2. what are the sofi labs?
From fingerprinting each and every harvest (batch) of our plants, to the meticulous flavour testing of our final formulations, the sofi labs are where much of the sofi plant magic takes place!
(Of course, the real magic happens in the earth, powered by the sun as the plants grow, and we are simply the beneficiaries) - but our labs are where we truly understand what it is that we are going to deliver in each harvest to you!
In our labs, you’ll find a series of incredible, and highly technical machines that carry out the tasks necessary to create this comprehensive account of each and every harvest of plants. (For some visuals of the sofi labs, click here).
Our machines
Our inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer machine detects any heavy metals present in the crop soil, by generating a plasma from the solution using extremely high heat (around 10,000 degrees). The quality of elements within the sample can then be determined using the intensity of light emitted from plasma at a particular wavelength.
Meanwhile, the high-pressure liquid chromatography machine (or HPLC) that we use harnesses techniques of analytical chemistry to separate, identify, and quantify each component in a mixture!
This divides each extract into a few hundred specific compounds so they can be measured by their molecular weight, providing a comprehensive fingerprint of - not only the entire plant - but each of the hundreds of compounds within the plant itself.
If we haven’t completely lost you yet, you may be interested in learning more about how and why we chemically fingerprint each of our plants here.