Bubbly Billy Buds Sour Pineapple 10mg CBD Lollipops, Display Box of 100

The sour is in the shell, which makes this a two-act sweet

No dusting is listed for this lolly; its citric acid is boiled into the shell, so the sourness lasts as long as the shell does and ends the moment you reach the bubblegum centre.

Most sour sweets on our shelf, the fizzy gummy bears and bottles among them, get their sourness from an acid-and-sugar crust on the outside. The crust fizzes for a second or two and the sweet underneath is ordinary. A boiled lolly cannot be built that way, because a dusting would not survive the wrapper, so the acid goes into the boil. The ingredient list for this lolly, from both the maker and our distributor, is sugar, glucose syrup, gum base, citric acid as the acidulant, flavouring, cannabis extract containing CBD, and colouring. The citric acid is a component of the shell. There is nothing on the surface.

The practical result is a sweet in two acts. The shell is sour from the first second to the last, a steady sharpness with the pineapple flavour riding on it, and it does not fade the way a crust does; the maker calls it a tangy pineapple flavour with a sour kick, which is accurate. Then the shell is gone and the second act is the bubblegum centre, which is sweet, soft and not sour at all. The gum base is in the list, the acid is not in the gum, and the switch from one to the other is abrupt. If you have only had sour gummies, that transition is the thing that will surprise you.

Pineapple suits this construction better than most fruits because pineapple flavouring is itself sharp; the fruit's character is largely acid and a sweet ester, so a sour pineapple reads as more pineapple, not as pineapple with something added. Our page on the five-lolly box used to go into the chemistry of why fresh pineapple stings and a sweet does not; that box has left the shelf, so the short version is that none of the fruit's enzyme is in a boiled sweet and the sting is citric acid doing the job on its own.

10mg

of CBD in one lolly, the maker's published figure

100

lollies in the display box, individually wrapped

24

months of shelf life from production, per the maker

The three sour flavours in the range, side by side

Bubbly Billy Buds makes three sour lollies, Sour Pineapple, Sour Apple and Sour Raspberry, all built the same way with the acid in the shell, and they differ in fruit, in colouring and in where you find them on our shelf.

The sour trio is the sharp end of a ten-flavour range whose other seven are plain sweet. All three share the construction above, so the choice is fruit and colour rather than how sour they are. Sour Pineapple is the brightest and most tropical. Sour Apple is the green one, the classic sharp apple sweet. Sour Raspberry is the darkest and jammiest, sour over a red-fruit sweetness. Two of them live as flavour options on our overview listing, and Sour Pineapple lives here on its own.

The colourings come from our distributor's carton declarations and the maker's product pages, and they are worth having in one place because the range is inconsistent about them; the overview page explains why different sellers list different colours. The point for this flavour is simple: neither of the colours declared for Sour Pineapple, nor those for its two sour siblings, is among the six colours that UK labels must sell with a statement about children's activity and attention.

The live comparison beneath the table reads the lollipop shelf as it stands today.

Yellow or orange? The maker and the carton disagree by one colouring

The maker's own page lists a single colouring, riboflavin, which is yellow, while our distributor's carton declares riboflavin plus paprika extract, which pushes the shell toward orange, so the same lolly is described in two shades.

This is a small discrepancy and we mention it because it is the kind of thing a buyer notices when the box arrives. The maker's product page for the Sour Pineapple display lists the colouring as E101i alone. E101i is riboflavin, vitamin B2 in its food-colour form, and on its own it gives a clear lemon-yellow. Our distributor's carton declaration adds E160c, paprika extract, which is orange-red; the two together would give a warmer, more golden pineapple colour. Either is plausible for a pineapple sweet, and both colourings are plant-or-vitamin derived rather than azo dyes.

What it is not is a safety question. Neither E101i nor E160c appears among the six colours, E102, E104, E110, E122, E124 and E129, that carry the statutory statement about children's activity and attention. That puts the Sour Pineapple, along with the Grape Juice and Rainbow Rush on our two-flavour listing, among the flavours in this range that avoid the warned colours entirely. If the exact shade matters to you, ask us and we will read the carton we have rather than guess between the two sources.

Why a boiled lolly goes sticky, and how to keep a hundred of them

A boiled sweet is hygroscopic, so in a humid cupboard the shell pulls in water, goes tacky and glues itself to its wrapper, and the fix is a closed box in a dry place and never a fridge.

Gummies and boiled sweets fail in opposite ways. A gummy dries out; a boiled sweet takes water on. The sugar and glucose syrup that make up the shell attract moisture from the air, and once the surface has absorbed enough the lolly stops being glassy and starts being sticky. The wrapper clings, the lolly comes out with bits of film on it, and in a bad case two lollies in the same box fuse through their wrappers. A sour shell is slightly worse for this than a plain one, because the acid in the boil already makes the sugar a little more eager to take up water.

The maker gives the display a shelf life of 24 months from the date of production, and that figure assumes the box is kept properly. A hundred lollies is a long supply for one household, so the storage habits below matter more here than they would on a bag of five.

1. Keep the display closed

   The box is built to stand open on a shop counter. At home, fold it shut between uses. An open display in a kitchen takes on steam from every kettle and pan.

2. Cool, dry, dark

   A cupboard away from the cooker and the sink. Warmth softens the shell and humidity makes it tacky; the two together are how lollies fuse.

3. Never refrigerate

   A cold lolly brought into a warm room sweats inside its wrapper, and condensation is the fastest way to turn a boiled sweet sticky. Room temperature is right.

4. If one goes tacky, eat it, do not rewrap it

   A sticky lolly is safe but will not recover its gloss. Take it out of the box so it does not transfer moisture to its neighbours.

Now the only Sour Pineapple on the shelf, and what a hundred is for

The five-lolly Sour Pineapple box has left our catalogue, so this display of 100 is the one way to buy the flavour here, and it suits a household that shares or a buyer who already knows they like it.

We used to carry Sour Pineapple in a gift box of five as well as this display. The five has gone from our distributor's range, and the only small Bubbly Billy Buds pack we still stock is the five-lolly gift box in Passion Fruit and Sour Raspberry. So there is no trial size of this flavour. If sour is what you want and you have not tried the range, the Sour Raspberry gift box is the nearest small step, since it shares the acid-in-the-shell construction.

A hundred lollies at 10mg each is a thousand milligrams of CBD in the box, which is a figure worth seeing written down. Our blue raspberry page sets out what a box of one hundred commits you to, and the same applies here. Everything on this site is 18+ only, and a display box of bright yellow lollipops is the single most important thing in the house to keep out of a child's reach.

Questions people ask