L04: Stability Across a Wider Range of Conditions

The dose of a given product, printed on its label, is a promise. One which must hold up against challenges throughout the beverage's life. For your active ingredients, though, there are three particular threats to performance in the end product.

Manufacturing, where high shear, heat, and a fast fill line all work on the emulsion. Storage, which might mean a warehouse in July or a truck making its way through the Midwest in February. And the liquid itself, because beverage environments can be complex. All three affect what your customer experiences.

How an emulsion fails

An emulsion holds oil droplets suspended and evenly spread through a beverage. A protective layer around each droplet is what keeps them there.

Weaken that layer and droplets begin to merge. Merged droplets are larger, and larger droplets rise. What was evenly distributed starts collecting in one part of the container.

The cost lands downstream. A lot gets flagged and held. A retail buyer stops reordering because two cans from the same case didn't look the same. A first-time customer decides the category isn't for them. The same protective layer also governs how exposed the active is to oxygen and heat, so a single weakness can surface as separation, as off-flavor, or as a dose that no longer matches the label.

Why one emulsifier can only do so much

For most emulsions serving the hemp beverage industry, that protective layer is built with a single surfactant. These single-stabilizer systems are capable and have supported the growth of the industry up until this point.

The concern with these single emulsifier systems is that any single stabilizer performs better under certain specific conditions than others. The limitation of a single stabilizer becomes the limitation of the emulsion, and therefore the beverage. Emulsion performance thus can govern pH range, carbonation levels, flavor systems, thermal processing, and more. These boundaries dictate what can and can't succeed at scale, and as the hemp beverage industry grows, we thought it was important to broaden the aperture of possibility.

What a multi-emulsifier system changes

L04 distributes the stabilizing work across several emulsifiers instead of concentrating it in one.

Each protects the interface through different conditions and at different scales. When one comes under pressure, the others are still holding. In practice, L04 is stronger against shear pressure in manufacturing, better at holding potency and particle size through rougher storage conditions, and more capable of surviving lower pH, to name a few. That redundancy widens the range of beverages an emulsion can hold together in, which moves the emulsion out of the way of what you want to build.

We test against that range rather than against ideal conditions: multiple beverage matrices, ambient and accelerated storage, rheological analysis across pH, and formulations built to stress an emulsion harder than a commercial product would. Across that program, we've seen strong potency consistency and very little movement in droplet size. Studies are ongoing, and we're glad to walk through the current data with anyone evaluating it.

What didn't change

Nearly everything else. Droplet size is effectively unchanged, so onset is unchanged. Taste, appearance, price, MOQ, and lead time all held. Viscosity came down slightly. L04 drops into your existing process with no reformulation and no new steps.

The point

You print a number on a can, and then you live with it for a year. The emulsion underneath decides whether that number holds through production, through storage, and through whatever beverage you built around it.

Every beverage program has variables worth spending R&D time on. Cannabinoid performance shouldn't be one of them, which is what we mean when we say we do the science so you don't have to.

Want to talk through the stability data? hello@perfectlydosed.com