❤️ health

Trip's CBD Cans Are Legal, Not Officially Approved

Every Trip can on a supermarket shelf boasts CBD (cannabidiol) as its headline ingredient, yet not a single CBD product has ever been formally authorised as safe to eat or drink in Great Britain. The gap between what's on the label and what regulators have actually signed off is wider than most drinkers realise, and it has just started to close.

Walk into almost any Waitrose, Sainsbury's or Asda and the fridge shelves are stacked with slim, pastel cans promising calm in a can. Trip built an entire brand on that promise, and its core range still lists cannabidiol, better known as CBD, as the star ingredient. The obvious question rarely gets asked out loud: how is a company allowed to sell a cannabis-derived compound in a soft drink at all, and does the FSA (Food Standards Agency) actually consider it safe? The short answer is that CBD is legal in the UK, but only under a narrow set of conditions that have nothing to do with formal safety approval. The compound has to come from an EU-approved industrial hemp strain, and the finished drink must contain no more than 0.2% THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) by weight and no more than 1mg of THC per container, the threshold that keeps a product out of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 entirely. Trip uses broad-spectrum or isolate CBD stripped of THC, which is why it can legally claim its cans will not get anyone high. That part of the story checks out. What gets murkier is the second, separate question of whether cannabidiol is authorised as a food ingredient at all. Since Brexit, CBD has been classed in Great Britain as a "novel food", meaning any company selling it as an ingredient is supposed to have regulatory sign-off before it goes anywhere near a can. None have ever had that sign-off. Instead, thousands of products including Trip's have survived on something called the Public List, a transitional enforcement tool the FSA set up in February 2020. Businesses had until 31 March 2021 to submit a novel food application, and only products tied to a credible, validated application were allowed to keep trading while assessment dragged on. Inclusion on the Public List is not an approval, it is a promise to eventually get one, and as of last year more than 12,000 CBD products were still sitting on that list, on shelves in England, legally tolerated rather than legally cleared. That limbo turned genuinely disruptive in October 2023, when the FSA slashed its recommended safe daily dose of CBD from 70mg to just 10mg, a reduction of more than 80% driven by concerns about long-term liver and thyroid effects at higher intakes. The change landed squarely on drinks brands, since most CBD cans on shelves contained more than the new daily ceiling in a single serving. Trip's own cans carry 15mg of CBD per 250ml, comfortably over the new guidance, and a full dropper of its standalone CBD oil contains 20mg. Trip's response was to argue the guidance simply didn't apply to its formulation. Director James Edmunds told trade press that CBD safety depends on purity and that not all CBD is created equal, insisting that studies on Trip's own source, reviewed by the FSA, generated a safety limit of 105mg, equivalent to seven cans a day. Rival brand Goodrays, whose cans carry even more CBD per serving, made a near-identical defence. Crucially, none of this is illegal. The 10mg figure is a recommendation to consumers about how much to drink, not a legal cap on how much a manufacturer can put in a can, so cans exceeding it can still be sold as long as they carry the required warnings. The regulatory picture finally started moving this month. On 3 September 2026 the FSA published recommendations to authorise the country's first three CBD novel food applications, covering roughly 3,000 products already on the market: a synthetic CBD from Chanelle McCoy CBD Ltd, a CBD isolate from Cannaray Brands Ltd, and a hemp-derived isolate from EIHA Projects GmbH, whose backers reportedly spent around 3.5 million euros on toxicology work to get there. The agency's board endorsed the recommendations at a meeting on 16 September and the decision now sits with ministers in England and Wales, who have final sign-off. The FSA itself called the moment a major milestone in the regulation of the CBD food sector, and said the resultant authorisations would be a regulatory first for Great Britain if ministers agree. Under the proposed conditions, approved products would have to display the FSA's 10mg provisional acceptable daily intake on the label along with warnings for under-18s, pregnant or breastfeeding people, those trying to conceive, anyone on medication and the immunosuppressed. Fourteen further CBD dossiers have already received positive safety assessments and are queued up behind these three, though industry figures have questioned whether a looming SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary) agreement with the European Union could make any GB-specific authorisation short-lived. While the paperwork inches forward, Trip has been busy proving it barely needs CBD as a business anymore. In 2024 it launched Mindful Blend, a magnesium, lion's mane, ashwagandha and L-theanine range sold alongside its original cans, and pushed the brand into 30,000 UK stores. That diversification has been so successful that CBD reportedly accounts for less than 3% of Trip's sales today, even as the company chases $200 million in revenue this year and just landed Kendall Jenner as a global ambassador and equity shareholder after a $40 million funding round valued the business at $300 million. The wellness marketing hasn't been trouble-free, though. In July 2025 the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) upheld three complaints against a Mindful Blend advert, ruling it implied the magnesium in the product could reduce serum cortisol levels and made unauthorised claims that lion's mane reduces anxiety and stress, alongside a misleading "0g added sugar" claim given the drink's fruit-derived sugars. And the science underpinning the whole low-dose CBD wellness category remains thin. Clinical reviews have found real evidence of anxiety reduction at CBD doses of 300 to 400mg, roughly twenty to forty times what is in a single can of Trip. A 2026 pharmacology review looking specifically at low-dose CBD, defined as up to 175mg a day, found very little evidence of clear physical or neurologic effects at those levels in healthy volunteers. The 15mg in a can of Trip sits closer to a rounding error against the doses shown to do anything measurable in a lab, which does not make the drink unsafe, but does make the calm-in-a-can pitch a matter of marketing rather than pharmacology.

My Take

There is a difference between something being legal and something being properly regulated, and the entire UK CBD drinks industry has spent six years living in that gap. Trip did not break any rules; it played a genuinely broken system about as well as it could be played, riding a Brexit-era regulatory backlog that let thousands of untested products stay on shelves indefinitely under the polite fiction of a Public List. That is not a conspiracy, it is bureaucratic drift, but it has let a multimillion-pound industry build itself on a promise regulators have never actually verified. What is more revealing is what Trip did once the ground started shifting under it. Rather than fight to keep CBD front and centre, the company quietly built an entire second business around magnesium and mushrooms, one that now dwarfs the original CBD line in sales. That is either a savvy hedge against looming ministerial decisions, or a tacit admission that the CBD story was never going to carry a $300 million valuation on its own. Probably both. None of this means anyone drinking a can of Trip is in danger. Fifteen milligrams of pharmaceutical-grade CBD isolate is a modest dose by any measure, and the company's own safety data, whatever one makes of it, has at least been reviewed by the regulator. But the gap between a label that says it contains CBD and proof that it does what the marketing implies is enormous, and consumers deserve to know that gap exists before paying a premium for a fizzy drink that promises to fix their nervous system.

What Happens Next

The immediate next step sits with ministers in England and Wales, who must formally sign off the FSA's recommendation to authorise the first three CBD novel food applications. If approved, the authorisations would be written into law as statutory instruments, a process that itself requires further Ministerial scrutiny and has no confirmed date attached to it, meaning the industry's long wait is not over even now. Fourteen other CBD applications already carry positive safety assessments and will be queued behind whatever happens to the first three, so a green light this autumn could trigger a much faster cascade of approvals through 2027. For Trip specifically, the more interesting fight may not be regulatory at all. With CBD now under 3% of its sales, the company's future increasingly rides on Mindful Blend and its newly signed Kendall Jenner campaign, both of which push the brand toward a mainstream functional drinks market worth billions rather than the smaller, more legally fraught CBD niche it started in. Watch for further ASA scrutiny of that marketing push, given the regulator has already sanctioned one Mindful Blend advert this year, and for rival brands like Goodrays to make similar pivots away from CBD-first positioning as the novel food goalposts finally start to move. A wildcard hanging over everything is the UK's ongoing SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary) negotiations with the European Union, which could reshape how GB-specific food authorisations interact with EU rules. Industry figures have already asked whether the FSA is rushing three applications through partly because it senses its window to set independent standards is closing. If that negotiation moves faster than expected, a hard-won British CBD authorisation could become a footnote almost as soon as it is granted.

What History Tells Us

CBD's legal limbo in Britain dates to February 2020, when the FSA reclassified cannabidiol as a novel food and gave companies until March 2021 to file authorisation applications tied to a public list of tolerated products. That five-year-old administrative fix, designed as a stopgap, has effectively functioned as the industry's entire legal foundation, letting brands like Trip build multimillion-pound valuations on products that were never meant to stay unauthorised for this long.

Market Impact

There is no public stock to trade here, Trip remains privately held, but its trajectory says plenty about where investor money is flowing in UK consumer goods. A $40 million raise in November 2025 valued the business at $300 million, and celebrity-backed momentum culminating in Kendall Jenner's September 2026 equity stake suggests investors are betting on the wellness-drinks category broadly rather than CBD specifically. The UK's wider functional beverage market is growing at roughly an 8.3% compound annual rate through 2030, and Trip's own pivot toward magnesium and adaptogens, now the overwhelming majority of its sales, looks like the smarter long-term bet than cannabidiol, which remains stuck in regulatory limbo even as its first approvals edge closer.