California (AB 899) compelled 39 baby-food brands to publish their heavy-metal test results. Most of them tried to hide it as best they could, but the data was left in such a precarious place that without breaking any laws, I was able to get all of it. 18,124 records from 32 brands, every bit of it public record. Here's what it says.
2,381 individual metal-lot tests exceeded an action level, one lot can fail multiple metals.
A failed lot tells you 1 lot was bad. It does not test the food in your kitchen. One drop of FluoroSpec on a spoonful, 30 seconds, glows green if there is lead. Works on baby food, dishes, the painted plate from grandma, tap-water residue on a glass.
Why it works: the reagent forms perovskite quantum dots only where there is lead, locked to that spot. No glow, no detectable lead. No lab, no swab fade, no waiting.
If all this did was tell you the jar in your pantry is the clean one, would $50 be worth it? It does that, and 3,599 more tests after that.
Or the Full Kit for $75. Reagent is consumable so the guarantee is simple. Email me, full refund, no return.
2,381 lots exceeded an action level across 32 brands. Filter by brand, spin a random failing lot, or type in your lot code to check it directly.
Four ways to count. Only one is scientific.
A heavy-metal number only means something once you know the serving size. Watch what happens to a real lot when we switch units, this is a lead example:
Three of these measure exposure. One (ppb) measures concentration. That’s why the headline says only one is the right answer to the question “is this dangerous for my kid?”
The brands that disclosed the most also had some of the worst records. Transparency and safety are not the same thing.
The same five crops show up across every brand that failed. This is a supply chain problem, you can't fix it by switching brands.
The five categories below account for the bulk of exceedances across 32 brands, tracing back to soil, irrigation water, and agricultural inputs.
Arsenic dominates the counts because it's everywhere in grain crops. Lead is different, it shows up in concentrated pockets. Unlike arsenic and cadmium, which enter food almost entirely through soil and irrigation, lead exposure for most children comes primarily from the home environment: paint dust, tracked-in soil, cookware, glazed dishes, and renovation debris. That context matters enormously for risk prioritization. These are the ingredients where food-based lead shows up:
For children in the U.S., food is a minor source of total lead exposure. The dominant sources are paint dust and chips in homes built before 1978, contaminated soil tracked indoors, lead plumbing, old cookware, and ceramic glazes. The most impactful first step is an XRF scan of your home, not a dietary overhaul.
Two quick audits scored against FDA reference levels. One for your home, one for your diet.
12 questions about your home's age, windows, paint, water, soil, and hobbies. Maps your answers to a µg/day exposure estimate compared to the FDA reference dose.
7 questions about what you and your child regularly eat. Estimates your daily dietary lead load from FDA Total Diet Study averages, in the same µg/day units.
Prefer the data in raw form? Switch to Researcher view at the top of the page.
The argument happening under the headlines is about units. A number like "15 ppb lead" means nothing in isolation. Dose is what maps to blood lead: ppb × serving mass → µg/day → blood-lead level. Concentration is the first term, not the last.
The FDA Interim Reference Level of 2.2 µg/day for children is derived from a blood-lead target of ≤5 µg/dL.
It's the only path that connects a product label to a pediatrician's chart.
The headline teether at 137 ppb delivers less absolute metal than a pouch at 29 ppb, because pouches are 28× heavier.
| Brand | Product | Lot | Metal | Ppb | µg/serving | % FDA IRL child ref: Pb 2.2 / As 3.0 / Cd 3.6 / Hg 1.0 µg/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading dose data… | ||||||
| Brand | Product types | Records | Failures | Per-100 | Max As | Max Pb | Headline |
|---|
These are actual food ingredients, rice, sweet potato, oats, apple. Arsenic dominates most; only a handful are lead-driven. One product can tag multiple ingredients (a rice teether with sweet potato flavoring tags as both).
| Ingredient | Records | Brands | Fail/100 | Primary metal | Worst offender |
|---|
The separate format question: teethers, puffs, bars, pouches, cereals. Formats carry ingredient-independent risk patterns, small-serving high-concentration formats (teethers, rusks) vs large-serving lower-concentration formats (pouches, meals).
| Format | Records | Brands | Fail/100 | Primary metal | Worst offender |
|---|
Babylife Organics Raspberry & Fig Oat Bar failed lead tests in three different production lots, each hitting exactly 84.0 ppb: lot 112026, lot 021127, lot 021727. Three independent runs landing on an identical value isn't sampling noise; it's a single contaminated upstream ingredient (almost certainly oat flour) distributed across multiple product batches.
Amara's "CR25029.F4" convention encodes the production line in the trailing "F4". Their F4 lots drive most arsenic and lead failures; F1 has the mercury outlier. Aldi Little Journey's lots split into "A" and "D" series, two lines feeding Rice Rusks Apple, both failing arsenic on every one of 76 tested lots. Lot codes leak supply-chain structure the brands never intended to disclose.
Sweet potato fails arsenic thresholds at 14 different brands. Apple-based at 17. Berry-based at 18. This isn't a brand problem, it's a raw-ingredient problem tracing upstream to soil, irrigation water, and post-harvest handling. Regulating the finished product is always late; regulating precursor ingredients at the supplier level is the tool AB 899 makes newly possible.
Every brand's AB 899 disclosure page was collected via publicly-accessible REST endpoints, inline JSON, or static HTML, the same requests a web browser makes when loading the page. No authentication was bypassed, no credentials were forged, and no session state was tampered with. AB 899 requires these disclosures to be public; collecting public data via standard HTTP requests is explicitly lawful. Four brands (Target Good & Gather, Walmart Parent's Choice, Albertsons O Organics, Love Child Organics) use Laravel Livewire with cryptographically-signed session state; generating a forged signed token would constitute unauthorized computer access under the CFAA, so those brands are excluded from this analysis pending crowdsourced QR scans or formal AB 899 public records requests.
Lead: 10 ppb (FDA Closer to Zero draft guidance, fruits/vegetables & single-ingredient cereals). Arsenic: 10 ppb inorganic (FDA final guidance for infant rice cereals, August 2020). Cadmium: 40 ppb (EU Contaminants Regulation 2023/915; FDA hasn't published an infant-food cadmium action level). Mercury: 10 ppb (not federally set; matches Consumer Reports' published audits).
µg per serving = ppb × serving grams ÷ 1000. Serving sizes are matched from product names (pouches 99–113 g, meals 170 g, teethers 4 g, puffs/snack bites 7 g, rusks 11 g, cereals 15 g dry, bars 25 g, juices 120 g) with brand-level defaults for API-only sources. Less than 0.5% of records fall back to a 30 g generic default.
Reference daily doses for a ~10 kg toddler: Lead 2.2 µg/day (FDA IRL); Arsenic 3.0 µg/day (ATSDR chronic oral MRL); Cadmium 3.6 µg/day (EFSA TWI); Mercury 1.0 µg/day (FDA RfD inorganic).
Values above 1000 ppb excluded as suspected unit mix-ups (e.g. A single Earth's Best mercury value of 3156 ppb was almost certainly ng/kg misreported as µg/kg). "
HUD Lead Hazard Control grantees, Public Housing Authorities, and CDC/EPA grant recipients can apply for 100 free Fluoro-Spec detection kits (~50,000 tests). If you're working in lead hazard control and want to add food and household surface screening to your program, this is free.
Learn more on the grantees page →Back to the parent-facing version? Switch to Parent view at the top.
18,124 lots is what the brands shipped. The jar on your counter is its own lot. One drop. Thirty seconds. If it glows green, it has lead.
If all this did was let you skip a single recalled jar your kid was about to eat, $50 would pay for itself once. It does that, 3,600 times.
Get the Drip Kit for $50 →Or the Full Kit for $75. Reagent is consumable so the guarantee is simple. Email me, full refund, no return.
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