How to read a COA — Super Feels

What a COA is

A certificate of analysis is the report an independent laboratory produces after testing one specific lot of product. We do not write it and we cannot alter it. The lab receives sealed units from a production run, tests them against a fixed set of methods, and publishes what the instruments measured.

Our testing is carried out by Cora Science, LLC of Austin, Texas, a laboratory accredited to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 by PJLA. The lab, its address and its accreditation number are printed on every page of the report.

Finding your lot number

Every bottle carries a lot number printed on the label. It is short, a few letters followed by a few digits. That number, and only that number, ties the bottle in your hand to its lab reports.

Type it into the lookup box on the home page. Capitals and spacing do not matter.

When the report opens, check it against the bottle. Near the top of the first page is a Sample Image, a photograph of the actual units the laboratory received, with the lot number visible on them. It should read the same as yours.

One lot, more than one report

Do not expect to find everything on a single document. A lot is sampled more than once, for different purposes, and each submission produces its own report with its own Job ID and its own dates. Between them they cover:

Potency — what active compounds are in the product and how much of each.
Safety — microbial contamination and heavy metals.

The two are usually submitted weeks apart, so their dates will not agree, and neither will their Job IDs. That is normal and does not mean the reports disagree. What must match across them is the lot number. If the lookup page lists more than one report for your lot, read both.

Checking the header first

Before reading a single result, confirm the report is about your product. The top of page one tells you:

Client — should read Super Feels. A report issued to anyone else is not ours.
Name — the product the lab was given. It should describe what you bought.
Lot Number — must match your bottle.
Job ID and Sample ID — the laboratory tracking numbers for that submission.
Received, Completed and Issued — when the lab took the sample in, finished the work, and released the report.
Revision — shown in the page header. Revision 00 is the original release. A higher number means the lab reissued the report, and the Revision History section near the back says why.

The potency panels

Mitragyna alkaloids

The alkaloids that occur naturally in kratom leaf. The panel reports each one separately and then totals them.

Mitragynine — the most abundant alkaloid in the leaf, and the figure most people are looking for.
7-Hydroxymitragynine — present naturally, in far smaller amounts than mitragynine.
Paynantheine, speciogynine and speciociliatine — the other alkaloids that come with whole leaf. Seeing them reported alongside mitragynine is what a leaf-derived product looks like.
Total Mitragyna Alkaloids — the sum of the rows above.

The relationship worth understanding is between the first two. In ordinary leaf material, 7-hydroxymitragynine sits well under one percent of the mitragynine figure. Work it out for yourself by dividing the one by the other. A report where 7-hydroxymitragynine makes up a large share of the total alkaloids is describing a concentrated or enriched product rather than a leaf one. The ratio tells you more than either number on its own.

Kavalactones

The active compounds in kava root. Six are reported individually, along with three flavokawains:

Kavain, dihydrokavain, methysticin, dihydromethysticin, yangonin and desmethoxyyangonin — the six kavalactones that account for most of the activity. Their proportions vary between kava cultivars and growing regions, so two honest reports of the same product can look different here.
Flavokawain A, B and C — minor compounds reported for completeness. Any of them may come back below the limit of quantitation.
Total Kavalactones — the figure to read if you want a single number.

Unit weight analysis

A density measurement, in grams per millilitre. It looks like housekeeping, but the lab uses it to convert the potency results between units, which is the subject of the next section.

Two units, one set of results

This is the part that causes the most confusion. Each potency panel is printed twice, once in mg/mL and once in w/w%. These are not two separate tests and they do not add up. They are the same measurements expressed two ways, converted using the measured density, and the report says exactly that in its Additional Report Notes. Do not add them together.

mg/mL — milligrams per millilitre of liquid. Use this if you want to know how much is in the bottle.
w/w% — percentage by weight. Use this to compare against a product sold by weight rather than by volume.

To get the amount in a whole unit, multiply the mg/mL figure by the volume of the bottle in millilitres, which is printed on your own label. A result of 1 mg/mL in a 50 mL bottle means 50 mg in the bottle. That arithmetic is the only way to turn a concentration into a per-bottle amount, and it is worth doing before comparing one product against another.

The safety panels

Microbial examination

Five tests for organisms that should not be in a drink: total aerobic plate count, total yeast and mould, total coliforms, Escherichia coli and Salmonella. The first three carry an upper limit in colony forming units. The last two must not be detected at all in a ten gram sample. Every row carries its own verdict in the Notes column.

Elemental impurities

Arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead, measured by ICP-MS. Each has its own limit and each is judged against it individually. These are the four to check if you read nothing else on the safety report.

How to tell a limit from a measurement

The Specification column tells you how to read the row, and it says one of two things:

Report Results — there is no pass or fail here. The lab was asked to measure the value and state it, nothing more. Every potency row works this way, which is why a potency panel cannot be failed.
A limit, written as NMT — not more than. The result is judged against it, and the Notes column on the right carries the verdict. Every safety row works this way.

So a page full of Report Results is not a page with no standards applied. It is a page where the measurement itself is the answer. Look to the Notes column for a verdict, and where that column is populated, read it.

Reading the values

<LOQ — below the limit of quantitation. Something may be present, in a trace too small to put a reliable number on. On a safety panel this is the result you want.
Not Detected or ND — not found at any level the method can measure.
LOQ — the smallest amount that method can put a number on. It describes the sensitivity of the test, not the contents of the bottle.
NMT and NLT — not more than, and not less than. The boundaries a specification sets.
CFU/g — colony forming units per gram, the unit for microbial counts.
N/A — not applicable to that row.
Method Code — the laboratory reference for the procedure used. Beside it is the date and time the instrument ran.

Confirming a report is genuine

Anyone can put a PDF on a website. These are the marks that make a real report checkable:

The Report ID in the Revision History section, a long unique identifier issued by the laboratory for that document.
The Authorization page at the end, signed and dated by the laboratory director, naming the person who released it.
The page footer, which repeats the work order, sample number and dates on every single page.
The accreditation statement, which names ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and the accrediting body.

That footer also states the report may not be reproduced except in its entirety. Treat that as your cue to be wary of a single page, a cropped screenshot, or a results table retyped onto a web page. Ask for the whole PDF, which is exactly what this site gives you.

What a report cannot tell you

A COA describes the sample the laboratory received, on the date it was tested. It does not speak for any other lot, and it says nothing about how a bottle was stored after it left us. Results relate only to the specific material analysed, which is the reason testing is done lot by lot rather than once per product. Read the report attached to your own lot number, and do not assume a figure from one lot carries over to the next.

If something does not match

If your lot number returns nothing, if the report describes a product other than the one you are holding, or if a figure does not look right to you, tell us. All three are things we want to know about immediately, and the form on the contact page reaches us directly. Send the lot number with your message.