How do you know which brand to choose for hemp seeds?
Hemp seeds are exploding as a favorite pick for healthy, organic foodies to add to their daily diet. With an amazing balance of protein, fiber, essential fatty acids, and variety of minerals, hemp could be the supplement that you’ve been looking for.
If you’re curious to learn about the full set of benefits, check out our infographic on “Top 7 Benefits of Hemp Seeds”
For those who are looking to try hemp seeds for the first time, the easiest place to check out is Amazon. Like every other product category, Amazon offers a wide arrange of brands and options for you to choose. But, how do you know which ones to trust and which ones offer the best value?
To make things easier for you, we’ve tried and tested all the hemp seed brands available on Amazon to help you get the best value in your next hemp seed purchase. First, we’ll go ahead and tell you what our top recommendations are, and then break it down to show you how we came to our conclusion. Hope you’ll find this resource useful as you shop for your next superfood.
Best Quality – Manitoba Harvest
You can tell the quality of hemp seeds by their looks, smells and taste. Fresh hulled hemp seeds should be mostly white. You can tell how good the batch of hemp seeds are by seeing how many of the seeds are darker colored. Also, fresh hemp seeds should have a strong nutty aroma while having a fresh grassy to nutty flavor. If the bag doesn’t smell all that much and the seeds don’t really taste like anything, that is a sign that they’re stale and old seeds.
All the brands that we tried were high quality, but Manitoba Harvest was clearly our favorite. This is clearly shown in their customer reviews as well, with an average of 4.7 stars on Amazon.
Their superior quality makes sense considering how they make their hemp seeds. Manitoba Harvest is the only hemp consumer brand that grows, makes and sells its own line of hemp foods. This gives them a distinct advantage over their competitors. Through vertical integration, they are able to tightly control their quality during the planting, cultivation, and packaging stages.
Best Price – Just Hemp Foods
If you’ve shopped for hemp seeds on Amazon, you would have noticed that hemp seeds typically all have amazing reviews. Also, since they are all raw hemp seeds, the nutritional content is the same across the board. So, we comparing the price per pound for each brand to see which brand offers the best value.
From our review, we found that Just Hemp Foods offers the best value for cost conscious customers who use hemp seeds on a regular basis.
These are the price per pound for each brand:
- Just Hemp Foods – $8.99 per lb
- Healthworks – $9.99 per lb
- Manitoba Harvest – $11.04 per lb
- The Raw Food World – $12.95 per lb
- Nutiva – $13.38 per lb
- Terrasoul – $15.32 per lb
- Navitas – $13.93 per lb
- Sun Pyramid – $22.02 per lb
Best Online Reviews – Nutiva
All the hemp seed brands have raving reviews, mainly because they source their hemp seeds from Canada, where hemp is cultivated without using any pesticides or fertilizers. But comparing the online reviews, Nutiva comes out as king, as it has over 1300 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 stars. But as you see in the list, you’ll find all these brands to offer high quality hemp seeds:
- Nutiva – 4.8 stars (1,267 reviews)
- Manitoba Harvest – 4.7 (1930 reviews)
- Just Hemp Foods – 4.8 stars (473 reviews)
- Healthworks – 4.8 stars (330 reviews)
- The Raw Food World – 4.8 stars (172 reviews)
- Sun Pyramid – 4.8 stars (30 reviews)
- Terrasoul – 4.7 stars (94 reviews)
- Navitas – 4.5 stars (124 reviews)
How To Tell The Good From The Bad
With our guide and by checking out more online reviews, you can feel pretty safe with whatever decision you make. Yet, if you still want to check whether the seeds you received are good quality, here’s a good rule of thumb:
Good:
- Mostly white nut – less than 50% green on the nut
- Low number of off colour (yellow) seed
- Fresh, nutty aroma
- Flavor ranges from slight fresh, herbal, grassy to nutty
Bad:
- More yellow colour seeds than white
- Dry feeling in the mouth
- Bitter or chalky aftertaste
The following guidelines were provided by Hemp Oil Canada, one of the leading producers of hemp seeds in Canada.
To help you see the full comparison among the top 5 brands, please reference the table below:
[table id=7 /]We hope this guide helps you in your next purchase of hemp seeds! If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to us at support@ministryofhemp.org.