Spruce Review

Written by Cathy Rozyczko — Edited by Jason Brett on February 9, 2021

Spruce yourself up! You can do it with the Spruce CBD lineup. This small brand has a couple of things going for them, mainly their awesome full-spectrum hemp from North Carolina and Kentucky. And we’re super intrigued by their moonshine extraction method! (Yes, you read that right). Spruce deserves the high marks they get from us, but we have just one bone to pick. Read on to see how they fare with our methodology.

Spruce is a small, family-owned CBD business out of North Carolina. In fact, they source their hemp from their home state as well as Kentucky. While Kentucky has been a hotbed for CBD production in the US for a while, North Carolina in recent years has become well-known for their regional hemp farms that use organic, sustainable methods.The Spruce brand works with two of these top-tier farms to produce their full-spectrum CBD products.

Good news! We can easily verify that the Spruce CBD oil is, in fact, full spectrum. That’s why the brand easily earns our Safety Badge. In the potency profiles, we can see the presence of multiple cannabinoids, including CBG. Two huge thumbs up!

Plus, Spruce provides current contaminants tests for their CBD oil, including residual solvents, pesticides, heavy metals, and microbials. They even go above and beyond our testing requirements with mycotoxin tests and terpene profiles for certain products. Way to go!

Since Spruce CBD oil is documented to be free of residual solvents, the brand gets the Quality Badge with flying colors. But for real, we are intrigued by their supposed extraction method — moonshine! Unfortunately, the company goes into zero detail about this… Do us a favor and tell consumers more about this process. It’s part of what differentiates you!

FYI, this is probably a similar process to small batches of CBD oil extracted with alcohol. Hemp parts are soaked in the alcohol (in this case moonshine), which then evaporates, leaving the extract behind. If the manufacturer does their job correctly (and Spruce does), there shouldn’t be any alcohol leftover in the CBD oil.

If you’re looking for a variety of CBD products, Spruce isn’t the place. If you’re looking for potency, you can easily get it in their 2400mg CBD tincture. We love that Spruce only uses full-spectrum cannabidiol and your choice of either organic hempseed oil or organic MCT oil in their tinctures. If you want a little less, you can go with the 750mg bottle. There’s also a CBD tincture specifically for dogs in the lineup.

The only other CBD product in the Spruce catalog is a CBD cream, and to be honest, we kinda wish it wasn’t there.

Why?

Spruce repeatedly states on their product pages that their offerings are 100% natural. Not only is their CBD cream not, but it also has a couple of synthetics that fall on the riskier side.

Whether or not you choose a CBD topical with synthetics is up to you, but we are here to call out anything we see. In this case, you should be aware of both methylchloroisothiazolinone and methylisothiazolinone, potentially sketchy preservatives.

It’s not so much the presence of these synthetics that bothers us, but the misleading 100% natural claim. However, this is really our only axe to grind with Spruce, as we find them to be an otherwise premium vendor.

Bottom Line – Spruce offers full-spectrum CBD products that we can verify have a great profile of cannabinoids and terpenes. Our only issue is their CBD cream that isn’t ‘100% natural’ like the company says.