Who Is Koi CBD? A Brand File on One of Hemp's Original Names

Koi is what a transparency-forward hemp veteran looks like — not perfect, but accountable. It tells you who owns it, posts verifiable lab reports from a named accredited lab, and has the rare distinction of an independent audit confirming it's among the most transparent in the category. Our score rewards exactly that kind of verifiable openness, which is why Koi holds a solid C despite its record.

What keeps it from the B is real and worth knowing: two FDA warning letters — the common 2019 marketing-claims letter and an individual July 2023 letter over its delta-8 gummies — two old lawsuits, and, most usefully for a buyer, independent evidence that Koi tends to over-fill its potency, so the label can understate what's actually in the bottle. We'll separate sourced fact from marketing throughout, and credit the genuine work Koi has done.

The operating entity is KOI CBD, LLC, a California limited liability company based in Norwalk, founded in 2015 and registered as an LLC around 2016. Crucially, Koi doesn't hide its people. It's a family-owned business with named, public founders: Brad Ridenour (CEO) and Malinda Ridenour (CFO), with Brent Brunner as co-founder and CMO — a "brother, sister, and cousin" team, per the company's own telling, all findable on LinkedIn and in trade-press interviews.

This is where Koi genuinely shines, and where we can credit independent verification rather than just Koi's own word:

• Public COAs + batch lookup. Koi runs a public Lab Results page with per-product reports and a batch-number lookup.
• A named, accredited lab. Its primary testing partner is Encore Labs (Pasadena, CA), which is genuinely ISO/IEC 17025:2017-accredited — a real, checkable credential, not a vague "ISO-certified" hand-wave. (Koi's blanket "ISO-certified labs" marketing is looser than that, and the newer THCa-flower line appears to use other, lesser labs, so we don't extend the credit to the whole catalog.)
• Independent transparency ranking. The third-party auditor Leafreport — which buys and tests products itself — ranked Koi among its Top-10 Most Transparent CBD brands, and found 77% of Koi products within ±10% of their label. That outside validation is rare and meaningful.

On manufacturing, Koi says its products are made in cGMP and ISO 9001:2015 facilities and describes an in-house "single-vessel" finishing process with a fast farm-to-bottle turnaround. That's a more specific quality claim than most brands make — but the certifications are self-asserted (we found no independent certificate or registry entry to confirm them), and importantly, ISO 9001 is a general quality-management standard, not a food-safety one. Who actually owns the extraction facility (versus the in-house finishing) isn't disclosed.

On sourcing, Koi clearly labels each product as full-spectrum, broad-spectrum, or isolate — a real transparency plus — and asserts US-grown hemp. The soft spot: the specific growing states are stated inconsistently across Koi's own interviews and pages (Kentucky, Colorado, Oklahoma, Oregon all appear in different places), so the precise origin story doesn't fully line up.

On funding, Koi is privately held and family-owned, and by all available evidence bootstrapped — its Crunchbase profile shows no funding rounds, and we found no outside investors, acquisitions, or any sourced evidence of foreign funding (so we assert none). For a private company, that's a clean, legible ownership picture. On people, it's a focused operation: independent databases put it at roughly 11–50 employees at a single Norwalk HQ, and a Glassdoor profile exists but has too few reviews to draw a workplace conclusion from. No red flags; just a small, named company.

Koi's regulatory and legal history is real, and — a correction we made in the open — it's not as old as we first published. Every item below is an allegation, not an adjudicated finding, and we weight it as such:

• 2019 FDA warning letter (allegation). Koi received the common 2019-era FDA letter over unapproved drug claims / CBD-as-food — the same category of letter dozens of CBD brands got that year. An allegation about marketing claims, never adjudicated, predating much of the industry's compliance cleanup.
• July 2023 FDA warning letter (allegation) — the recent one. After inspecting Koi's Norwalk facility in December 2022, the FDA issued Koi an individual warning letter (July 18, 2023) deeming its Delta 8 Gummies adulterated — delta-8 THC being, in the FDA's position, an unsafe food additive — and citing the agency's standing delta-8 concerns, including appeal to children. Like all warning letters it's an agency allegation rather than a court finding, and we found no recall or penalty attached — but it is recent, it is Koi-specific, and it's the main reason this pillar scores where it does. (We missed this letter at first publication and added it, with a score adjustment, when our sources audit surfaced it — corrections happen in the open here.)
• Two old consumer lawsuits (allegations). A 2019 mislabeling class action (Fausett) was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice with no liability finding; a separate 2020 suit (Shipman) alleged a failed drug test after relying on a "0% THC" claim — and its outcome isn't public, so we report it as filed, not as anything proven.
• What's genuinely clean: no recalls, no FTC action, and Koi was not part of the May 2022 multi-company delta-8 sweep (a company called "Delta 8 Hemp" was — unrelated to Koi). The 2023 letter above was an individual action, which is why precision matters here in both directions.

On customer sentiment, Koi advertises tens of thousands of on-site reviews, but those are self-reported; the independent Trustpilot sits around 3.4 stars on relatively low volume, with the usual mix of praise for service and complaints about subscription billing. A middling-but-thin third-party rating, which we treat as a minor, not a major, signal.

In our view, Koi is one of the more trustworthy names in hemp — a named, family-owned veteran that does the transparency work and has the independent receipts to prove it. If you want a brand where you can verify the people, the lab, and the test results, Koi clears that bar better than almost anyone in these files. The reasons it's a C and not a B are honest and useful: two FDA warning letters (2019 marketing claims; an individual 2023 delta-8 adulteration letter), two old suits, self-asserted (not shown) factory certs, a fuzzy sourcing-origin story, and independent evidence that it over-labels potency about a quarter of the time.

If you buy Koi, our practical advice: pull the COA for your specific batch (the lab is named and accredited, which is exactly what you want), stick to the core CBD/delta line where the testing is strongest rather than assuming the same rigor on every newer SKU, and remember the potency on the label may run a little low versus what's actually inside. A C (75/100) — a solid grade for a brand that earned its longevity honestly, dented by a regulatory record that now includes a recent letter. The full methodology shows every point; if Koi resolves the FDA's 2023 concerns, documents its facility certifications, and tightens its label accuracy, the grade climbs back toward a B (see the notice below).