Bubbly Billy Buds Cola Kiss CBD Lollipops, Gift Box of 5

Cola is not a flavour, it is an accord

Every other flavour in this range points at something you could pick up: a raspberry, a peach, a pineapple, an apple. Cola points at a drink, and that drink does not taste of any single plant.

The cola flavour used in confectionery is a compound accord, meaning several unrelated materials assembled to make a smell that exists only as a combination. The backbone is citrus, usually orange with lemon and lime alongside it. Over that go warm spices, cinnamon and nutmeg being the usual pair, and a rounding note of vanilla. Coriander seed and neroli turn up in some versions. Nothing in that list tastes of cola on its own, and all of it together does.

That is why cola sweets taste subtly different from brand to brand in a way that strawberry sweets do not. There is no reference fruit to be judged against, so each manufacturer's cola is its own recipe rather than an approximation of something in nature.

The kola nut, which gave the drink its name, contributes very little to modern cola flavouring and nothing at all to a sweet like this one. It is worth saying plainly because the name suggests otherwise.

Cola over bubblegum, which is an unusual pairing

The construction here is the same as the rest of the Bubbly Billy Buds lollipops: a hard flavoured shell around a soft bubblegum centre, so the sweet changes partway through rather than tasting of one thing throughout.

With the fruit flavours that works straightforwardly, because a fruit shell and a bubblegum centre are both sweet in the same direction. Cola is the odd one out. The shell is tangy and spiced, with the citric acid in the ingredients pushing the sourness up, and the centre underneath it is sweet and floral in the way bubblegum always is.

The result is more of a contrast than a blend. The maker describes it as a tangy cola coating encasing a bubblegum centre, which is accurate and slightly undersells the gear change. People who like cola bottles and cola cubes tend to enjoy it. People expecting a smooth sweet find the transition abrupt.

On intensity, cola sits in the middle of this range. It is sharper than the Cotton Candy and the Passion Fruit, softer than the Sour Apple and the Sour Pineapple, which are built to be properly sour.

The small box and the large carton do not declare the same colouring

This is the reason this page exists rather than repeating what our other lollipop listings already say.

The ingredient list on these lollipops is short and, across the whole range, almost identical: sugar, glucose syrup, gum base, citric acid as an acidulant, and the flavour, which is where the CBD is declared. The only thing that varies between one flavour and another is the colouring.

For Cola Kiss, the five-piece gift box declares E163. The hundred-piece carton of Cola Kiss declares E101i and E160c. Those are not variations on a theme. E163 is the anthocyanin group, the plant pigments that make berries and grape skins red, purple and blue. E101i is riboflavin, which is yellow. E160c is paprika extract, which is orange-red.

A sweet coloured with anthocyanins and a sweet coloured with riboflavin and paprika extract do not look the same. Both listings describe a product called Cola Kiss from the same brand through the same distributor, and they cannot both be right about what is in it.

It is not only this flavour. Blue Raspberry, Peach Fuzz and Sour Pineapple show the same split between the small box and the large carton. The other four flavours are consistent across both pack sizes.

We are not going to tell you which one is correct, because we would be guessing, and we are not suggesting anybody has done anything improper. Labels get updated, recipes get reformulated and old text lingers on listings, which is the likeliest explanation. We have put the question to our distributor and this page will carry the answer.

In the meantime, the practical advice is simple. If you avoid a specific additive for any reason, read the box that arrives rather than any listing, including ours. That is good practice with confectionery generally and it is necessary here.

Why one colouring can legitimately appear on very different sweets

Part of the confusion above has an innocent explanation, and it is worth knowing because it looks like an error and is not.

E163 appears on a blue raspberry lolly, a cotton candy lolly and a cola lolly. That seems impossible until you know what anthocyanins do. They are pH-sensitive pigments: acidic conditions turn them red, and as acidity falls they shift through purple towards blue. The same declared colouring can therefore produce genuinely different colours depending on what else is in the sweet, which is the same chemistry behind red cabbage changing colour in vinegar.

So one colouring across several shades is not a contradiction. What that chemistry does not explain is a switch from anthocyanins to riboflavin and paprika extract between two pack sizes of the same flavour, which is a change of ingredient rather than a change of conditions.

That distinction is why we have flagged one and not the other.

The rest of the label

Ten milligrams of CBD in each lolly, five lollies in the gift box. The CBD is declared inside the flavour rather than as a separate ingredient, which our hundred-pack listing goes into properly.

The maker states THC free and made in the EU, and adds that the product is legal for consumption in the European Union. That last line is about the EU rather than the UK, and the UK applies its own test: no more than 1mg of controlled cannabinoids in the whole container, whatever its size and whatever percentage anyone quotes. Anything edible also sits under the Food Standards Agency Novel Foods regime, which our gift box listing covers.

Worth knowing on stock: this flavour is currently unavailable in the five-piece box while the hundred-piece carton of the same flavour is not. If five is what you wanted, the grouped gift box listing carries four other flavours.

Everything on this site is 18+ only.

Who should choose a different flavour

Anyone who dislikes the cola family. This is the one flavour in the range that is not a fruit, and cola is a love-or-hate accord in a way that raspberry is not.

Anyone who wants a smooth sweet. The tangy spiced shell and the soft bubblegum centre are a deliberate contrast here and the change partway through is noticeable.

Anyone chasing real sourness. Cola Kiss is tangy rather than sour. Sour Pineapple and Sour Apple are the ones built for that.

Anyone avoiding a particular colouring should regard the listings for this flavour as unreliable until the discrepancy above is resolved, and should read the physical pack.

And anyone buying for the CBD rather than the sweet should look at our oils and capsules instead. Ten milligrams in a lollipop is a modest amount inside a large quantity of sugar, and there are formats that do that job more directly.