What Is 3rd Party Lab Testing?

A big buzz that you’ll read is only to buy CBD products that are 3rd party lab tested. What does that exactly mean, though? Any legitimate company will test their product with a lab they are not affiliated with to ensure their product is the correct potency. This is an act of transparency to demonstrate you are getting what you pay for. The companies are doing this the right way to test each batch of product they make.

Part of a full panel test

Types of tests

There are two main types of tests, potency and full panel. The potency is primarily for the finished product to show it has the advertised amount of CBD and other cannabinoids, and the full panel is for the raw CBD ingredient to verify that it’s not only potent but free of heavy metals, toxins, and other contaminants. Here at CBD LION, we full panel to test all of our raw CBD ingredients before they make it into any batches of the final product to ensure the highest quality.

Reading the tests

While the testing labs have been around for a while and have perfected the testing methods, they are not used to end consumers' reading results. They are created in a more scientific format that can be confusing to read and may require some math to calculate the overall amount of CBD. We’ve worked with these labs to produce easy to read and understand results, but there are some key terms you need to know to understand better.

Key Terms

Action Level - The level needed for a test to fail on a specific substance

LOQ - Limit of Quantitation, the smallest amount the test can measure.

ND - Not Detected

PPM - Parts per million, way to measure concentration

Calculating CBD amount when given a %

On some of our older test results like our vape pens, the tests only show the percentage of CBD. You can calculate the actual amount by some simple math. For example, the Strawberry Cough 50mg pen result shows 10.51% CBD. The pen is a 50mL pen with a weight of 500mg. If you multiply 500 x .1051 you get 52.55mg of total CBD.

Most of the newer test results have a total for the whole product calculated out. This is something we pushed for as we did not want you to have to do math to figure out the amount of CBD in the product.