Cannapower CBD Infused Strawberries 400mg

The brand gets the hard rule right and the easy one wrong

Two statements sit on Cannapower's own listing for these sweets. One is better than nearly anything else we have read while researching this catalogue. The other is nearly three years out of date.

The good one first, because credit matters. Cannapower states that a CBD product must be made from approved hemp varieties and contain no more than one milligram of THC per product. That is correct, and it is stated in the right units.

It is worth explaining why that is remarkable. The single most repeated falsehood in UK CBD is that the consumer limit is a THC percentage. It is not. The rule counts milligrams of controlled cannabinoids in the finished container, however large the container is. We have now read roughly fifty competitor product pages for this project and found sellers stating the percentage myth, printing it on ingredient declarations, and in one case putting it on the label of a tea. Cannapower is the first to state the actual test.

Now the other one. The same page says not to exceed seventy milligrams of CBD a day, in line with FSA guidance.

The Food Standards Agency published that seventy milligram figure in February 2020 and replaced it on 12 October 2023 with ten milligrams a day for healthy adults. So the number is withdrawn, and attributing it to current FSA guidance makes it worse rather than better, because a reader has no reason to doubt a figure that comes with the regulator's name attached.

This is the fifth time we have found the seventy milligram figure still circulating on products in this catalogue. We have set the correction out in full on the Hempthy pick and mix listing rather than repeating it on every page it appears.

The combination is genuinely strange when you sit with it. The container limit is the difficult rule, the one that needs you to understand why a percentage cannot answer the question. The daily figure is a single number that has been sitting updated on the FSA's website since 2023. They got the hard one right.

Broad spectrum or isolate, and our own record is the one at fault

The first item on Cannapower's ingredient list is broad spectrum hemp-derived cannabidiol.

Our own product record for this jar, and for all ten Cannapower gummies we carry, says isolate.

Those are not the same thing and the difference is worth knowing. Isolate is CBD on its own, purified to around ninety nine point nine per cent, with everything else stripped out. Broad spectrum keeps other cannabinoids and the plant's terpenes and has the THC removed. It usually carries a faint hemp character that an isolate cannot, and it matters directly to anyone who wants CBD without any other cannabinoid alongside it.

We are not going to tell you which is in the jar, because we have two sources and they disagree, and the one that is wrong is probably ours. A brand describing its own ingredient list is better placed than an importer mapping a field. We have logged it for correction and asked the supplier to confirm.

If having only CBD and nothing else is the point of your purchase, this is not the jar to buy on an assumption. There are isolate products elsewhere on our shelves where every source agrees, and a broad spectrum product is a different proposition worth choosing deliberately.

Why the strength of one sweet is given as a range

Cannapower states fourteen to twenty milligrams of CBD in each sweet. Not a number, a range, and a wide one. The largest sweet in the jar holds around forty three per cent more than the smallest.

Almost no CBD brand publishes a range, and the reason is not flattering to the ones that do not: a single tidy figure looks more professional. The range is the more honest description.

Here is what is behind it. Sweets like these are deposited into moulds or tumbled in a drum, and they vary in weight the way any confectionery does. When the CBD is mixed through a batch rather than measured into each individual piece, the amount in any given sweet follows its size. A heavier strawberry has more in it. That is true of most CBD sweets on the market whether or not the maker admits it.

The practical consequence is the useful bit. You cannot read one of these as a known amount. If you want a piece that carries a stated figure you can rely on, a tablet or a measured oil is the format built for that, and we say the same thing on the Hempthy tablets listing.

The brand's own arithmetic implies something in the region of twenty to twenty eight sweets in a four hundred milligram jar, though we do not state a count as fact and the shipping unit is confirmed before anything leaves us.

The colours here are all plant ones

The declaration gives the colours as black carrot concentrate, spirulina concentrate and turmeric. Every one of those is a plant.

That is a genuine and unusual advantage, and it goes unmentioned by everyone selling these. Most CBD gummies on our shelves carry synthetic colours, and several carry E102 and E129, which are two of the six that UK law requires to be sold with a statement about children's activity and attention. There is nothing of that kind in this jar.

The gelling agent is pectin, which comes from fruit, rather than gelatine. That is what makes the vegan claim work, and it also gives a shorter, cleaner bite than a gelatine sweet: pectin sets firm and breaks rather than stretching.

Sorbitol appears as a humectant, which keeps the sweets from drying out. It is a sugar alcohol, but it is doing a small job here rather than acting as the bulk sweetener, so the caution we give on properly sugar-free sweets does not apply in the same way.

Apple is declared at one per cent and there is fruit juice concentrate in the mix, which is where some of the flavour comes from.

Only two other products in this catalogue can claim a comparable colour story: the Hempthy American Hard Gums, which also use plant colours, and the Hempthy imperial mints, which declare none at all.

Which Cannapower jar, and who should skip this one

Cannapower makes five shapes, strawberries, bears, cherries, fruit cubes and peach rings, and each comes as a four hundred milligram jar or a twelve hundred milligram one. The jar is 125g either way, so the larger number means three times the CBD in the same weight of sweets rather than a bigger jar.

That makes the four hundred the sensible choice for most people. On the brand's own range, a sweet from this jar holds fourteen to twenty milligrams, which is already above the ten milligrams the FSA advises for a whole day. The twelve hundred milligram version puts roughly three times that in a sweet of the same size.

Skip this jar if you specifically want isolate and nothing else, at least until the spectrum question is settled.

Skip it if you need a known amount per piece. The range is honest but it is still a range.

Skip it if you are avoiding apple, which is declared, or if fruit juice concentrate is a problem for you.

And skip it if you are pregnant, breastfeeding or taking medication. The FSA advises vulnerable groups not to consume CBD, and that covers this shelf as much as any other.