Hempthy CBD Sugar Free Gummies 1000mg

The one Hempthy sweet that is not vegan

The declared ingredients include gelatine, which is animal collagen, and beeswax, which is made by bees. Neither is vegan and neither is vegetarian in the case of the gelatine.

Credit where it is due. The brand is not the one getting this wrong. Hempthy labels this product as non-vegan on its own page, plainly, and that is exactly what a manufacturer should do.

The problem is what happens after that. One UK shop currently ranking for this product has the word vegan in its title. And the deeper issue is structural rather than anyone's individual mistake: every other sweet Hempthy makes genuinely is vegan, the brand markets the range that way, and we have now written up fifteen of them that are. Somebody who has bought Hempthy before, and who learned two purchases ago that the range suits them, has no reason to re-read the label on the sixteenth.

That is the single most likely way to get the wrong thing off this shelf, and it is the reason this section is at the top of the page rather than buried in an ingredients list.

If you are avoiding gelatine, the sugar free gummies are the product to walk past, at both strengths. The pick and mix, the fizzy bears, the sour peaches, the hard gums, the bottles and the imperial mints are all vegan.

Beeswax is worth naming separately, because plenty of people who eat gelatine still avoid bee products, and a glazing agent is the sort of thing that gets skimmed over at the end of a list.

What replaces the sugar, and the statement nobody displays

The sweeteners are maltitol syrup and steviol glycosides. Maltitol is a polyol, which is the family of sugar alcohols used to build sugar free confectionery, and it is listed first.

There is a labelling rule attached to that family which is worth knowing about. Under retained GB food information law, a food containing more than ten per cent added polyols has to carry the statement that excessive consumption may produce laxative effects. It is a requirement rather than a piece of folklore, and it exists because polyols are not fully absorbed in the small intestine.

We have not measured this product and we are not going to tell you it crosses that threshold, because we do not know. What we can tell you is that a sweet whose first listed sweetener is maltitol syrup is exactly the sort of product the rule was written for, that a pouch of fifty is a lot of it if they get eaten freely, and that not one of the shops ranking for this product displays any such statement. We have asked our distributor whether the pack itself carries it.

One more plain fact, with no health claim attached. Sugar free is not the same as carbohydrate free or calorie free. Maltitol contributes both, less than sugar does but not nothing. The brand describes the gummies as keto friendly, which is the brand's wording and not ours.

There is a genuine upside in this declaration that nobody mentions. There are no colours in it at all, and no sulphites, because there is no glucose syrup. Along with the imperial mints, this is one of only two Hempthy sweets you can say that about, and it is the only one of the two that is a chewy fruit gummy.

A word about checking this elsewhere

One UK site ranking for these gummies publishes an ingredient list that reads glucose syrup, sugar, maize starch, modified potato starch, citric acid, flavourings, colours from anthocyanins, paprika extract and curcumin, and plant concentrates.

That is the American Hard Gums declaration. The same site has published the same hard gums list on its pages for the brand's imperial mints and its thousand milligram pick and mix, which we noted on both of those listings.

Here it is the most consequential of the three by a distance. It replaces a list containing gelatine and beeswax with one containing neither, on the single product in this brand's range where that difference decides whether somebody can eat it. It also swaps a sugar free product for a sugar one, which matters to a different set of people for a different reason.

We are not saying that to score a point off a competitor. We are saying it because if you are checking a label across two shops before you buy, which is a sensible thing to do, those two shops currently disagree about what is in this bag.

What they are like

A gelatine gummy behaves differently from the pectin and starch sweets in the rest of the range. It is springier and more elastic, closer to a conventional wine gum than to the softer fizzy bears, and it holds its shape rather than compressing in the pouch.

Mixed fruit is the only flavour. Without the acid coating the fizzy range uses, the flavour is rounder and less sharp, and the caramel syrup in the declaration gives it a slightly deeper background than a plain fruit gummy would have.

Maltitol does taste of something. It is close to sugar and noticeably closer than most sweeteners get, but it has a faintly cooling finish that people either do not notice at all or cannot stop noticing. Stevia is doing part of the work too, and stevia has its own liquorice-like edge at the back of the palate.

As ever, the CBD contributes no flavour, because isolate has no plant compounds left in it to contribute.

Who should skip this pouch

Anyone vegan or vegetarian. Gelatine rules it out, and the rest of the Hempthy range is open to you.

Anyone avoiding bee products. The beeswax glaze is easy to miss at the end of a long line of sweeteners.

Anyone who reacts to polyols. If maltitol or sorbitol has caused you trouble before, a pouch of fifty maltitol-based sweets is not the place to test whether it still does.

Anyone new to CBD. Twenty milligrams a piece is twice the daily figure the FSA advises, and the three hundred milligram sugar free pouch at ten milligrams a piece exists for that reason.

And anyone who assumed sugar free means it can be eaten more freely than the sugared version. It does not follow, for the polyol reason above, and it is the assumption this product most invites.