Labeling an essential oil “therapeutic grade” is a marketing tactic, not an official designation. Companies invent terms like “certified therapeutic grade,” without specifying any agency that certifies essential oils—because no such agency or certification exists.
The only source for classification and standards for essential oils is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a global overseer that determines what can be called an essential oil and what is simply an oil or an extract. This organization sets rules for labeling containers of essential oils; how they should be packaged; how testing should be carried out on the oils to determine their acid value, phenol, water, and benzene content; how to determine their chromatography; and many other arcane things about them. ISO also sets very specific rules for individual oils including aniseed, bergamot, bitter orange, caraway, citronella, clementine, cypress, eucalyptus, ginger, lemon, mandarin, matricaria (chamomile), oregano, palmarosa, parsley, petitgrain, rose, sandalwood, spike lavender, sweet orange, tarragon, tea tree, vetiver, wintergreen, and others. The standards are extensive and address many of the essential oils currently on the market, but they do not define any kind of guidelines for “therapeutic grade” oils.
One of the most aggressive campaigns to make certification for therapeutic grade seem real comes from doTerra, the MLM company that states its commitment to purity on its website. The company created its own labeling to promote its Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade® (CPTG) protocol, touting its commitment to “set the standard for purity in the essential oil industry.” This involves “a rigorous examination of every batch of oil, along with third-party testing to guarantee transparency.” The company describes a process in which it tests each oil’s chemical composition right after distillation, before the oil actually leaves its originator. It then retests the oils as they arrive at doTerra’s facilities, to be sure that the oil tested at its point of origin has not been adulterated or otherwise changed between its point of origin and arrival at the bottling plant. The website goes on to detail a third round of testing, this time to ensure the purity of the oil after it has been bottled. doTerra lists eight kinds of testing that take place within its three rounds of examination: organoleptic (human sensory), microbial, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, chirality, isotopic analysis, and heavy metal testing. If these tests truly take place on every batch of essential oil, it may be that the company can stake their reputation on the purity of their oils—but while all of this testing certainly can help determine purity, it has nothing to do with therapeutic value. Whether this oil has any kind of therapeutic characteristics requires an entirely different kind of testing, the kind carried out on pharmaceuticals and vaccines. No essential oil marketing company conducts testing to see if these oils can be effective as treatment for so much as a scratch, let alone any illness or disease.
Other essential oils companies also use the term “therapeutic grade” to describe their products, but most of them provide no proof to back up this claim. Until science catches up with the popularity of essential oils, we cannot know if any of them have a rightful place in the modern apothecary.
“Food grade” is another marketing term, as one bottle of bergamot essential oil is as safe to ingest (in miniscule amounts) as another one. The term comes from the equipment side of food manufacturing, signifying that a machine that processes a food product can safely come into contact with that food without somehow contaminating it. Essential oil bottlers picked up this term fairly recently, to lead consumers to believe that their products can be consumed as flavorings in food or as therapeutics when added to water.
Many essential oils are used by the food industry as flavorings, because they provide a natural, sugar- and chemical-free flavor, and they are Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Some essential oils companies including LorAnn Oils sell their oils almost exclusively to food manufacturers and packagers, and they make their oils available to consumers as well for cooking. While these oils are no different from the ones you may purchase for use in diffusers, the fact that they are from the same bottler that supplies them to cookie, candy, and ice-cream companies provides some assurance that they are probably fine to use in your home baking, if you follow the supplier’s explicit directions for doing so. You can tell if such an oil has been approved for this use by its packaging, which must have a Nutrition Facts label that provides information about calories, additives, and vitamin and mineral content. If the essential oil does not have a Nutrition Facts label, it has not been approved for consumption.