Cannapower CBD Infused Cherries 1200mg, 125g

Why cherry sweets taste of almond

Eat a cherry sweet and then a marzipan, and the family resemblance is obvious. Most people put it down to poor flavouring. It is more interesting than that.

The compound responsible is benzaldehyde. It makes up somewhere between eighty and ninety-five per cent of natural bitter almond oil, which is why it reads as almond to anyone who has ever eaten marzipan or amaretto.

It is also the primary volatile released when a stone fruit kernel is crushed. Crack open the stone of a cherry, a peach or an apricot and benzaldehyde is what you smell. So the compound is genuinely present in cherries. It is simply not in the part of the cherry you eat.

What happened next is a matter of industry habit. Flavourists building an artificial cherry leaned heavily on benzaldehyde because it is recognisable, stable and unmistakable, and because a single dominant molecule is far easier to work with than a faithful reconstruction. One flavourist put it neatly: benzaldehyde is present in real cherry, but it is one voice in a large chorus rather than the soloist the industry has made it.

So a cherry sweet is not failing to taste like a cherry. It is accurately reproducing a small part of a cherry and leaving out the rest, and once you know which part, the flavour makes sense rather than seeming wrong.

Cherry, almond and peach are the same genus

There is a reason the almond note sits so naturally on a cherry, and it goes deeper than flavour chemistry.

Cherries, almonds, peaches and apricots are all Prunus. They are the same genus, closely enough related that they share a fruit structure: a fleshy outside around a hard stone, with a kernel inside it.

We came at this from the other direction on our Peach Fuzz lollipops page, where peaches and nectarines turned out to be the same species, Prunus persica, differing by a single gene that switches the skin fuzz on or off. Same family, same architecture.

An almond is the odd one out only in which part you eat. With a cherry or a peach you eat the flesh and discard the stone. With an almond you discard the flesh and eat the kernel. It is the same basic fruit, harvested for the opposite half.

Which explains everything about the flavour. The almond note in a cherry sweet is the taste of the kernel rather than the flesh, from a family where the kernels all smell alike. Nobody who sells cherry sweets mentions any of this, and it is the most interesting thing about the flavour.

What to expect from these specifically

Cherry gummies in this format are usually made as a twin cherry on a stem, which is a denser shape than a bear and takes longer to chew through.

On taste, calibrate for the above. Expect the confectionery cherry, which is sweet, slightly marzipan-adjacent and quite unlike a fresh cherry. If that is what you grew up with, it will taste exactly right. If you were hoping for something that tastes of fresh fruit, no cherry sweet from any brand is going to deliver it, because that is not what the flavour is built from.

Cherry is also the least fruity of the shapes in this range in the sense that matters. Where the strawberries and peach rings read straightforwardly as their fruit, cherry reads as its own confectionery category, closer to a boiled sweet flavour than to a strawberry one.

That is not a criticism. It is the single most recognisable sweet flavour in Britain and it has been for a century, which is precisely because it does not taste like anything else.

The numbers, in one paragraph

Everything structural about this range is the same as the bears, and we have written about it at length rather than repeating it here.

This is a 125 gram bag with 1200mg of CBD stated across the whole bag, sold alongside a 400mg version in the identical pack. Nobody publishes how many sweets are in it, which is the central problem with a bag-total figure, and our page on the 1200mg bears sets that out in full along with what the FSA advises and where Novel Foods actually stands.

Our page on the 400mg bears goes further and uses a comparable product from another brand to infer what the count is likely to be, and makes the case that the figure that matters is the one in a single sweet rather than the one on the front of the bag.

Both are linked below and both apply to this bag without modification. Rather than restate them, we would rather spend this page on the thing that is actually specific to a cherry.

Who should buy something else

If you dislike marzipan, amaretto or almond flavours generally, you will probably dislike cherry confectionery, and now you know why. The strawberries or peach rings in the same range are built on entirely different compounds and read as their fruit far more directly.

If you want a fresh-fruit taste, no cherry sweet is going to give it to you. That is a property of how the flavour is constructed rather than of this particular product.

If you are new to CBD, the 400mg version of this bag is the same sweets at a third of the concentration and is the more sensible starting point. Its page also explains why the per-sweet figure matters more than the bag total.

And if you need to know exactly what is in one cherry, nobody publishes a count for this bag. Our page on the 400mg bears explains what a comparable product suggests, but an inference is not a specification and we would rather you knew the difference.