Posted by Azar Aghayev
A lot of brands in this industry like to treat a lab report as a one-and-done marketing asset. They get a good test result back in the day, put the PDF on their homepage, and use it forever.
That isn't how agriculture works.
Black seed is a natural crop. Every single season brings different amounts of rainfall, sunny days, and soil conditions as a result. Because the raw seed changes from harvest to harvest, the chemical profile moves around too.
We operate on one non-negotiable rule: New harvest, new lab test
We have tested with Eurofins and used two methods:
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HPLC: 3.02% TQ
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NMR: 2.99% TQ (29,907 mg/kg)
HPLC is the liquid chromatography gold standard that isolates and measures Thymoquinone via UV light absorption at room temperature
NMR is Eurofins' proprietary magnetic spectroscopy method that they have adapted for use on oils that verifies the molecule's exact atomic hydrogen signature.
There are many other methods used by the industry. For example, our supplier told us that one of their customers came back with an extremely good TQ result of 4%, from the oil of the same seeds that we have. The method used was GC-MS.
GC-MS doesn't add up for us, and not for the reason you'd first assume. While we fight for every single degree Celsius during cold pressing, GC-MS blasts the oil to around 250°C in the lab to vaporize it before it can even be measured. Thymoquinone is heat -sensitive — published stability studies show it degrades significantly under thermal stress. So if anything, that heat should lower the measurable TQ, not raise it.
So where does a 4% number come from? Most likely a resolution problem, not a heat problem. Black seed oil contains several close chemical cousins of thymoquinone - thymol, carvacrol, thymohydroquinone. When a heat-stressed sample runs through a method that doesn't fully separate these compounds, some of that overlapping signal gets counted as thymoquinone. The number goes up, but not because there's more thymoquinone in the bottle - because the method can't tell it apart from its neighbors.
Either way, the result doesn't reflect what's actually in the oil. That's why we stick with HPLC and NMR - both run at controlled, moderate conditions that separate the compound cleanly instead of cooking the sample first.
P.S. If you look at the text below the HPLC result it says that this test isn't accredited.
Why isn't this test accredited? Accreditation isn't a blanket lab status - it's granted method by method, and it requires the lab to formally validate the method and undergo an independent audit, which costs real time and money. Being accredited to run HPLC on, say, olive oil doesn't mean a lab is accredited to pull thymoquinone numbers out of black seed oil - it's a different oil with different stuff in it, so it counts as a different test.
Labs generally only pursue it for tests with steady, high-volume demand. Thymoquinone testing in black seed oil is a very narrow niche - it's plausible that no general commercial lab has found it worth accrediting, simply because the market for it is too small. We haven't been able to independently confirm whether any lab holds formal accreditation for this specific test, and we're not going to claim otherwise. What we can tell you is that we ran it through two independent methods at two different labs, and they agreed within a few tenths of a percent.
Bookmark this page. See you back here in late 2026 or early 2027 with our next harvest report
