The European CBD market: where the value is moving

European CBD is not one market but a patchwork of national tolerance regimes, and the value is migrating towards the jurisdictions that have settled their rules. Switzerland remains the most liberal market on the continent: its 1% THC threshold — well above the limits of almost all EU member states — lets companies produce and sell legally where competitors elsewhere operate in grey zones. The Czech Republic, the only EU country permitting hemp cultivation at 1% THC, moved from a scrapped 2023 product ban to a formal regulatory framework implemented in January 2025.

The contested format, almost everywhere, is flower. Austria's courts clarified in January that hemp flower under 0.3% THC is subject to 34% tobacco tax and restricted to licensed tobacco shops; Poland has been raiding CBD flower retailers and weighing legislation to classify flower under narcotics rules; Italy's government is attempting to categorise all hemp flower as a narcotic regardless of THC content, against significant industry pushback. Oils and cosmetics, by contrast, are tolerated in most markets.

The structural drag on ingestibles is the EU Novel Food process. The UK — otherwise one of Europe's stronger CBD markets — has spent years making only nominal progress on registering CBD novel foods, while in markets such as Ireland and Finland no authorisation has been granted at all, leaving supplements in legal limbo. France, after two tolerant years, now has both its medicines and food-safety agencies raising health concerns.

The pattern for operators and investors: regulatory clarity, not consumer demand, is what separates the compounding CBD markets from the stalled ones — and clarity is arriving one court ruling and one framework at a time.