When choosing between different companies offering delta 8 THC, you don’t want to throw blind guesses. Instead, you want to know as many details about the company as possible — that’s why reviews are paramount if you want to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Here, we’ll cover all the makings of a premium delta 8 THC supplier. We’ll cover the importance of independent testing, where to look for past customer reviews and the importance of a satisfaction guarantee.

Here’s everything you need to know about vetting a delta 8 THC vendor.

TLDR: Why You Should Buy From Area 52

We’re a newer company to enter this space. The whole reason we decided to take this endeavor was because of how sick and tired we were of ordering shitty delta 8 products from unethical vendors. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t.

We’ve outlined 7 key characteristics that make for a quality delta 8 THC vendor and make sure we tick of each of these boxes for every product that leaves our facility: 

1. All products are third-party tested, with results published live.
2. All vape products are compliant with the new PACT laws (age-verification process).
3. All hemp is sourced from local (USA) organic hemp farms.
4. All products guaranteed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
5. Our customer service team actually knows what they’re talking about. You’re not going to get a copy/paste response.
6. All our delta 8 THC is extracted from industrial hemp.
7. We’ve received a ton of positive reviews on various cannabis authority websites.

Despite being a young company, we have already made some big headlines on the cannabis scene. We’ve been featured by industry-leading digital magazines and positively reviewed by experts such as herbalists, neurobiologists, science writers, and biohackers.

What to Look for When Buying Delta 8 THC from Vendors

1. Third-Party Testing

The Delta 8 THC space is unregulated, so it’s the consumer’s responsibility to research any company selling delta 8 THC products out there. The best way to ensure the quality and safety of any given product is to look for a certificate of analysis (CoA) from a third-party laboratory.

A laboratory is considered a third party if it has no affiliation with the manufacturer. Such facilities can provide unbiased results about the product’s potency, its entire chemical profile, and purity.

Only purchase from companies that publish relevant and up-to-date certificates of analysis on their website — or, at least, send them via email.

Delta 8 THC is a relatively new space, so there’s an abundance of different manufacturers offering “the best delta 8 THC on the market.” Unfortunately, there are many untrustworthy vendors on the scene, there is no shortage of companies selling low-quality delta 8 THC, marketing their products as a cheap alternative to get high.

However, for health-conscious users, delta 8 THC is about more than getting buzzed. The quality of your delta 8 extracts can make or break the experience, but you get what you pay for, as the old saying goes.

Below we present the most important points to check on your way to getting delta 8 THC from online vendors.

2. PACT Compliant

The PACT act is an older act designed to make it more difficult for minors to order cigarettes online. It was recently updated to include vaporizers, which include delta 8 THC vape products.

In order to remain compliant with these changes, vendors must incorporate an age-verification process during checkout.

The process is relatively simple but involves uploading a piece of photo ID to confirm you’re real age.

Believe us, this isn’t something we want to do — it’s annoying as hell, but it’s something that needs to happen in order to stay compliant.

A lot of companies aren’t incorporating this age verification step, which is completely illegal. If you find a company that isn’t following this important rule, it makes us wonder what else the company is doing that they’re not supposed to. All high-quality delta 8 vendors are incorporating this process into their checkout. If you find a company that isn’t, we recommend looking elsewhere.

3. Hemp Source

Here we need to cover two aspects: legality and quality.

Delta 8 THC can be extracted from both hemp and marijuana.

Marijuana-derived extracts are federally illegal; you can buy them only in states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use; there are 17 such states as of this writing.

Hemp-derived products, on the other hand, are legal in all 50 states because they contain less than 0.3% of THC. This makes them compliant with the provisions of the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp on a federal level.

That being said, individual states can regulate the legality of delta 8 THC within their jurisdictions. Currently, you won’t be able to buy delta 8 THC in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Rhode Island, and Utah.

The second aspect — quality — refers to how the hemp was farmed. Hemp plants are bioaccumulators, meaning they easily absorb everything from their environment. Mass-produced hemp that has been grown in contaminated soil and pesticides will yield poor-quality material for extraction. The best hemp-derived delta 8 THC products are made from organic hemp that produces clean, high-CBD flowers.

4. Satisfaction Guarantee

There’s no better way to prove to customers that a brand stands behind its products than by offering a money-back guarantee. In our experience, only companies that know they’re selling inferior products don’t offer this level of security to their customers.

We recommend sticking to brands that can back their products by giving your money back if you aren’t happy with it. If the product is as high-grade as they say it is, there should be no reason to need to give any money back — right?

5. Knowledgeable Staff

Honestly, there’s nothing worse than asking a question to the customer service team and getting some super generic answer back in response. What’s the point of having a customer service team if they’re just going to copy and paste stuff from around the web.

Most of the time you won’t need to interact with the customer service team at all — however, when you do, you’ll want them to be as knowledgeable and responsive as possible.

6. Extraction Method

The gold standard for hemp-derived products is CO2 extraction because it doesn’t use additional heat sources or solvents to pull the desired compounds from the plant material. Once extracted, the viscous liquid goes through a filtering process known as distillation, where the redundant compounds are removed — leaving pure delta 8 THC behind as a result. The end product is thick, slightly less concentrated than isolated, and has a bit pink in color.

The isolation process uses a few toxic chemicals that need to be purged from the final product to ensure its safety. Unfortunately, many companies fail to run this process properly and sell contaminated extracts.

7. Past User Reviews

Past user reviews are important because they reflect personal feedback. However, you must compare the reviews on the company’s website to those posted on third-party websites, as there may be a world of difference between them.

It’s a good idea to check out reviews from several different sources. The vendor website will usually hand-pick a few of the best reviews to share, but will usually leave out the bad reviews.

Check for reviews on forums or industry-expert websites written by people who have actually used the products and know what they’re talking about (easier said than done, I know).

If you Google the company name + “review” you should find lots of results. Signs the company could be a scam are reviews that are clearly fake or exaggerated, or a lack of reviews completely.

Even the best delta 8 brands will have a blend of positive and neutral reviews, with a few negative reviews sprinkled in. The overall sentiment should be very positive, but don’t get hung up on one or two bad reviews. You have to remember that just as much as unethical brands pay for fake positive reviews for their brand, they also buy fake negative reviews for others.

Beware of Cheap Delta 8 THC Products

Delta 8 THC is relatively new, and not every company can afford the money to invest in the right machinery and highly qualified lab workers. And since the market remains unregulated, companies selling delta 8 on the cheap probably push low-quality products that may contain toxic solvent residue and other dangerous ingredients.

Unless you’re a reseller and buy delta 8 THC in bulk, extremely low prices should raise doubts about the product’s quality. That’s because hemp only produces delta 8 THC in negligible amounts, so not only does the extraction require high-tech equipment and skilled workers, but it also calls for large quantities of biomass.

This, in turn, translates to a higher cost per product.

The average cost of delta 8 THC is around $0.10 per milligram — which makes it about the same rate as you’d expect to pay for other cannabinoids like CBD.

If you’re finding companies that are selling their delta 8 THC for less than 5 cents per mg — ask yourself what this company might be doing to get the cost so low.

Here are some of the ways companies may be cutting costs: 

• Sourcing low-grade hemp — increases the risk of contamination
• Hiring unskilled lab technicians — dramatically increases the risk of contamination
• Not paying for third-party testing — lacks transparency and masks potential contaminants in the final products
• Selling fake delta 8 THC products — at best these will be ineffective, at the worst they can make you sick

Why You Should Buy Premium Delta 8 Products

Producing delta 8 THC takes more time, effort, and precision than producing any other type of cannabis extracts.

It’s critical that each stage of production is done correctly, and with a high degree of accuracy. In order to achieve this, we need to employ highly skilled (and expensive) chemists, source very high-quality starting hemp, buy or lease costly lab equipment, and pay for third-party lab tests.

Additionally, if we find any discrepancies on the lab tests, we toss out the entire batch. This is rare, but we’ve done it in the past if the results don’t meet our strict standards.

All of these steps add to the cost of the product — but is the only way to ensure everything you order from us is up to snuff.

Here at Area 52, we’re aware that our products have a slightly higher price than their competition. However, we strive to offer the best quality of delta 8 THC products, starting from the source. Our hemp plants come from organic farms in Colorado and Kentucky, known for some of the best conditions for growing hemp in the US.

As a team of individuals that want the delta 8 THC space to flourish, we urge competitors to raise their standards and cater to health-conscious consumers who will spread the word on how decent products should be made.

Cheap Delta 8 THC Won’t Save You Money

When you purchase a cheap product, not only are you risking your health, but you can also get cheap results. The potency in most delta 8 THC products available locally contains significantly less D8 than written on the bottle.

This means you’re going to need to take a higher dose to get the same effects. We’ve had samples from other brands (which we won’t name), that needed nearly twice as much per dose to get the desired level of effects.

The initial cost may feel lower, but when you need to take double or triple doses to get the same effects, the cost ends up being much more expensive.

Where to Buy Delta 8 THC: The Area 52 Standard

Our team at Area 52 has created a collection of top-shelf delta 8 THC products that excel at quality, formulations, and overall experience. We only use pure delta 8 THC distillates and combine them with strain-specific terpenes from cannabis to provide a wider range of benefits and delicious, natural flavors.

Everything that leaves our facility has been rigorously tested. We don’t sell anything we wouldn’t use ourselves — so that means nothing but the best. We have no patience for low-grade delta 8 products and don’t want anything to do with them ourselves.

When you buy from Area 52 you’re getting nothing but the best.

Feel free to explore our collection, and if you’ve already tried some of our products, please leave us your feedback in the reviews section!