How To Read a Certificate of Analysis (COA)

What is a Certificate of Analysis (COA)?

A Certificate of Analysis (COA) is a lab report from an accredited third-party testing facility that shows the quantity of different cannabinoids found in a product. To ensure transparency, a third party and not the company selling the product should always carry out the product tests.

At Korasana we send a sample from every batch of every product we manufacture to a third-party lab for testing. This ensures that our customers are getting exactly what is being advertised on our product label. 

How do I find the Certificate of Analysis (COA) for my CBD or CBG product?

At Korasana we include the COA on individual product pages and also have a central repository on our website. A customer can find the COA for their product by locating the batch number and date that corresponds to the information found on the product label. The customer can also scan the QR code located on the product package with their smartphone to go directly to the central repository.

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Here you will find the name of the accredited testing facility, a description of the product, the date of the test and the batch number. You should also find the name of the company that the COA was prepared for; this should match the name of the company selling the product.

Cannabinoid Profile

The first thing that you want to look for in a Certificate of Analysis (COA) is the THC content. In order for a product to be consumed and sold across all 50 US states it must contain less than 0.3% THC. In the example above the D9-THC shows 0.010% for the tested tincture, which is well under the federally legal limit.

For this example we are looking at a Full Spectrum CBD tincture*, the next item we need to look for is the total CBD, here we see the tincture contains 59.269 mg/g of CBD. If we multiply that by the size of the bottle (30ml) we would have 1,778 mg of CBD per bottle. 

*Please note that this is a Full Spectrum tincture so there are other cannabinoids present that make up the total cannabinoids (1,821.2 mg) found in the product.

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At the bottom of the report you should see the name and signature of the person(s) that tested the product. You should also find the lab name, contact information and certifications.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately there is a problem of mislabeled products on the market. Transparent companies with high quality products will make their COA’s available to the consumer. Every consumer should know how to read a COA and if it is not readily available, do not buy that product.