My favorite weed store in Cambridge is Yamba Market, and I was there shopping for a challenge for Jill Carreiro. I needed edibles for my training on the Lightlab 3, and had heard that chocolates are hard to analyze for cannabinoids. I figured these ones with flecks of espresso beans in them might be especially challenging.

DO Drops is a brand of edibles under Holistic Industries, a private MSO whose flagship cannabis brand is Liberty. They’re currently sold in MA, MD, and MI, with the pitch: “FUNctional gummies and chocolates that are low sugar and low dose, with just enough THC to lift you up or chill you out while you DO what you need to DO.”

DO Drops are candy products shaped like the “D” in the logo that contain 2.5 mg THC per piece, promoted as “approachable” and useful for microdosing. I found these convenient, but I believe some people titrate increments smaller than 2.5 mg.

Their shape and size are adorable. The bottom of each chocolate is marked with a stamp of the “Intoxicating Cannabinoid” symbol on the bottom in white fondant. This is good for child safety (shoutout to Darwin Millard), and we also found it aesthetic. We would like to see this symbol prominently on the package, as well.

When I shared these with Jill, she wanted to eat more than one. The espresso milk chocolate is tasty, with a pleasant crunch, and it lights up my caffeine sensors. I could also feel the mellowness of THC within minutes of consuming.

Testing for cannabinoids in chocolate is challenging because it’s mostly fat. Most of the compounds in chocolate don’t dissolve in the LightLab solvent. When we heated the mixture of chocolate and solvent, two liquid phases emerged, like oil and water.

We analyzed the solvent phase, and found 1.8 mg THC and 0.35 mg CBG per drop. 1.8 mg is 72% of 2.5 mg, but that doesn’t mean the chocolates were under-potent.

THC is an oil-loving, water-avoiding compound, and we probably didn’t coax every molecule of it from that glob of chocolate. This is a known challenge in testing cannabis products, investigated with elegant experiments reported several years ago: https://lnkd.in/dJC44KVe

We would need to do more work ourselves to confirm that incomplete extraction impacted our measurement. We can say for sure that these DO Drops were tasty, artful, and effective. A great entry in the mass-market infused chocolate category.

hashtag#TastingTesting hashtag#Cannabis hashtag#Science hashtag#HonestData