Cannabis-laced Haribo sweets found only in eastern Netherlands

The packets of Haribo cola sweets that contained traces of cannabis were all found in the east of the country, the company told Dutch News on Friday.

Several people – both adults and children – are reported to have fallen ill after eating the sweets. The alarm was raised by a family from Twente who called in the police after several children became unwell.

The police then alerted the food safety authority, which tested the product and found traces of the popular recreational drug.

The NVWA purchased several bags of the sweets from local shops and found cannabis traces in three of them, news website Nu.nl reported. No contaminated bags have been discovered in other parts of the country.

However, the advice not to eat them remains in place nationwide, an NVWA spokesman said. The scare concerns one-kilo bags of Happy Cola F!ZZ with a use-by date of January 2026. Haribo said the recall is precautionary.

“We are taking this incident extremely seriously,” a spokeswoman for Haribo’s Dutch office told Dutch News. “The investigation focuses on a limited number of reports and a specific product in the east of the country.”

The NVWA spokesman said police are now working to establish how many people became ill and how the cannabis ended up in the sweets.

The Dutch forensic institute NFI is also investigating to determine what type of cannabis was involved and whether the sweets contained any other substances.

Cannabis “edibles”, often disguised as legitimate sweets, are a popular online buy and stories about children becoming ill after eating them are common.

In 2023, six children were taken ill while playing outside in The Hague after eating sweets containing THC, one of the active ingredients in cannabis. There is a type of THC fruit gum available which is very similar to the popular Haribo gummy bears.