Cannabis Chocolate UK

What is actually in these bars

Take the Multitrance and Haze bars first, because the maker publishes a full ingredients list and it settles the question. Cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa powder or whole milk powder depending on the bar, shelled hemp seeds at ten per cent, roasted hazelnut kernels on two of the lines, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and bourbon vanilla from Madagascar. Read that list again and note what is not on it. There is no CBD, and no cannabis extract of any kind. It is chocolate with hemp seeds in it.

Euphoria's Cannabis Airlines bars work the same way. Eighty grams, dark or milk, described by the maker as blended with hemp seeds for texture and flavour, free of THC, and with no cannabinoid figure anywhere on the specification.

Tyson 2.0 does something slightly different and it is worth understanding the distinction. Its dark and milk bars are described as terpene-infused. Terpenes are the aroma compounds that give cannabis its smell, and they are found across the plant world in hops, pine and citrus peel. They are not cannabinoids. A terpene-infused bar smells and tastes of the plant without containing the compound people mean when they say CBD.

So the whole shelf divides two ways, and neither way involves a dose. Some of it is seeds, some of it is aroma. All of it is confectionery.

If you came here for CBD chocolate, read this

The UK market genuinely does sell chocolate with CBD measured into it, and the shops ranking for that search sell little else. Their bars run from around twenty milligrams up to well over a thousand in a single bar, with one brand printing five milligrams a square, which is the most useful number anyone in that category publishes.

We do not stock one. Neither of our two distributors carries a dosed CBD chocolate bar, and rather than file our hemp-seed bars under a heading that implies a dose, we have written this paragraph.

What we do stock is three chocolate-flavoured lines that publish a figure. None of them is a bar, and if a measured amount matters more than the format, one of these is what you actually want.

Why hemp seed chocolate needs no Novel Foods paperwork

This is the part of the category almost nobody explains, and it follows directly from what is in the bars.

Novel Foods rules apply to foods without a significant history of consumption in Europe before May 1997. CBD extract falls inside that regime, which is why ingestible CBD sold in the UK is expected to sit on the Food Standards Agency's public list. Hulled hemp seed does not. It has been eaten for a very long time and is treated as an ordinary food ingredient.

So a bar made with ten per cent shelled hemp seeds is, in regulatory terms, a chocolate bar with seeds in it. That is not a loophole and it is not a criticism. It is simply what the product is, and it explains why these bars carry no Novel Foods position, no cannabinoid figure and no certificate of analysis for a cannabinoid that was never added.

The cannabinoid limit still applies to everything we sell: no more than 1mg of controlled cannabinoids in the whole container, measured per container rather than per square or as a percentage of anything. On a bar with no cannabinoid content that test is comfortably satisfied. It matters far more in our oil and hash aisles, where the question is live.

For contrast, three of the five pages we examined while researching this one publish UK commercial CBD content with no legal statement at all, and two of the remaining ones give a concentration figure, either 0.01 percent or a vague reference to the legal limit, in place of the test that actually applies.

How to read a cannabis chocolate label

Four checks, in order, and they work on any bar in any shop rather than only on ours.

First, look for a milligram figure on the front. If there is not one, there is very probably no cannabinoid in the bar, because a maker who has paid for CBD extract will always tell you how much they used.

Second, read the ingredients for the word extract. Hemp seeds, hemp seed oil and hemp flour are food ingredients. CBD, cannabidiol, hemp extract and cannabis extract are the words that indicate a cannabinoid was added.

Third, if a figure is given, check whether it is for the whole bar or for a portion of it. A hundred and twenty milligrams in a bar divided into twenty-four squares is five milligrams a square, and the bar figure on its own tells you very little about what you are eating in one sitting.

Fourth, take terpene-infused, hemp-infused and cannabis-flavoured at face value. Each is an accurate description of an aroma or a seed, and none of them is a claim about cannabinoid content.

On the two bars where it is published, dark chocolate here runs to a minimum of seventy per cent cocoa solids, which is a proper dark chocolate rather than a nominal one. The hemp seeds themselves are the reason these bars have a slightly nutty, seedy bite that a plain bar does not.

When this shelf is the wrong buy

There is one obvious case and several less obvious ones.

If you want CBD, do not buy a bar from this shelf. That is the entire point of the section above, and we would rather lose the order than have you find out later.

If you are avoiding soy, the Multitrance and Haze bars use soy lecithin as the emulsifier. If you are avoiding dairy, the milk bars contain whole milk powder. If you are avoiding nuts, two of the Multitrance bars contain roasted hazelnuts and the rest are made in a factory that handles them. The Tyson 2.0 lines are the vegan and gluten-free ones on this shelf.

If you want the widest range of formats rather than bars specifically, the full CBD edibles aisle carries cookies, brownies and snacks alongside these, and that page explains how fat and food change the way an edible behaves.

If you want a warm chocolate drink with a stated amount in it, the CBD drinks aisle is the answer rather than this one.

And if what you actually want is a strong flavour of cannabis with no cannabinoid attached, that is precisely what this shelf is, and it is a perfectly good thing to want. Buy the Tyson bar for the name on it or the Multitrance one for the hemp seeds. Just buy it knowing what it is.

Over-18s only. These are food products rather than medicines, and nothing here is sold to do anything for a health condition.