Hemp oil is a word you come across on very different bottles. One carries a price of a few euros for half a litre, another forty euros for ten millilitres. That difference is not marketing. They are simply not the same products.
All three meanings come from the same plant, Cannabis sativa. What sets them apart is which part of the plant is in them.
Hemp seed oil: pressed from the seeds
Hemp seed oil is cold pressed from the seeds. The same process as with sunflower or linseed oil, only with hemp seed. What you get is a green-yellow oil with a nutty taste.
The seeds contain virtually no cannabinoids. Those are produced in the flowers and the leaves, not in the seed. Hemp seed oil therefore contains no meaningful amount of CBD and no THC. It is a kitchen oil and a skin oil, and that is how it is sold: in bottles from 250 millilitres to a litre, for a few tens of euros.
Rich in unsaturated fatty acids, suitable for cold and lukewarm dishes. Not for strong heating, which costs it its taste.
CBD oil: extract from leaf and flower, dissolved in a carrier oil
CBD oil is something else entirely. Here an extract is drawn from the flowers and leaves of the hemp plant, where the cannabinoids do sit. That extract is too concentrated to use on its own, so it is dissolved in a carrier oil.
And that is where the confusion starts: that carrier oil is very often hemp seed oil. With us that is the case in 57 of the oils. The label then reads something like “hemp seed oil, hemp extract”, and anyone glancing quickly reads “hemp oil” into it.
So the distinction is not in the plant and not in the bottle, but in what has been dissolved into it. A 10 ml bottle with 1000 mg CBD is a concentrate. A 250 ml bottle of hemp seed oil is food. That the second sometimes contains some CBD does not make it a concentrate.
Cannabis oil: the third meaning, and the only one that is not allowed
Cannabis oil is an extract from cannabis with a meaningful THC content. THC is the compound that gets you high, and in the Netherlands it falls under the Opium Act. That makes cannabis oil something other than the two above, legally and practically.
Legal CBD oil in the Netherlands stays below 0.05% THC. If you come across a “hemp oil” promising you will notice something in that direction, you are buying something other than what you thought you were looking at.
And then there is hemp oil that has nothing to do with any of this
Search for hemp oil and you will also find bottles for carp fishing and oil for finishing wooden furniture. That is not a mistake by the search engine. Hemp seed oil is a cheap, plant-based oil with useful properties outside food, and those markets use the same word.
Useful to know if you get search results that make no sense. Your search term is simply ambiguous.
How to tell them apart when buying
Four things on the label tell you within ten seconds what you are looking at.
- Is there a number of milligrams of CBD on it? If so, it is CBD oil. Hemp seed oil states no mg of cannabinoids, because there are none in it.
- How big is the bottle? Concentrates come in 10 to 30 ml with a pipette. Kitchen oil comes in 250 ml or more.
- What is in the ingredient list? “Hemp seed oil” alone is the kitchen oil. “Hemp seed oil, hemp extract” is CBD oil in a hemp seed oil base.
- Is there a lab report? A cannabinoid product comes with a per-batch analysis, stating the content and the THC percentage. For pure hemp seed oil that is not needed.
When in doubt, the price per millilitre is the quickest test. Around ten euros per 100 ml is food. Several euros per millilitre is a concentrate.
What we carry
Our CBD oil is the second category: extract in a carrier oil, independently tested per batch, with the content and the THC percentage on the packaging.
We also have one product that sits exactly on the line: the Dutch Hemp CBD hemp seed oil of 250 ml. Cold-pressed hemp seed oil to finish cold dishes with, with 250 mg CBD dissolved in it, roughly 1 mg per millilitre. That is a low concentration compared with a pipette bottle, and that is the point: this is a kitchen oil with something in it, not a concentrate.
If you want to know how those concentrations work and what a percentage means, read what is CBD oil.
