Soulsome uses a holistic, artisanal approach to making our full-spectrum hemp extract. The challenge has always been to make the most effective full-spectrum CBD oil available, but also to make it in an environmentally friendly way with a focus on the people who make it and the customers who benefit from it. When it comes to making a premium cold-pressed oil that matches all of these criteria, you’ll see that we went to extraordinary lengths to create Soulsome cold-pressed CBD oil.
The entourage effect is important for us.
The most obvious step in making our cold-pressed oil was to avoid all the conventional CBD extraction methods. Why? Well, to start with we wanted Soulsome to be both a pure, and full-spectrum CBD oil. Full-spectrum oils come with all of the micronutrients, polyphenols, terpenes, and other micro-compounds which naturally occur in the hemp plant. When taken together these compounds work together in the human cannabinoid system to make the CBD dose more effective for the user–something called “The Entourage Effect.”
However, when the extraction process only extracts CBD or CBD and a few other compounds from the plant, the entourage effect is greatly reduced or worse, lost entirely. This is one of the principal effects of using CBD and, to make a CBD oil without the benefits of the full-spectrum entourage effect, seemed a little disingenuous to us.
To ensure that, in making our cold-pressed CBD oil, we did not lose this essential effect, we steered well clear of any extraction method which may harm or negate the entourage effect. This means that CO2 extraction, alcohol, and hexane gases were not good options for us to use.
Instead, we turned to an oil extraction method with is thousands of years old and, is still the safest, and most preferred method of extraction for many of the household oils you already have in your kitchen: Cold-pressing, just like the olive oil, palm oil, canola oil or sesame oil in your kitchen.
For us it was a simple choice and came down to one question: If we were offered a salad made with two kinds of olive oil, one made by traditional cold-pressing and the other, made with alcohol or butane gas extraction, which would we choose? For some reason, no one wanted the second one. We applied the same reasoning to the kind of CBD oil we would take if we were feeling stressed out, or perhaps weren’t sleeping well at night. Again, the answer seemed obvious–keep it simple, and keep it pure. Any other choice just made us feel more anxious about taking oil that may, or may not, contain contaminants or by-products from a chemical extraction process.
Use the best quality hemp available
Soulsome’s cold-pressed CBD oil uses the best possible hemp available for one simple reason: The quality of cold-pressed CBD oil depends entirely on the quality of the plant used for extraction. It is very much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get process. Got a weak plant? You can’t expect to make a great oil. With cold pressing, there are no shortcuts and there’s definitely no cheating.
So conscious are we of the quality of our plants that we have taken three extraordinary steps to ensure that we only use the highest possible quality help to make our cold-pressed CBD oil.
Firstly, all our hemp is grown in an indoor, organic environment. Why indoor? It’s simple really, only in an indoor environment can we be 100% sure that our plants obtain the right amount of light, can be completely protected from most pests (so we won’t require pesticides) and can provide a consistent and predictable result every time. In this way, we can protect the quality of our oil and ensure that it is always consistent throughout the seasons.
Secondly, we only use hemp flowers to extract our oil from. We could use other parts of the plant but it is in the flower that the CBD oils and other micronutrients are strongest. We harvest our flowers by hand–having found that our growers are the best judge of ripeness, far better than any harvesting machine would be. This also ensures that we only use the flower and no other part of the plants.
Finally, to ensure that our flowers do not dry out during harvest, we even lower the lights in our indoor growing rooms to optimize the heat levels in the room for the preservation of the flower. In this way the flower stays optimally hydrated without drying out too much, ensuring that all the goodness of the hemp plant is at its very best by the time it gets to you.
Cold Pressed CBD Oil meet… Cold-Pressed Hemp Oil
Once we have harvested the flowers for our cold-pressed CBD oil extraction they are macerated to increase the available surface area and then placed in a mechanical press to squeeze the oils out of them–in much the same way that a good quality olive oil is made.
The result is a highly concentrated CBD hemp oil–a little too concentrated for human use at this point actually. To make our CBD oil consumable it is necessary to dilute the high concentration of CBD to acceptable levels and, for this, most cold-pressed oils mix their CBD oil with a carrier oil, typically MCT oil or medium-chain triglyceride oils. These oils are often made from coconut oil and are not without their benefits, principal among these is their price.
The focus at Soulsome has always been to create the best cold-pressed CBD oil we could afford to make, to cut no corners, and to provide the maximum benefit for our customers. For this reason, we chose not to use traditional carrier oils, but to look a little deeper at the problem of how best to dilute CBD oil for human use, without diminishing the quality of the final product.
Our carrier oil is organically grown hemp seed oil, rich in omegas 3, 6, and 9, along with a range of health benefits surpassing many other cold-pressed oils. The choice of carrier oil was an easy one, mixing our oils from the flower with oils from the seed of the same plant just made sense and reduced complications. Hemp seed oil is already a well-known and trusted oil, widely used. Combining CBD-rich hemp flower oil with oil extracted from the very same plant, one which we already use in foods for its incredible health benefits, was a fairly obvious choice.
No additives, No flavors, No funny stuff–Just Cold Pressed CBD
Soulsome cold-pressed CBD oil contains no additives, no contaminants, and no flavorings or sweeteners, just pure, raw, hemp flower oil. It has a rich earthy flavor to it, richly nutty with just a hit of spice a unique and natural flavor that shouldn’t be masked by artificial mint or strawberry. We’ve created an entirely pure oil by combining oils made by cold-press extraction from two different parts of the same plant. The taste is raw and natural, the flavor is nutty and earthy and the benefits really do speak for themselves. The whole point of Soulsome’s cold-pressed CBD oil is total transparency about our process and the contents of our oil. We will never need to cover something this good for you up with an artificial flavoring because we made Soulsome the right way, from the very start.
