Bubbly Billy Bud's CBD Chewing Gum 17mg, Box of 24

Peppermint or Strawberry, and why that is not a small choice

Chewing gum gets bought for two quite different reasons and this range splits neatly along the line between them.

Peppermint is gum in the ordinary sense. It is the one you keep in a coat pocket, chew after coffee, and use for the reasons anyone has ever chewed mint gum. The peppermint here is straightforward rather than aggressive, closer to a traditional pellet gum than to a cold, sharp mint, and it fades over a few minutes the way sugar-free mint gum tends to.

Strawberry is a confectionery flavour and behaves like one. It is sweet from the first chew, distinctly candied rather than fruit-like, and it goes flat faster than the mint does. People who like it really like it. People who wanted gum rather than a sweet tend to be surprised by it.

There is no third option at this strength. The mango flavour that appears elsewhere in the Bubbly Billy Bud's line only exists on the stronger gum, and there is no unflavoured version of any of these.

One point that applies to both. This is sugar-free gum, sweetened with sorbitol, isomalt and maltitol syrup alongside acesulfame K and sucralose. That is standard for chewing gum and it is the reason the sweetness in the strawberry reads slightly cool rather than sugary. It is also the reason for one of the cautions further down.

A piece, a blister and a box are three different things

This is where the listings for this gum fall apart, and it is worth being precise because the numbers involved differ by a factor of hundreds.

The manufacturer's own wording is Content: 12 Pieces (17g), and Contains Cannabis Sativa and 17mg CBD. So one blister holds twelve pieces, weighs seventeen grams, and carries seventeen milligrams of CBD between all twelve. The seventeen in the product name is the blister total, not the strength of a piece, which works out at about one and four tenths of a milligram in each. Several of our other gum pages go into that arithmetic in more detail and are linked below.

The box is the third unit. It holds twenty-four blisters, which is two hundred and eighty-eight individual pieces and four hundred and eight milligrams of CBD across the whole thing. The trade code on both flavours ends in C24, which is the distributor's own encoding for a case of twenty-four.

Now the errors. One of the better-ranked UK pages for this gum publishes twenty-four blisters and seventeen grams as though they belonged together. Seventeen grams is what one blister weighs, so twenty-four of them cannot also weigh seventeen grams. A trade listing for the same product publishes twenty-four pieces, when twenty-four is the blister count and the piece count is two hundred and eighty-eight. Neither is dishonest. Both come from the same habit of treating three units as one.

The same gum wears four brand names, and four different words for mint

We stock CBD chewing gum under four labels. All four trace back to the same Amsterdam manufacturer, and their trade codes all begin with the same three-letter maker prefix. That much has been noted on our other gum pages.

What has not been set out anywhere, by us or by anyone else, is what happens to the flavour names.

Each of the four brands sells one mint-family gum and one strawberry-family gum at seventeen milligrams. Bubbly Billy Bud's calls its mint Peppermint. MediCBD calls the same thing Mint. Astra Hemp calls it Eucalyptus. And the Multitrance Cannabis line calls it Cannabis Sativa, although the distributor's own page address for it reads eucalyptus, which is the same word Astra Hemp uses. On the strawberry side the four names are Strawberry, Strawberry, Strawberry and Strawberry Haze.

So four brands, and something between two and four genuinely different flavours depending on how much you trust a name. We are not going to claim they are identical in the mouth, because we have not had all four side by side and inventing a comparison would be worse than admitting the gap. What we can say is that the format, the piece count, the blister weight, the milligram figure and the ingredient list are the same across all of them, and that the differences you can verify are on the front of the blister rather than inside it.

The practical consequence is simple. If a shop is out of one, the equivalent from another of these labels is the closest substitute you will find anywhere, and it is closer than most people realise.

Bubbly Billy Buds is in two places on this site, and that is our doing

A small piece of housekeeping that will otherwise waste your time.

Bubbly Billy Buds makes more than gum. There is a substantial lollipop range under the same rabbit branding, in flavours including sour apple, cotton candy, passion fruit, cola kiss and sour raspberry, all built around a bubblegum centre.

Those lollipops sit on our Bubbly Billy Buds brand page. This gum does not. Our catalogue files the gum under Multitrance, because that is how it arrives from the distributor, so the two halves of the same sub-brand end up on two different brand pages here.

We are flagging it rather than quietly hoping nobody notices. Both are linked below, and if you came looking for the lollipops the brand page is the place to go.

What is on the label, and what the EU line does not cover

The ingredients are a sugar-free gum base with sweeteners, flavouring, and the cannabinoid content carried in oil. In full: sorbitol, isomalt, maltitol syrup, acesulfame K and sucralose as sweeteners, a gum base that contains soy lecithin, the peppermint or strawberry flavouring, glycerol as a humectant, gum arabic as a thickener, hemp essential oil at around three tenths of one per cent, and CBD oil.

Two things in there matter to specific people. It contains soya, in the gum base, which is not obvious from the front of the pack. And the polyol sweeteners are the ones that come with the standard warning about excessive consumption on any sugar-free confectionery. That is discussed properly on our sugar-free gummies page and the same reasoning applies here.

On the cannabinoid side, the manufacturer states THC free at zero per cent and describes the gum as containing cannabis sativa, meaning the plant the CBD comes from rather than anything psychoactive.

Now the part every page in this SERP skips. All of them repeat the maker's line that the gum is legal for consumption in the European Union, and stop there. That statement is about the EU, and the UK has not been in it for some years. The test that applies here is a maximum of 1mg of controlled cannabinoids, meaning THC and its relatives, in the whole container, regardless of the container's size or the percentage involved. Anything edible also sits under the Food Standards Agency Novel Foods regime, and it is worth knowing that appearing on the FSA public list is not the same as being authorised: the FSA says plainly that inclusion is no guarantee a product will be authorised. Our Novel Foods explainer sets out what that list actually means.

Everything on this site is 18+ only.

Who should buy something else

Anyone who wants a meaningful amount of CBD in one go. At roughly one and a half milligrams a piece this is among the lightest formats we sell, and you would be chewing your way through a blister to reach the sort of figure a single gummy or a couple of oil drops carries. Our gummies and oil aisles are the right place if that is the goal.

Anyone with a soya allergy. The gum base contains soy lecithin and there is no soya-free version of this product.

Anyone buying for the strawberry alone should think about it twice. It is a confectionery flavour on a sugar-free base and it fades quickly, and people who wanted gum rather than a sweet are the ones who tend to be disappointed by it.

Anyone who specifically wants a strong, cold mint. The peppermint here is a plain traditional mint, not a menthol-forward one.

And anyone shopping for a single blister to try. This line arrives as a full box of twenty-four, which is a great many blisters if you turn out not to like the flavour. If you want to test the format first, one of the single-unit CBD sweets in the same aisle is the smaller commitment.