Multitrance HaZe Cannabis Lollipops, 8 flavours

Where this sits among cannabis lollipops

Cannabis lollipops split into three genuinely different products that share a name, and Multitrance itself sets them out this way. There are CBD lollipops, made with hemp extract. There are THC lollipops, which are psychoactive and are sold only in licensed premises in jurisdictions that permit them, never in UK retail. And there are hemp seed oil and cannabis flavoured lollipops, which the brand describes as containing neither CBD nor THC while giving you the distinctive taste and the look.

This product is the third kind. That is not a criticism of it, because it is a perfectly good boiled sweet and the flavour work is the point. It only becomes a problem when a page tells you otherwise.

And two of the longest pages ranking in the UK for cannabis lollipops do exactly that. Both run thousands of words using cannabis lollipop and CBD lollipop as interchangeable terms, one of them under a heading about the benefits of cannabis lollipops on a collection with nothing in it. Read either and you would reasonably expect a cannabinoid in this bag. There is none.

Credit where it is due: two other retailers in that same ranking set handle it properly, one separating the CBD line from the cannabis flavoured line on the shelf, the other stating the correct legal test. The confusion is widespread rather than universal.

Hemp seed oil is not CBD, and the reason matters

The word hemp does a lot of quiet work on labels and it is worth pulling apart, because it is the single most common misunderstanding in this aisle.

Hemp seed oil is pressed from the seeds of the plant. Seeds are not where cannabinoids are made, so seed oil carries no meaningful CBD and is treated in law as an ordinary food oil, no different in principle from rapeseed or sunflower. It has been on supermarket shelves for decades.

CBD is extracted from the flower and leaf, where the cannabinoids actually sit, and it is a completely different ingredient with a completely different regulatory position. A product can be full of hemp seed oil and contain no CBD whatsoever. That is precisely the situation here.

One honest wrinkle we will not paper over. Multitrance lists hemp seed oil in the ingredients on its website and names it in its own product photography filenames, but the six pack labels we read do not list it among the ingredients at all. We have raised it with the supplier. Whichever is right, it changes nothing about the cannabinoid content, which is zero on both accounts.

The eight flavours, and which ones are not vegan

This is the part no other page in the category provides, so it is worth explaining where it comes from. We pulled the manufacturer's actual multilingual pack labels for six of the eight flavours we stock and read the ingredient panels directly. Not one competitor page publishes an ingredient list at all.

The base recipe is identical across the range: sugar, glucose syrup, citric acid as the acidulant, flavours, and food colours. What changes between flavours is the colour set, and that turns out to matter.

E120 is cochineal, also called carmine, and it is derived from insects. It appears on the Blueberry Haze and Strawberry Haze labels and on neither of the four other flavours we verified. So Blueberry Haze and Strawberry Haze are not suitable for vegans or vegetarians, and Lemon Haze, Energy Skunk, Watermelon Kush and Mango Kush are. E101 is riboflavin, E132 is indigotine and E160c is paprika extract, all of which are fine on a plant-based diet.

Two flavours we could not obtain a label for, Bubblegum and Hash, are marked below as unverified rather than assumed. If either decides your purchase, ask us and we will get the panel from the supplier before you order.

Blueberry Haze and Strawberry Haze are both short at the time of writing. The other six are available.

Weight, nutrition and what the numbers on the carton mean

Every label in this range carries the same figures, and they are worth setting out because no UK page selling cannabis lollipops publishes a single one of them.

Each lolly weighs 18 grams. The manufacturer's display carton holds seventy of them, printed on the pack as 70 x 18g, for a net weight of 1260 grams and a gross weight of 1300 grams. Shelf life is stated as twenty-four months from production, and the whole range is produced in the European Union at the company's address in Diemen-Amsterdam.

On the listing title. This product is titled as a seventy piece because that is how Multitrance packs the range for trade. We have not yet confirmed with our distributor which unit our listing ships as, so we are not stating a count for it. Ask us before ordering if the quantity matters and we will tell you exactly what we hold.

The nutritional panel is the same across all six labels we read. Worked out for a single 18 gram lolly, that comes to roughly 71 calories and about 12 grams of sugar, which is the honest arithmetic on a boiled sweet and the reason nobody should be eating four in a row.

The Amsterdam story behind the format

Multitrance tells the origin story on its own site, and we pass it on as its account rather than as established history. In 1997 a twenty-four year old souvenir shop owner on the Leidsestraat in Amsterdam, named as Dror Gorany, put the first cannabis flavoured lollipop on a counter. It was expected to fail. It did not, and the format spread across European novelty and souvenir retail from there.

Worth a note of caution: another UK retailer dates its own house cannabis lollipop recipe to 1999 rather than 1997, so the histories in this category do not agree with each other. We are not in a position to arbitrate, and neither claim changes what is in the sweet.

What the story does explain is the product's design logic. This was always a souvenir and a novelty, made to taste and look like something rather than to deliver a compound, which is exactly why the flavour work is good and the cannabinoid content is nil.

The legal position, and the rule that does not apply here

A cannabis flavoured sweet with no cannabinoid in it is an ordinary confectionery product under food law. There is nothing controlled in it. We still keep it behind an 18+ check because of the branding, and the manufacturer runs an age gate on its own site for the same reason.

Because this contains no CBD, the FSA Novel Foods regime does not apply to it. That regime governs ingestible CBD, and it is the reason our CBD gummies and oils are handled differently. A page that lumps a cannabis flavoured sweet in with CBD edibles implies a compliance question that does not exist here, and it also obscures the one that does exist over on the CBD shelves.

One correction while we are here, because two of the largest pages ranking for this category get it wrong. The figure you will see repeated, that a product is legal if it is under a fifth of a percent THC, is not the consumer test. That percentage is a Home Office rule about a growing hemp crop in a field.

The rule that governs what may be sold to you is a limit of one milligram of controlled cannabinoids per container, whatever the container's size. Two of the retailers in the same ranking set state that correctly, which is worth acknowledging. Our full explanation of the arithmetic is in the legality guide linked below.

Who should choose something else

If you want CBD, buy a CBD lollipop instead. The Bubbly Billy Buds line we stock is sold as a CBD lollipop and is the direct swap, in the same format and from the same distributor. This one will do nothing beyond taste of what it says.

If you are vegan or vegetarian, avoid Blueberry Haze and Strawberry Haze specifically. Both carry E120 on the label. The four other verified flavours do not.

If you are buying for someone managing sugar intake, look elsewhere entirely. This is sugar and glucose syrup with flavouring, and no version of it is anything else.

And if you dislike sweet confectionery, seven of the eight are firmly sweet. Hash is the only flavour in the range built around the herbal, earthy note rather than a fruit or sugar profile, and it is the one to start with if the sweet shop end of the range is not for you.