Three things worth knowing before you buy anyone’s hemp.

How to read a certificate of analysis in ninety seconds

A certificate of analysis is not a marketing document, which is exactly why it is useful. It is a laboratory reporting what it found in a specific sample on a specific day. Everything that makes it trustworthy or worthless is visible in the first minute.

1. Does the batch number match the bottle?

This is the check that catches the most problems and takes the least time. A certificate for a different lot describes a different product. If a supplier sends you a certificate with no batch number on it, or one that does not appear anywhere on the packaging, you have been sent a sales aid.

2. How old is it?

Cannabinoids degrade. THC converts to CBN over time, and a certificate from three years ago describes a batch that has either been consumed or has changed. Look for two dates: when the sample was taken and when the report was issued. On our current lot the potency report was issued twenty days after the sample was taken, and the terpene report three days after its own, because the two analyses run separately.

3. Measured against declared

Find the milligrams per unit on the certificate and compare them with the milligrams on the label. A tolerance of about ±10% is normal and accepted in this category. What the gap tells you is not really about that bottle. It is about whether the manufacturer formulates to a target or fills to a hope.

4. The safety panels, not just the potency

Potency is the number that sells the product. Pesticides, heavy metals, residual solvents, mycotoxins and microbiology are the numbers that keep you out of a recall. A certificate showing only cannabinoids is showing you the half that was never in doubt. Ask which panels that lot was run against, and if the answer is that it costs extra, that is your answer.

5. Who signed it, and are they independent?

An in-house laboratory reporting on its own product is not a third-party test. Look for a named laboratory, an accreditation body and an accreditation number. ISO/IEC 17025 is the relevant standard: it is what says the laboratory has demonstrated competence for the specific methods on the page, rather than simply owning the equipment.

Our certificates are on SC Labs' own portal, and the current batch is summarised on the lab results page.

Full spectrum, broad spectrum, isolate: what actually differs

These three words are used loosely enough across the category that a customer can reasonably assume they are grades of quality. They are not. They describe what was left in the extract, and each one answers a different question.

Full spectrum

Everything the plant produced, minus the solvent: the target cannabinoid plus the minor ones, the terpenes and the flavonoids, with THC present at or below the legal hemp threshold of 0.3% by dry weight.

On a certificate, full spectrum should look busy. Our current batch reports CBD, Δ⁹-THC, CBDV, CBG, CBC, CBL and CBN, plus six quantified terpenes. A product sold as full spectrum whose certificate shows one cannabinoid and no terpenes has been named optimistically.

Broad spectrum

The same extract with the THC removed in post-processing. The minor cannabinoids and terpenes are largely retained, but the profile is not identical to the full-spectrum version of the same oil, because removing one compound is a process, and processes touch their neighbours.

This is the answer for a customer who has a reason to avoid THC: an occupational testing programme, a sensitivity, a preference. Be careful with the language here. “THC removed” and “not detected on this certificate” are claims a certificate can support. “THC-free” is not, because no analytical method reports zero. It reports below a limit of detection, and the limit is a number that belongs to the method.

Isolate

One cannabinoid, refined away from everything else. No terpenes and no minors. What you get instead is a single quantified cannabinoid and a flavour-neutral ingredient, which is why isolates carry the standardised products. Our THCv line is isolate for that reason: a customer buying THCv is buying THCv, not a profile.

Which to stock

All three, if you can, because they answer different customer questions and the customer usually knows which question they are asking. What matters commercially is that the three are not sold as better and worse versions of the same thing. They are not, and a customer who buys an isolate expecting a full-spectrum experience returns it.

The number nobody puts on a label: batch-to-batch variability

Every certificate you will be shown describes a single batch. It is a photograph. What a distributor is buying is a film: the next batch, and the one after, and the one that arrives in eight months when the customer has built a routine around a dose that worked.

Why one certificate cannot tell you this

A single certificate proves that one lot hit its target. It says nothing about whether the process can hit that target repeatedly, and hitting it once is not hard. A supplier can send a very good certificate for the batch they tested most carefully and a very different bottle in the case.

The question to ask instead

Ask for the potency figure across the last several batches, and work out the spread. Under about 7% means the process is genuinely controlled rather than merely landing inside a wide band. Our own spread across batches is 6.35% in CBD — a figure from our batch records, not from a third-party audit, and one we will show the working for — and the current batch sits 0.10% away from its declared label figure, which the certificate shows on its own.

A supplier who cannot answer this question is telling you something. It is usually not dishonesty. It is that nobody has ever asked, and the batch records have never been read side by side.

What it costs to be consistent

Consistency comes from formulating against the assay rather than against the recipe: you test the extract, then you dose the batch to the number, rather than mixing to a formula and testing afterwards to see what happened. It is slower and it wastes extract. It is also the entire difference between a product a pharmacist will recommend twice and one they will recommend once.

The batch record behind these figures is summarised on the lab results page, and the certificates themselves are on the laboratory's portal.