Cannapower CBD Infused Cherries 400mg, 125g

The maraschino cherry is bleached before it is dyed

The glacé cherry on a cocktail, on a cake, in a tin of fruit cocktail: that is a maraschino cherry, and almost nobody knows what one is.

The version everyone has eaten was largely invented in the 1920s by Ernest H. Wiegand, a professor at Oregon State University. His process is still broadly what the industry uses.

It begins by taking the cherry apart. The fruit is brined for four to six weeks in a solution containing calcium chloride and sulphur dioxide, and that brine bleaches it. Not just the colour. The flavour goes too. What comes out the other end is a pale, firm, largely tasteless piece of fruit.

Then it is rebuilt. The bleached cherries are soaked in a solution of red food colouring, sugar syrup and a little almond flavouring, pitted, destalked and packed in syrup. The colour you see and the taste you get were both added after the fruit's own were taken out.

That is not an exposé. It is a well-documented food process that has been running for a century and produces something people genuinely like. But it does mean the red cherry is one of the most heavily reconstructed things in the sweet aisle, and nobody selling anything cherry-flavoured ever mentions it.

Which makes the almond thing literal

Our page on the 1200mg version of this bag explains that cherry confectionery tastes of almond because the flavour industry built artificial cherry around benzaldehyde, a compound that lives in the cherry stone rather than the flesh.

Set that next to the maraschino process and the two fit together exactly. The industry does not merely borrow an almond note when it makes a cherry sweet. When it makes an actual cherry, it strips the flavour out and then puts almond in.

So the almond you taste in anything cherry-flavoured is not an accident of crude synthesis or a corner cut. It is the deliberate, century-old convention for what a cherry is supposed to taste like in confectionery, applied consistently to sweets and to the fruit itself.

Once you know that, the flavour stops seeming wrong and starts seeming like a genre. A cherry sweet is not a bad copy of a cherry. It is a faithful copy of a maraschino cherry, which is itself a construction.

The original was a Croatian liqueur cherry

The name has a history that has almost nothing to do with the jar in a British bar.

Maraschino cherries were originally Marasca cherries, a small, dark, sour variety from Dalmatia, the coastal region that is now Croatia. They were preserved in maraschino, the liqueur distilled from the same fruit, which is where the name comes from.

Luxardo, still the best-known name in the traditional style, began in Zara, the old Dalmatian capital, and introduced candied cherries steeped in sugar and Marasca juice in 1905. The traditional article is candied slowly in its own syrup, with no artificial colour, no thickener and no preservative.

So there are two completely different products sharing a name. One is a Croatian liqueur cherry with a two-hundred-year lineage. The other is a twentieth-century American industrial process applied to a bleached fruit. Both are called maraschino, and it is the second one that shaped what a cherry tastes like to almost everyone alive.

What colours a red sweet, and what we got wrong here

Red is the hardest colour in confectionery to source honestly, and it is where the ingredient question gets interesting.

Across our own sweets shelves we have now found several completely different answers. The Multitrance berry lollipops use E120, which is cochineal and derived from insects, so those are not suitable for vegans. The Euphoria cannabis gummies use spirulina and carrot concentrate, both plant derived. And a blue confectionery flavour, as we found on the blue raspberry lollipops, essentially requires a synthetic dye because neither plants nor insects supply that shade at that intensity.

For red, the most common synthetic answer across the industry is Allura Red AC, which under UK and EU labelling rules is one of six colours requiring a statement that they may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.

When this page first went up we said we could not tell you which of those applied here, because neither Cannapower nor our distributor publishes an ingredient list. We have since found that one does exist, published in full by another UK retailer, and we would rather correct that in the open than leave it standing.

The colours in this range are black carrot concentrate, spirulina concentrate and turmeric. All three are plant derived. There is no synthetic dye and no cochineal, which means none of the labelling statement above applies and these are suitable for vegans, the gelling agent being pectin rather than gelatine.

The full panel, and what else it reveals, is on our page for the fruit cubes in the same range, linked below.

The numbers, briefly

This is a 125 gram bag with 400mg of CBD stated across the whole bag, and a 1200mg version exists in the identical pack.

Everything worth saying about those figures is on our two pages for the bears, which cover the same bag in the same two strengths. The 1200mg page sets out the problem with a bag-total figure when nobody publishes a piece count, along with the FSA advice and where Novel Foods actually stands. The 400mg page uses a comparable product from another brand to infer the likely count, and argues that the figure that governs what you take is the one in a single sweet rather than the one on the front.

Both apply here without modification and both are linked below. The 400mg version is the gentler of the pair and the more sensible place to start if you have not had these before.

Who should buy something else

If you dislike almond or marzipan, cherry confectionery is built on that note by convention rather than by accident, and you will probably not enjoy these. The strawberries and peach rings in the same range are constructed on entirely different compounds.

If you need to know what colouring a sweet contains, we cannot tell you for this one and nobody publishes it. That is a reasonable point at which to stop, and we would rather you did than order and find out.

If you want a fresh cherry taste, nothing in confectionery will give it to you. What the category calls cherry is a faithful copy of a reconstructed fruit rather than of a cherry off a tree.

And if you already know a larger amount suits you, the 1200mg bag is the same sweets with a bigger step per piece, so there is no reason to buy three of these instead.