Hemp Market Keeps Growing
During the last several years, there has been significant growth in the hemp industry. According to some reports, we should expect a further boom in hemp production by 2023.
The demand for hemp products is steadily increasing and therefore, we’ve witnessed an incredible variety of products and services stemming from it.
Hemp has a low amount of psychoactive components, however, it is rich in cannabidiol (CBD)
that can be extracted from it.
Hemp and CBD products are now available at any leading departmental store or supermarket, including ecommerce platforms and brand sites.
Scientists continue to research CBD effects, however, there is already plenty of proof of the numerous health benefits of quality CBD oils.
As producers and manufacturers make CBD oil from hemp plants, they have discovered how to turn full-scale production into a new profitable industry.
Additionally, new federal regulations encourage small businesses to enter the hemp market as they do not need to compete with big national providers.
What is the Best Entry Point to the Hemp Market?
If you are a small-business owner, the best option to enter the hemp market is to extract hemp oil. Hemp oil is rich in CBD and does not have a high concentration of delta 9 THC. You can produce hemp oil using plant material and a botanical extraction process.
There are various ways to extract hemp oil, however, many experts consider supercritical CO2 extraction is the safest, quickest, and purest of all the extraction processes.. extraktLAB offers a supercritical CO2 extractor. Our extractors deliver the highest daily throughput of biomass. They also have the lowest processing costs in the hemp oil industry.
What are the Best Hemp Oil Refinement Methods?
For those new in the hemp industry, it is not always clear if the extracted hemp oil is the final product. In many cases, it needs further refinement.
In this article, we will overview different refinement methods. We will also discuss what you can do with the hemp oil after extraction.
1) Producing isolate from extracted hemp oil
Producing isolates from the extracted hemp oil is one of the most popular refinement methods.
With this refinement method, you can separate specific cannabinoid components. It helps to get rid of impurities from crude oil. Producing distillate and isolate also separates possible pesticides in the product.
Also Read: 9 Brilliant Ideas On How To Use Tea Tree Oil
2) Producing distillate from extracted hemp oil
There are various distillation apparatuses. Among them are a wiped film still or other devices with efficient molecular distillation methods. With these methods, you can produce a distillate.
Creating distillate is important for formulating products that are highly potent with as little undesired products as possible. This includes trace amounts of solvents, plant chlorophylls, and other compounds. Avoiding these in a final distillate makes sure that a potent product can be used to create tinctures, edibles, vaporizers, etc.
3) Decoloring Extracted Hemp Oil
After the extraction process, the crude hemp oil will have a dark green color. You can produce decolored hemp oil with the help of sorbents.
For example, you could use CarbonX, a carbon-based filtration media. The sorbent will remove most of the chlorophylls and color. You can do this with a minimal loss of active compounds.
Keep in mind that the choice of a sorbent depends on the solvent.
You can also use ethanol as a solvent for hemp oil extraction. Then C18 will remove large plant waxes and sugar alcohols (polyols).
Alumina, a Lewis acid, will suck up Lewis bases. Silicon dioxide, or silica, contains silanols that we can protonate depending on the pH.
Before using any of these sorbents, please consider the preconditioning.
4) Selling non-refined crude hemp oil
One of the options is to sell the crude hemp oil as it.
This means that you can avoid the refining process altogether. The crude hemp oil market is quite vast, therefore, you are very likely to find plenty of buyers as long as raw CBD oil is in high demand.
After CO2 extraction, hemp oil has a deep green color. A crude extracted hemp oil still contains residual plant material, as well as chlorophyll.
However, you can easily sell this product on the market to other businesses. You do not need any further refinement or filtration.
5) Winterizing the extracted hemp oil
You can also consider winterizing the hemp oil extract. This process removes the waxes from ethanolic solutions.
During winterization, you need to mix the extracted hemp oil with alcohol and form a solution. The solution is then chilled to sub zero temperatures in order to solidify the plant fats and waxes. Once this has been accomplished, the solution is filtered leaving behind the solidified waxes and providing a dewaxed oil.
The process of winterizing typically upgrades the concentration of active compounds. However, please note that the waxes’ concentration is about 10-15% depending on the strain.
For this reason, you may lose some activities that remained in the precipitated waxes.
extraktLAB has developed the fastest vacuum filtration apparatus in history. It is called DrainDroyd. Our clients used DrainDroyd to dewax winterized hemp oil. It works with the capacity of five liters in five minutes.
extraktLAB manufactures extraction equipment for hemp and botanical extraction industries.
Our equipment has the lowest operating costs and fastest throughput. It also has the most scalable design. Contact us today to learn more about leading-edge hemp oil equipment.
Also Read: Does CBD Consumption Make You Addicted?