Who Koi is in 2026

Koi CBD started in 2015 in Los Angeles as a family business — a brother, sister and cousin who, by the company’s own account, still run it. For the first half of its life Koi was essentially a vape company. The product that made the name was Koi CBD vape juice, sold in 250mg and 500mg bottles, and for a stretch around 2018 it was one of the most widely stocked CBD e-liquids in American smoke shops.

That product no longer exists. Koi’s current catalogue has 31 items and not one of them is a bottled e-liquid. If you came here searching for it, we wrote a separate piece on what happened to Koi CBD vape juice and what replaced it.

What Koi sells now is a full-spectrum hemp catalogue that looks much more like a modern brand: CBD gummies in two potencies, delta-8 and delta-9 THC gummies, a CBN sleep gummy, THCA flower in three grades, pre-rolls, a disposable vape, a tincture, four topicals, a pet line, and mushroom chocolate. The house extract is branded PRIZM — Koi’s broad-spectrum material, which they list at 0.001% THC, effectively undetectable.

The short version: Koi is no longer the cheapest brand in the category and hasn’t been for years. What it has instead is a decade of continuous operation, a wider formulation range than almost anyone at its size, and a returns policy that is genuinely better than the industry norm.

Category scores

We score each part of the range separately, because Koi is uneven. The gummies and topicals are strong; the entry-level CBD gummies are poor value; the THCA side is newer and less proven.

The range, product by product

What Koi actually costs per milligram

Price per milligram is the only honest way to compare CBD products, and it is where Koi’s catalogue splits in two. The full-spectrum jars and the large topicals are competitive. The small-count Anytime Balance gummies are not, and Koi merchandises them prominently.

The practical takeaway: a jar of Complete Full Spectrum gummies gives you 25mg of full-spectrum CBD per piece for less than half the per-milligram cost of the 10mg Anytime Balance gummies sitting next to it on the same shelf. If you want the reasoning behind this way of comparing, we set it out in our guide to hemp price per milligram.

Lab testing and what the COAs show

Koi third-party tests every batch through an accredited lab and puts a QR code on the label that resolves to the certificate for that specific batch, searchable by batch number. That is the correct implementation — batch-level rather than a single representative COA reused across a whole product line, which is what weaker brands do. On the THCA flower, potency is published per strain rather than as a range for the whole tier.

Two things we look for and Koi gets right: the potency panel matches the label within a sensible tolerance, and the full-spectrum products declare their delta-9 content rather than burying it. Two things worth knowing: the PRIZM broad-spectrum products are listed at 0.001% THC rather than a flat zero, which is the honest way to describe a non-detect, and the full-spectrum products do contain enough delta-9 to matter if you are tested at work.

Where the labelling slips is at the top of the range. The Dragon Blend headlines 125mg of total cannabinoids and its delta-8 and delta-9 figures, but does not publish the THCP fraction — and THCP is the component doing the most work per milligram. The 5g THCA disposable is worse: it quotes total oil volume with no cannabinoid breakdown at all. For a brand that gets batch COAs right, that is an odd gap.

If you have never opened a certificate of analysis, our COA guide walks through what each panel means. And if drug testing is a concern, read does hemp THC show up on a drug test before you buy anything full spectrum — this is not a hypothetical risk with Koi, and it is the subject of one of the cases below.

The availability problem

The most practical criticism of Koi in 2026 is not price or quality — it is that a meaningful share of the catalogue is regularly out of stock. When we checked on 28 August 2026, both delta-8 gummy strengths and the Dragon Blend were unavailable, and the THCA flower tiers have a history of selling out.

That matters more than it sounds, because the affected products are concentrated in the intoxicating half of the range — exactly the part Koi has been expanding into. If you are buying CBD, you will almost always find what you want. If you are buying delta-8 or a multi-cannabinoid blend, check the product page before you plan around it, and read our delta 8 review for the alternatives.

The legal history, stated plainly

Search for Koi and you will find the word “lawsuit” attached to it. Here is the actual record, because most of what is written about it online is wrong in one direction or the other.

In April 2019, two plaintiffs sued Koi in Los Angeles Superior Court after one of them failed a workplace drug test and lost her job; the product involved was Koi CBD vape juice, marketed at the time as 0% THC. In November 2019 the FDA sent Koi a warning letter over disease claims — the agency quoted marketing copy about pain, diabetes, opioid addiction and tumours. A putative class action followed in December 2019 in the Central District of California. The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed it, without prejudice, on 10 February 2020, three days after Koi moved to dismiss. No class was certified, nothing was adjudicated, and there was no settlement. A second FDA warning letter arrived in July 2023, this one about delta-8 gummies as an unapproved food additive.

That is the whole file. It is not nothing, but it is also not the pattern of consumer fraud the search results imply, and the specific claims the FDA objected to in 2019 are gone from Koi’s current product pages. We go through each case and letter in detail, with sources, in the Koi CBD lawsuit explainer.

Shipping, returns and small print

Zero-THC products — the PRIZM broad-spectrum gummies, the Naturals tincture, the standard topicals and the Balance Bar — ship everywhere. State law moves quickly here; our hemp THC legal by state tracker is kept current.

Pros and cons