Tyson 2.0 Cannabis Milk Chocolate, 100g

The panel, and what its order tells you

One UK retailer publishes the ingredient list for this bar. Nobody else in the range does, for either finish. It reads: sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, shelled hemp seeds at 10 per cent, cocoa mass, emulsifiers, soy lecithin, vanilla aroma, traces of various nuts.

UK and EU labelling rules require ingredients in descending order by weight, so the sequence itself is information, and three things fall straight out of it.

Sugar is first, which means there is more sugar in the bar than any single cocoa component. Whole milk powder is third and the hemp seed is fourth, so the bar contains more dairy than it does the ingredient it is named and marketed for. And cocoa mass, which is the component that carries actual chocolate flavour rather than fat or sweetness, sits fifth, below a hemp seed line stated at 10 per cent.

None of that makes it a bad bar. It makes it a sweet, milky one with a genuinely tasteable hemp seed content, which is a fair description and not the one it is sold under. What it is not, on the evidence of its own panel, is cannabis oil chocolate.

There is no hemp extract on that list. There is no CBD figure. There is nothing on it that would make this a cannabinoid product rather than a confectionery product with seeds in it.

Allergens: milk, soya, and nuts that are not named

The panel declares three things a shopper may need to avoid. Whole milk powder makes this a dairy product. Soy lecithin makes it a soya product. And it carries a traces-of-nuts warning.

Neither our own listing nor our distributor's declares any of the three, which on a food product is a gap we have raised with them rather than one we are going to paper over.

The nut warning is the weaker part of the declaration. It says various nuts without naming them, which is not much help to anyone managing a specific tree-nut allergy. That phrasing usually points at shared production equipment rather than an ingredient, and the same Czech producer does make a hazelnut bar, which would explain it. We are asking for the pack photograph so we can tell you exactly what the warning says rather than what a transcription of it says.

One more thing about that transcription. The line reads emulsifiers and then soy lecithin, a plural followed by a single name. Bars from the same producer declare two emulsifiers, soya lecithin and polyglycerol polyricinoleate, the second of which is standard in a lower-cocoa bar to keep it flowing. So this list looks short by one name. We are not going to add an ingredient to a label we have not seen, but if you are avoiding a specific emulsifier, contact us and let us get the pack first.

If dairy, soya or nuts matter to you, that conversation takes a minute and is worth having before you order.

Not one cannabis chocolate on a UK shelf publishes a dose

It would be easy to make this bar look uniquely evasive. It is not, and pretending otherwise would be a false picture of the market.

We went through the whole chocolate range at a UK retailer that stocks this bar. Ten products, across seven brands, including an HHCP bar and a mushroom chocolate. Not a single one of them states a milligram figure for anything.

That is the actual state of the UK cannabis-chocolate aisle. The word cannabis on a wrapper is doing brand work, and almost nobody is putting a number behind it. So the useful question is not how many milligrams this bar contains, it is whether any cannabinoid is declared on it at all, and for this bar the answer is no.

That is the standard we hold ourselves to on this shelf: for every chocolate we list, we will tell you whether a cannabinoid is declared and how much, or say plainly that none is. The table below does that for everything on our own shelf in this format.

A CBD retailer sells this as CBD chocolate, and it is not

One UK CBD shop lists this bar as CBD milk chocolate, describes it as containing hemp extract, and states no milligram figure anywhere on the page. On the panel evidence above there is no hemp extract in it. There are shelled seeds.

We are not singling that shop out, because our own catalogue makes the identical mistake. The description generated for this line calls it a CBD-isolate CBD edible, which is wrong twice over: there is no isolate in it and no CBD declared on it. It is the nineteenth product in this brand group where our generator has asserted a cannabinoid on something that declares none, and it is being fixed at the source rather than patched over here.

The reason this keeps happening is worth naming. A wrapper that says cannabis, sold through CBD channels, reads as a CBD product to almost everyone in the chain, and hardly anyone stops to read the panel. If you came to this page expecting CBD in the bar, that expectation was entirely reasonable and the market gave it to you.

The law, and the sentence that gets it half right

The same retailer prints a legal note claiming the bar is verified to hold less than 0.2 per cent and less than one milligram of THC per pack. That is two different tests welded into one sentence as though both governed.

The container figure is the real one. A product on a UK shelf must hold no more than 1mg of controlled cannabinoids per container, whatever the size of that container. The percentage is a threshold that applies to the hemp crop a grower is licensed to cultivate, and it has never been a consumer limit. On a 100g bar the difference between the two readings is enormous, which is exactly why the conflation matters and why we wrote it up separately.

For this particular bar none of it bites, because no cannabinoid is declared in it at all. A hemp seed chocolate with no extract in it is an ordinary food. The Novel Foods authorisation question does not arise for it either, since that regime covers ingestible CBD rather than seeds.

One further thing the search results throw up. Query this bar and you will also be shown UK sites selling milk chocolate bars advertised at 100mg as weed edibles. A 100mg chocolate bar of that description is not a legal UK product. We mention it because a shopper looking for this bar will be shown both on the same page of results, and the two things could not be further apart.

We sell this to over-18s only. That is our own policy on cannabis-branded confectionery rather than a legal requirement on chocolate, and we apply it across the shelf.

How it eats, and who should skip it

At 32 per cent cocoa solids this is a soft, sweet, distinctly milky bar. It sits closer to a mainstream milk chocolate than to anything the wrapper suggests, and the melt is quick and buttery because cocoa butter is the second ingredient.

The hemp seed is the reason to eat it. Shelled seeds at 10 per cent give a fine, even, sandy crunch that runs through every bite rather than sitting in pockets, and a soft green nuttiness that arrives in the finish, somewhere between sunflower seed and pine nut. A milk base at this cocoa level is the most forgiving background for that flavour there is: on the 70 per cent Multitrance dark bar the seed has to fight the cocoa, and here it does not. If you have tried hemp seed chocolate before and found the seed vanished, the milk version is the one where it does not.

It is a 100g bar, which is a large format, and the sweetness does not let up across it. Anyone who finds mainstream milk chocolate too sweet will find this sweeter, because the sugar leads the panel.

Who should skip it: anyone avoiding dairy, soya or nut traces, anyone wanting a cannabinoid, anyone who prefers a cocoa-forward bar, and anyone expecting the seeds to be a subtle garnish rather than a texture that defines the bar.

Milk against dark, and where the two bars actually differ

The two Tyson 2.0 bars are the same 100g format from the same producer with the same 10 per cent hemp seed content, and their barcodes are consecutive. What separates them is cocoa level and dairy.

The dark bar is 47 per cent, which is low for a bar sold as dark, and its own panel has never been published, so its allergen set is unknown to us. This milk bar is 32 per cent and its panel is the one on the record. If you want to know what is in a Tyson chocolate bar, the milk bar is currently the only one you can find out about, which is an odd but real reason to choose it.

The wider producer story, including why the same Czech factory puts 100mg of CBD in a bar under its own name and none in either of these, is set out on the dark bar page. We have not repeated it here.