes from a full-spectrum hemp extract all the way from the land of Roger Federer and Army-Knives - Switzerland.
Only here could we find a supplier that would be able to match our very specific requirements for the Sport-Gel. The specially designed process of so-called Decarboxylation converts just a part of the CBDA from the raw material into CBD instead of the whole amount. It’s the combination of CBDA and CBD that makes our Sports-Gel so special.
Again, we could have opted for a much cheaper alternative, but decided to go with the much better and much higher-quality approach.
Quality Doesn’t Stop at CBD
Having said all that, there’s more than just CBD in our products. And, of course, our quality standards don’t stop at CBD. We use only the highest quality ingredients in all of our products. But if you’ve read so far then by now you should already know that we value quality over everything else.
TL;DR
We put quality first. We could have used the cheapest China-CBD-Isolates. But we don’t. We use only the highest-quality stuff out there to make sure you get the best product we could possibly produce.
