Crowdfunded retests · the actual lab cost

The Lead Lottery.

If you want a specific batch retested, here is how. $100 chips fund one Purity Labs ICP-MS panel and one sealed retail unit. No markup, no admin fee, no separate business overhead. Same lab Lead Safe Mama uses, roughly 5× cheaper.

Same product, different batches, different numbers. We built /pages/contested-foods to show that. The Lead Lottery is the practical answer. Anyone can nominate a product. Anyone can chip in. When chip-ins reach $100, we buy a sealed retail unit, ship it sealed to Purity Labs, and publish the result side by side with whatever number is currently on record. No anonymization. Real packaging. Real chain of custody.

$100
total per batch tested ($80 ICP-MS panel + $20 sealed retail unit)
$495
Lead Safe Mama "Community Sponsorship" rate per product (her own published budget)
5×
price difference for the equivalent ICP-MS panel
5
currently on the Lead Lottery radar (LSM has open GoFundMes for these, we'll do them at lab cost)
How it works The math Currently on the radar Why this is cheaper Nominate one LSM food testing audit →

How it works.

Three steps. No anonymization. No mailing the sample yourself. We buy it sealed at retail and ship it sealed to the lab.

1

Nominate.

Email us a product you want retested. Specify the brand, the variant or flavor, and the batch or lot if you have one. We post it to the Lead Lottery board with a $100 chip-in goal.

2

Chip in.

Anyone can chip in $5, $20, $100, anything. When the board reaches $100 for an item, the test is funded. There is no separate platform fee. Stripe processing is on us.

3

We test, we publish.

We buy a sealed retail unit and ship it sealed to Purity Labs. ICP-MS, CH114 4-metal panel (lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium). Result published side by side with whatever ppb number is currently on record for that product, with the signed lab report.

The actual cost of one ICP-MS panel.

Both columns below are sourced. Ours is what we pay. Hers is what she publishes on her own budget page.

Lead Lottery (our model)

$100

per product, all-in

Purity Labs ICP-MS, CH114 4-metal panel$80
Sealed retail unit + shipping$20
Admin / overhead$0
Payment processing$0
Our time$0
Source: puritylabs.com published 2023-2024 price list, CH114 4-metal heavy-metals panel ($80, digestion included).

Lead Safe Mama "Community Sponsorship"

$495

per product, per her own budget page

Lab Testing$100-498
Product Purchase$2-450
Payment Processing$35-50
Administrative & Support$180-325
Lead Safe Mama's Time$0
Source: tamararubin.com/budget ("Individual/Group Sponsorship $495.00 per product").
$495 community sponsorship
÷ $80 Purity CH114 panel (her current lab since March 2025)
= 6.2× over the documented lab cost

For historical context only, her former SimpleLab rate (discontinued March 2025):
$495 ÷ $195 SimpleLab kit (her May 2024 quote)
= 2.5× over that older rate

The roughly $415 spread between her $495 community solicitation and the $80 documented Purity lab fee is the line that interests us. Her budget page calls that line "Administrative & Support." The community is paying for an overhead apparatus that we don't have, because detectlead.com is our existing business and the Lead Lottery rides on the same infrastructure that already runs the calculator, the dish database, and this site.

Currently on the radar.

Five products that Lead Safe Mama has open GoFundMes for right now. We will do every one of them at $100 each as soon as the chip-ins land. If she funds them first, great, the data still comes out. If we fund them first, the result gets published on detectlead with the receipts.

Open · 4 SKUs

Once Upon a Farm Immunity Pack

4-flavor bundle, organic baby/kid pouches.

LSM goal
$2,000
Lottery cost
$400
LSM GoFundMe (raised $1,370 of $2,000) →
Open · 1 SKU

Now Real Food Organic Raw Cacao Powder

Pantry baking staple. Cocoa is a known cadmium accumulator and varies wildly by source country.

LSM goal
~$495
Lottery cost
$100
LSM GoFundMe →
Open · 4 SKUs

Four More Cinnamon Products

Bundle test of cinnamon brands following the cinnamon-applesauce recall era. Cinnamon is the textbook batch-variability case (origin country, soil, processing).

LSM goal
~$2,000
Lottery cost
$400
LSM GoFundMe →
Open · 1 SKU

Matcha.com Organic Superior Matcha

Powdered green tea. High-volume daily consumption product for many people, worth the data point.

LSM goal
~$495
Lottery cost
$100
LSM GoFundMe →
Open · 1 SKU

Anthony's Organic Cocoa Powder

Pantry baking staple. Direct comparison candidate to the Now Real Food cacao test (different brand, similar matrix).

LSM goal
~$495
Lottery cost
$100
LSM GoFundMe →

Why this is cheaper, in plain English.

Three line items. The first one is real. The second is partly real. The third is the spread.

1. Lab fee. Purity Labs charges $80 per sample for the CH114 4-metal ICP-MS panel (lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium), digestion included, per their published 2023-2024 price list. Lead Safe Mama uses Purity Labs for ICP-MS food testing. Her current lab is Purity Labs, which she has used since March 2025 (her own statement). Before that she used SimpleLab, quoting $195 per kit in her May 2024 post. Her current documented lab cost is the published Purity CH114 fee: $80 per sample. We use the same lab she does.

2. Sample purchase. A retail unit of cream cheese is $4. A box of cereal is $6. A jar of cinnamon is $4. The product-purchase line in her budget runs $2 to $450, which is honest about the high tail (some specialty supplements are expensive), but the median pantry item is $5 to $20. We allocate $20 in our $100 model. Generous to ourselves on this line.

3. Administrative and support. Her budget allocates $180 to $325 to this line per product. This is the line that creates the spread. A separate single-tester operation has real overhead: hosting, accounting, shipping logistics, sample archiving, reporting, communications. We don't have that overhead because detectlead.com already exists. The infrastructure that runs the calculator, the dish database, the lookup pages, and this site already has hosting, accounting, and a full-time founder. Adding one ICP-MS submission to that infrastructure costs effectively nothing in marginal admin terms.

So the spread between $80 and $495 isn't lab inflation. It is the cost of running a stand-alone testing operation. We are not running one. We are running a lead-detection company that happens to commission ICP-MS panels as part of the work, and the marginal cost of one more panel is the lab fee plus the cost of a sealed retail unit. That's $100.

How $495 gets justified.

In her own words, with sources. We read these as honest. We also read them as describing one specific operating model, not the floor of what crowdfunded testing has to cost.

"Testing food down to single digit parts per billion levels for Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, and Mercury is relatively expensive and we want to acknowledge that most people cannot afford to pay for this sort of testing." Lead Safe Mama, "How to test food yourself" (May 2024)
"Each kit is for testing one single food item… $195 per kit." Lead Safe Mama, same post. This is her own quoted lab fee through SimpleLab.
"Our costs include both the cost for testing and for reporting on the test results, as well as an allocation of overhead costs specifically related to the Lead Safe Mama, LLC Community Collaborative Laboratory Testing Initiative." Lead Safe Mama, budget page. The "allocation of overhead" is the line that drives the spread.
Birch Benders pancake fundraiser: "$195 per single food sample tested for Lead, Cadmium, Mercury, and Arsenic, and other costs related to testing this specific item and publishing the results." Lead Safe Mama, June 2024 fundraiser post. The phrase "other costs" carries a lot of weight here.

Reading these in good faith: the costs she lists are real costs for the operation she is running. The criticism is not that she made the costs up. The criticism is that these are not the floor, and the GoFundMe fundraising language often implies that they are. They are the costs of one specific way to do this. There is a different way that costs $100, and the lab fee on a Purity Labs ICP-MS panel is the same lab fee whether the cover sheet has Lead Safe Mama's logo or DetectLead's.

Last note. Lead Safe Mama has done genuinely valuable work raising public awareness, especially on dishes, toys, and ceramics where XRF is the right tool. The Lead Lottery is not a critique of that work. It is a different model for the same kind of food testing she also runs, with a different cost structure, presented transparently so the public can choose.

Nominate a product. Or chip in to one already on the board.

Email us with the product, the brand, the variant or flavor, and the lot or batch number if you have one. We post it on the Lead Lottery board and the chip-ins start. When the board hits $100, the test is funded. ICP-MS at Purity Labs, sealed retail unit, signed report published next to whatever number is currently on record. Updates to nominators when the lab returns the result.

Nominate by email → See the contested cases →

Or text 631-461-1838.

Lead in soil doesn't go away. It just sits there.

Pre-1978 exterior paint flaked into the dripline. Pre-1996 leaded gasoline settled into the topsoil. Lead pipes corroded into the gardening beds. The soil within ten feet of any pre-1978 house is the highest-stake outdoor lead exposure for kids who play in dirt.

Lifetime lead exposure timeline FETAL CHILD ADULT PARENT SENIOR

Free tools we maintain.

All four are free, no signup. Built and updated by us. Anyone, anytime, in your kitchen or your house or wherever you happen to be.

"Lead is bad", the primary sources.

Find it. Deal with it. Don't let lead weigh you down.