Multitrance Cannabis Space Cookie

Cannabis is the flavour, and hemp seed oil is not an extract

Every listing for this cookie tells you what is not in it. The brand's line is THC FREE (0% THC), and each of the four single-flavour pages carries it. Fair enough, and true. The problem is that nobody then tells you what is in it.

There is no cannabidiol figure on this product. Not on Multitrance's own page for any of the four flavours, not on the mix box listing, not on the retailer pages ranking above the brand for its own product name. When a manufacturer publishes a weight, a shelf life, a product code and a full ingredient panel but declines to print a milligram figure, the sensible reading is that there is not one to print.

The ingredient that causes the confusion is hemp seed oil, which appears in all four recipes. Hemp seed oil is pressed from the seed of the plant, and the seed is the part that carries essentially no cannabinoids. It is a culinary oil with a grassy, nutty character, and it is in this cookie for taste and provenance. It is not hemp extract, which is drawn from the flower and leaf and is where cannabidiol actually comes from. Two different ingredients, two different purposes, and one word doing the work of both.

If you want a cookie with a stated cannabidiol content, Multitrance make those too and we stock them. They are compared further down this page, and they are named differently on purpose.

What Multitrance actually publishes about this cookie

The brand's specification is short but it is complete, which is more than can be said for most of the listings built on top of it. Here is everything it states, with nothing added.

One figure worth holding on to: the net weight is eighty grams a cookie. You will see other numbers quoted for this product elsewhere, and there is a section below on why.

Where the name comes from, and why your search results look odd

A space cake, in Amsterdam coffeeshop usage, is a baked good containing cannabis. The term travelled, and by now it is doing double duty: it names both the thing itself and an entire aesthetic built around it.

That is why searching for a space cookie in the UK returns a strange mixture. You get strain databases describing a hybrid called Space Cookies, seed banks selling its genetics, North American sellers listing biscuits with real tetrahydrocannabinol in them, and home-baking guides for making your own. None of those things is this product, and some of them are not lawful to buy here.

Multitrance have been baking in Amsterdam since 1995 and their confectionery leans hard on that iconography: leaf artwork, strain names on the wrapper, the three crosses of the Amsterdam coat of arms. The Purple Haze cookie is purple, the Pure Hemp cookie is green. It is a piece of Amsterdam, done as a biscuit. Take it on those terms and it is a good one.

The four flavours are not four versions of one recipe

This is the part nobody tabulates, and it is the reason the choice matters more than it looks. Multitrance publish a separate ingredient list for each flavour, and they genuinely differ. Chocolate gets cocoa powder. Natural gets cocoa butter and a natural vanilla flavour. The two brightly coloured ones get a set of food colourings the other two do not have, plus preservatives the other two do not have.

On taste, the base cookie is the same across all four: soft, sweet, buttery, with a faint grassy note from the hemp seed oil sitting underneath. Chocolate is the most conventional of the set and reads as an ordinary chocolate cookie with something herbal behind it. Natural is a pale chocolate-chip cookie and the mildest. Pure Hemp and Purple Haze lean furthest into the green, herbal side, and their colour is a large part of the point.

Options that are unavailable stay visible in the picker rather than being hidden, so you can see what is out rather than assuming the range was cut.

Two of the four carry colours that require a warning on the label

This is the single most useful thing on this page and not one competing listing mentions it, including the one currently ranking first.

Six food colours have to be labelled in Great Britain with the wording: may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children. They are E102 tartrazine, E104 quinoline yellow, E110 sunset yellow, E122 carmoisine, E124 ponceau 4R and E129 allura red. The requirement came out of research commissioned by the Food Standards Agency and published in 2007, and it has applied here since 2010. Most British manufacturers reformulated rather than print the sentence. Imported confectionery frequently did not.

Multitrance publish E102 and E124 in the Pure Hemp recipe, and E102, E122 and E124 in the Purple Haze recipe. Three of the six, in one cookie. The Chocolate and Natural recipes contain neither, using only E160a, which is the carotene family and carries no such requirement.

None of this means the cookie is unsafe or unlawful. It means the pack is required to say something, and if you are buying for anyone who reacts to those colours you now know which two flavours to avoid and which two are clear. We are confirming the on-pack wording with the distributor and will publish what it says.

One footnote for completeness: the 2007 study tested those colours alongside the preservative sodium benzoate, which is E211 and appears in the Purple Haze list. The labelling requirement that followed applies to the colours, not to the preservative.

The listings for this cookie contradict each other, and one of them matters

We check what other retailers publish before writing a page, and this product produced the worst set of disagreements we have seen on a food item.

Start with the weight. The manufacturer states eighty grams. The page ranking first in the UK states one hundred. A sibling listing on the same shop states one hundred and fifty for a related line. Some of that is gross against net, since twenty-four cookies box up at two and a half kilograms, but not all of it, and nobody reconciles it.

The serious one is the ingredient panel. The UK page ranking first for this cookie publishes a list built on wheat flour and hemp flour, with no butter, no egg and no whey powder in it. That is not this product. It is the panel for Multitrance's Space Cake Cookies, a separate line, and the same shop publishes near-identical wording on its own Space Cake page. Anyone with a milk or egg allergy reading the top result would come away believing this cookie is free of both. It contains both.

So the naming is a mess as well: Space Cookie, Giant Space Cookie, Space Cake Cookies and Haze Space Cake Cookies are all in circulation, and at least two of them are genuinely different products. Ours is the Space Cookie, and the brand's own product codes confirm it: canna35B for Chocolate, canna36B for Natural, canna36GB for Pure Hemp and canna36PB for Purple Haze.

If you want a cookie that does contain cannabidiol

Plenty of people land on a page like this one wanting a CBD cookie and leave with a flavoured one, so here is the honest side by side. Everything below is in our range, and the difference between the two halves of the table is whether a milligram figure exists at all.

The pattern to notice is in the naming. Multitrance put the word cannabis on the flavoured lines and the letters CBD on the cannabidiol lines, and they are consistent about it. Once you know that, their catalogue stops being confusing.

Strength across the comparison runs from ten milligrams a cookie up to a hundred and twenty in a pot, so this is a choice about format as much as about strength.

Where UK law actually sits on a cannabis-flavoured cookie

Every listing in the ranking set repeats the manufacturer's line that the product is legal for consumption in the European Union. True, and beside the point on a British shop. Here is the UK position.

The consumer test in the UK is one milligram or less of controlled cannabinoids per container. Per container, not per serving, and not a percentage of anything. You will see a percentage figure quoted in this market as though it were the rule for finished products. It is not. That figure comes from the Home Office licence for growing industrial hemp and describes the standing crop in a field, which has nothing to do with what may lawfully be sold to you in a shop.

Applied here, the question barely arises. Multitrance declare this cookie free of tetrahydrocannabinol, hemp seed oil is not a cannabinoid extract, and no controlled cannabinoid is claimed for it by anyone.

The Novel Foods point is the interesting one, and no page in the ranking set makes it. Ingestible cannabidiol in the UK sits inside the Food Standards Agency's Novel Foods regime, and authorised products appear on its public list. A cookie made with hemp seed oil and no cannabinoid extract is not caught by that regime at all, because there is no novel ingredient in it. The Multitrance CBD cookies sitting beside it in our range are a different matter entirely. Same brand, same shelf, different regulatory world.

Everything we sell is 18+ regardless, this cookie included.

Who should not buy this cookie

Anyone who wants cannabidiol. There is none declared in it, and this is the main reason people are disappointed by products in this category. Buy one of the CBD cookies above instead.

Anyone avoiding milk, egg, soy or gluten. This contains butter, whey powder, egg, soy flour and spelt, and it is baked where peanuts and tree nuts are handled. It is not vegan and it is not free from anything much. If you have an allergy, do not rely on the ingredient list published by the shop ranking first for this product, for the reasons set out above.

Anyone buying for a household where the six named colours are an issue. Choose Chocolate or Natural, both of which are clear of them.

And anyone expecting anything at all to happen. This is a biscuit that tastes faintly of hemp and is coloured like a poster. That is the entire proposition, and it is a perfectly good one as long as it is the one you wanted.