MediCBD CBD Mint Chewing Gum 17mg

The green colourant that belongs in this gum and not the other two

MediCBD makes three chewing gums: this mint, a strawberry at the same strength, and a mango at roughly double. The ingredient declaration published for all three is identical, character for character, including the colours.

Both of those colours are the same on every listing: E171 and E141ii.

E141ii is copper complexes of chlorophyllins. It is a green colour, derived from chlorophyll, and it is one of the standard ways a food is made green.

Green makes obvious sense in a mint gum. It makes no sense at all in a strawberry one, and none in a mango one either. So the single declaration circulating across this range looks very much like the mint gum's list, applied to all three flavours by whoever transcribed it first.

That matters more than a pedantic point about a shade. A colour declaration is a legal requirement rather than marketing copy, and it is the thing a shopper avoiding a particular additive actually relies on. If one flavour's list is standing in for three, then two of the three are telling somebody the wrong thing.

It also cleans up a loose end. On the strawberry gum's listing we noted that two European sellers publish E133, which is a blue, rather than the E171 and E141ii our distributor gives, and we said at the time that it was most likely different flavours' lists being mixed up. Reading all three side by side, that now looks like the obvious explanation rather than a guess: three differently coloured sweets, and not enough different ingredient lists to go round.

To be careful about what we are and are not saying. We cannot open a physical pack of each flavour and check, so we are not telling you the strawberry and mango gums definitely contain no green colour. We are telling you what is published, that it cannot be right for all three, and that we have asked our supplier for the per-flavour declarations.

Three numbers for one blister, and one of them is wrong

Seventeen milligrams is the CBD across a whole blister of twelve pieces, which works out at about one and four tenths of a milligram in each piece. We set that out in full on the strawberry gum's listing, because the way these are named invites the opposite reading.

Here is how easily that goes wrong. A European wholesaler currently lists this exact product with two hundred and four milligrams in its web address, while its own page title says seventeen. Two hundred and four is seventeen multiplied by twelve. Somebody has read the seventeen as a per-piece strength and scaled it up by the pieces in the blister.

So there are three figures in circulation for the same packet: seventeen milligrams, which is correct per blister, one and four tenths, which is correct per piece, and two hundred and four, which is an arithmetic error committed by a business selling the thing.

None of that is a reason to avoid the gum. It is a reason to be careful reading any CBD number on a multi-piece product, and to check whether the figure in front of you describes a piece or a pack before you compare it against anything else.

Why mint is the flavour to pick from a sugar-free base

This is the practical case for the mint over the strawberry, and it is a confectionery point rather than a CBD one.

The gum is sweetened with sorbitol, isomalt and maltitol syrup, with acesulfame K and sucralose alongside them. Sugar alcohols do not hold a flavour the way sugar does, and a polyol-sweetened gum loses its sweetness faster than a sugared one. Fruit flavours depend on that sweetness, so a strawberry or a mango goes flat quickly once it starts to fade.

Mint does not work that way. The cooling compounds in a mint flavour register on their own, independently of how sweet the gum still is, so a mint reads as strong long after a fruit flavour has thinned out. That is why almost every conventional sugar-free chewing gum on a British shelf is a mint.

It also gives the gum something to do beyond the CBD. A mint gum is a mint gum, useful after coffee or lunch whatever else is in it, which is a fair thing to want from a product carrying one and a half milligrams of anything.

As for taste, it is a clean spearmint-leaning European gum rather than the sharper peppermint a British palate might expect. The CBD contributes nothing at this quantity, arriving as an oil worked into the base.

The rest of the label, briefly

Three things carry over from the other two gums in this family and are worth stating rather than assuming you have read those pages.

It contains soya, in the gum base, which is a declarable allergen and is not mentioned by any page currently ranking for this product.

It declares E171, titanium dioxide, which Great Britain kept as a permitted food additive when the European Union removed it. Northern Ireland follows the EU rules on additives, so we are not shipping this line to a Northern Ireland address until our supplier confirms the position. The full account of that split is on the strawberry gum's listing.

It is sugar free by way of three different sugar alcohols, and there is a labelling rule about foods containing a high proportion of polyols that is worth understanding before you get through several blisters. We have set it out on the Hempthy sugar free gummies listing.

On who makes it: our distributor names the manufacturer as Multitrance, in Amsterdam, and MediCBD also runs a brand site of its own. Neither of those facts is surprising and neither contradicts the other, since a label and a factory are different things. We have written about what that means for the CBD market generally on the mango gum's listing, where the same product turns up under three brand names.

Who should skip this gum

Anyone with a soya allergy, because of the lecithin in the gum base.

Anyone in Northern Ireland, until the E171 question is answered by our supplier. We would rather decline the order than take it on an assumption.

Anyone avoiding a specific colour additive. Given that one declaration appears to be serving three differently coloured products, we cannot tell you with confidence what is in any single flavour, and until that is resolved the honest thing is to ask us rather than read a list.

Anyone who has had trouble with sugar-free sweets. Three sugar alcohols in one product is a lot, whatever else is in it.

And anyone expecting a meaningful amount of CBD from a piece of gum. One and a half milligrams is a seventh of the figure the Food Standards Agency gives as a daily maximum. If the number is what matters to you, this is the wrong end of the shelf.