Multitrance Cannabis Dark Chocolate

This bar has no hazelnuts, whatever the photograph shows

We check every product against the data our supplier ships, and on this one the image file is named for a different bar. It carries the filename of the hazelnut version. The product name does not mention hazelnuts and the published recipe does not contain them.

It is not an isolated slip either. The milk chocolate listing in the same range carries the same wrongly named file, and the Haze milk bar that genuinely does contain hazelnuts appears to carry the picture of the plain one. The filenames look to have been rotated somewhere upstream.

We are saying this out loud because hazelnut is a declared allergen and because the second case is the one that matters. A bar with no nuts shown with nuts is confusing. A bar with nuts shown without them is a hazard.

So, plainly: if you have a nut allergy, do not buy any bar in this range on the strength of a photograph. Read the ingredient list on the listing and read the wrapper when it arrives. That is true of every shop, and it is more true here until the images are corrected.

For this particular bar the answer is straightforward. No hazelnuts, no almonds, no nuts of any kind added. The brand does carry a may-contain warning for milk and other dry nut kernels, which is a shared-line statement rather than an ingredient, and that is covered below.

How to tell the five dark bars apart

One Dutch factory makes at least five dark chocolate bars that look almost identical on a shelf, across four different brand labels. Working out which is which from the listings alone is genuinely difficult, so here they are side by side.

The differences are small but real, and two of them are worth caring about: whether there is a nut in it, and whether the vanilla is an extract or a flavouring.

What is on this label

Cocoa mass, sugar, shelled hemp seeds at ten per cent, cocoa butter, fat-reduced cocoa powder, soy lecithin as an emulsifier, and vanilla aroma. That is the whole list, and it is shorter than the hazelnut bar's.

Two details in it are worth pulling out because nobody else mentions either.

The vanilla here is an aroma, meaning a flavouring, where the Haze hazelnut bar uses a Bourbon Madagascar vanilla extract. In a dark chocolate at this cocoa level the difference is small but detectable: an extract carries more of the woody, slightly boozy end of vanilla and a flavouring is cleaner and flatter.

And there is one emulsifier here rather than two. Soy lecithin does the work on its own, without the polyglycerol polyricinoleate that the hazelnut bar adds. That additive is usually there to help a more complicated mix flow, so its absence is consistent with this being the plainer recipe.

The brand also publishes a may-contain statement covering milk and other dry nut kernels. That is a shared-production warning rather than an ingredient, and it is the sort of thing every retailer selling this bar drops. If you react to traces, it applies to you.

What it tastes like

A clean, fairly straight dark chocolate. Without hazelnuts competing for attention, the hemp seeds are the only texture in it, and they read differently on their own: a fine, even crunch running through every square rather than the alternating soft and hard bites you get in the nut version.

The flavour the seeds bring is mild and slightly green, closer to a toasted grain than to anything herbal. Against dark chocolate it reads as nutty and a little savoury, which is why this bar works despite having nothing sweet added to carry it.

The vanilla flavouring keeps the finish simple. It is doing less than an extract would, and on a plain bar that is arguably the right call: there is less going on, so anything loud would dominate.

If you find the hazelnut version too busy, this is the bar. If you find dark chocolate with seeds in it a bit austere, the milk version of the same recipe is the softer option.

The legal position in short

There is no cannabinoid in this bar, so none of the CBD rules apply to it. Not the one milligram per container test on controlled cannabinoids, and not the Novel Foods regime, because hemp seed is not a novel food and has a long history of consumption in Europe.

The reason hemp seed sits in that position, and the reason it carries no cannabinoids of its own, is worth understanding properly and we have set the whole argument out on the hazelnut bar's page rather than repeating it here. It is the most useful thing to read before buying anything hemp-seed based.

The listing line that appears across this entire range, that the product is one hundred per cent legal for consumption in the European Union, is a statement about the EU rather than about Britain, and Britain has not been in it since 2020. On this particular bar it happens not to matter, because a hemp seed chocolate is an ordinary food on either side of the Channel.

We sell it as eighteen plus, in common with everything else here, though a bar of dark chocolate with seeds in it is about as unremarkable as this catalogue gets.

Who should skip this one

Anyone avoiding soy. The lecithin is in every bar in this range without exception.

Anyone who reacts to traces of milk or nuts. The brand's may-contain statement covers both, and a shared production line is a shared production line.

Anyone who wanted the nuts. They are in the Haze hazelnut version rather than this one, and the photograph on this listing has been misleading people in exactly that direction.

And anyone expecting a cannabinoid. There is none here, there is none in any bar in this range, and the hemp seed is the reason for both.