Do You Know Where Your CBD Comes From?

If you’ve ever bought any ingestible CBD from Amazon, there’s a good chance the product you bought was a sham. A new study from CBD Oracle, an independent cannabis consumer research company, found that the majority of ingestible CBD products sold on Amazon may not contain any cannabinoids at all.

CBD Oracle purchased 56 of the most popular “hemp” ingestibles sold on Amazon and sent them to InfiniteCAL, a third-party lab, for testing. The results were mind-boggling: Only 30% of the products contained CBD, 62.5% had no cannabinoids at all, 96% of products did not provide an accurate dosage, and 11% contained THC. Of the brands that contained THC, one had a dose of 76 mg per gummy, an amount that Oracle stated is “well above what would be acceptable in a state-legal marijuana edible.” (Indeed, legal dispensaries in Colorado must sell gummies with no more than 10 mg of THC per piece.) 

What may be even more concerning, however, is that 95% of the companies did not have certificates of analysis from a third-party lab, which is required by both the USDA and states, and 52% of the product pages made an unapproved medical claim about their products. 

How have these companies gotten away with it?

Well, we have to start with Amazon itself. Amazon has an official policy that bans all ingestible CBD—including ours—to prevent unreliable or illegal products from making it onto the site. (CBD from hemp is legal in all 50 states; CBD from marijuana is not.) Amazon does, however, sell legitimate CBD topicals from reputable brands—just be sure to do your research.

But with the ban, some CBD companies saw opportunity, scrubbing all mention of CBD from their product names and descriptions, replacing it with “hemp,” and hawking them anyway. (Just do a search for “CBD gummies” in Amazon, and you’ll see hundreds of “hemp” products purporting to bring you peace, relaxation, sleep, and calm, some for a bargain price of $15.99.) But in what may be the most ironic black-market twist ever, it turns out many of these brands illicitly selling the stuff through the site aren’t actually selling the stuff at all. 

For legitimate CBD brands like ours, this is frustrating, and it confuses consumers even more about a compound that is already largely misunderstood. It’s bad for the consumers, of course, and bad for the industry at large. 

If you’re buying ingestible CBD, we urge you to buy from a reputable source. At Miraflora Naturals, we grow our own USDA-certified organic hemp on our family farmw, and we have full control over every product from seed to seal. We have every product rigorously tested by a third party, and we have certificates of analysis clearly posted on our web site to prove it. 

Miraflora is the CBD brand you can trust—wherever you find our products sold.