Multitrance White Widow Cannabis Pops

Who actually bred White Widow

White Widow was bred in the Netherlands in the 1990s, and the person usually credited is Shantibaba, born Scott Blakey, an Australian breeder who was then working at the Green House Seed Company.

The genetics are specific and unusually well documented for a strain of that era: a Brazilian sativa mother crossed with a South Indian indica father, the latter originating in the mountains of Kerala. That pairing of a South American sativa with a South Asian indica is what gave the strain its balance and, more importantly for the name, its resin production.

Green House released it in 1994. By 1995, a year after it reached coffeeshop shelves, it had won the High Times Cannabis Cup. Accounts of that period describe the win as resetting what the Amsterdam scene expected in terms of resin coverage, which is a strong claim but a widely repeated one.

It became one of the handful of strain names that escaped the cannabis world entirely. Most people who have heard of White Widow have never bought cannabis, which is exactly why an Amsterdam confectioner would put it on a lollipop.

And the argument about it is still going

The word Original in this product's name is doing more work than whoever wrote it probably realised, because the origin of White Widow is genuinely contested.

Credit is disputed between Shantibaba and a Dutch breeder known as Ingemar. Both accounts have been published for years and neither has been settled to everyone's satisfaction.

Shantibaba, who later co-founded Mr Nice Seeds, maintains that the seeds which won the 1995 Cannabis Cup came exclusively from his own plants. The counter-account credits Ingemar with the underlying work. We are not in a position to adjudicate a thirty-year-old breeding dispute and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What we can say is that a product calling itself The Original White Widow is naming something whose originality is precisely what people have argued about. That is a small joke the packaging almost certainly did not intend, and it is more interesting than anything else on the label.

The name is about trichomes

White Widow is named for its appearance. The flowers of the strain are so heavily coated in resin that they look dusted with white, and that coating is trichomes.

Trichomes are outgrowths of the plant surface. On cannabis they are glandular, meaning they secrete, and what they secrete is the resin carrying the cannabinoids and terpenes the plant is grown for. A strain that produces a conspicuous amount of them looks frosted, and White Widow was named for looking exactly that.

There is a neat coincidence on our own shelves, which we noticed while writing about a different lollipop entirely. The Peach Fuzz lollipops in our range are named after peach fuzz, and a peach's fuzz is also made of trichomes, though the non-glandular kind that secrete nothing and exist purely as a physical defence.

So we now sell two sweets named after two different kinds of trichome, one from a fruit and one from a cannabis strain, and neither product mentions it. That page is linked below if the biology interests you.

What a strain name can mean on a sweet with no cannabis

Being straightforward about this: there is no cannabinoid in this lollipop. It is a boiled sweet, handmade, listed by the manufacturer with sugar, corn syrup, citric acid, a cannabis extract and food colourings, described as THC free and made in the EU.

So what is a White Widow flavour actually referencing? Not the effects, which the sweet does not produce. Not the cannabinoid content, which is nil. What is left is the aroma, and that is a real thing rather than a marketing abstraction: a strain's smell comes from its terpene profile, and terpenes are aromatic compounds that can be reproduced.

Whether this particular sweet is built on a genuine White Widow terpene expression or simply on a general herbal cannabis note is not stated by anyone, and we are not going to assume. Our sibling page on the wider Multitrance lollipop range goes into the strain-naming convention across the whole line and is linked below.

What we would say is that a strain name on a sweet is a promise about smell rather than about anything else, and it is worth reading it that way before you buy.

The twelve that is a weight, not a count

There is a counting problem across this product and it has a specific cause worth isolating.

Our own listing name says ten. Our catalogue records the unit differently again. The image filename attached to it says twelve. The manufacturer sells White Widow pops as single lollies, in gift boxes of ten and in display containers of one hundred. And at least one European retailer lists the product as twelve grams.

That last one is the key. Twelve grams is a weight, and another source gives eighteen grams for a single lolly. Somewhere in the chain a gram figure has been read as a piece count, which is how a product sold in tens and hundreds acquires a phantom twelve.

Our sibling page covers the broader problem that no two labels in this range agree on quantities, so we will not re-run it here. The specific thing to take away is that if you see a twelve attached to White Widow pops, check whether it is grams before you assume it is lollies.

If the exact count in the unit we ship decides your purchase, ask us and we will confirm from the case rather than from a listing.

Where it sits among the lollipops we carry

Our lollipop shelf is deeper than most and splits into two quite different propositions, which is the useful way to compare rather than by flavour.

One group is strain-named and herbal: this White Widow pop, the Multitrance cannabis lollipops in Hash and OG Kush, and the HaZe range. These are trading on the cannabis association and taste herbal to some degree.

The other group is straightforwardly confectionery: the Bubbly Billy Buds range in blue raspberry, peach, cola and pineapple, which are fruit sweets with a bubble gum centre and a stated CBD content on their multi-variant listings.

If you want the cannabis reference, this shelf. If you want a cannabinoid figure you can point at, the other one.

Who should buy something else

If you want CBD, this is not a CBD product. There is no cannabinoid figure on it from anyone, and a boiled sweet named after a strain is selling you an association rather than a compound.

If you expect it to taste like White Widow smells, calibrate. Nobody publishes whether the flavouring is a genuine terpene expression of that strain or a general herbal cannabis note, and a hard-boiled sugar sweet is a blunt instrument for reproducing a complex aroma either way.

If the exact quantity matters, ask before ordering. The figures attached to this product across the market include at least one weight being read as a count, and we would rather confirm than guess.

And if you dislike herbal flavours, this is the wrong half of our lollipop shelf entirely. The Bubbly Billy Buds range is fruit and cola with a gum centre, and it is linked above.