A 13-month-old's elevated blood lead level was traced to a metal ring in the blade assembly of a Black + Decker PowerCrush BL1230. The federal incident report was published, then quietly removed a few hours after Consumer Reports asked questions. The blender is still on Amazon, $39.99, "7K+ bought in past month." An audit of the agencies, the statutes, and the gap that lets it stay there.
The food a one-year-old was eating tested at 3,060 parts per billion lead.
The federal action level for the same food sold by a regulated manufacturer is 10 ppb.
The food was being made in a Black + Decker blender. Model BL1230SG. Currently selling on Amazon as the BLACK+DECKER PowerCrush Multi-Function Blender, $39.99, 10,561 customer reviews, sold by Amazon.com directly.
The case was reported by a state lead risk assessor to the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission and published on SaferProducts.gov, the federal incident database that exists for exactly this kind of warning. The report sat on the database for some unknown number of days. Consumer Reports found it. CR called CPSC to ask what the agency was doing about it. A few hours later, the report was no longer online. What follows is an audit of which agency had authority to act, which agency told the public a different agency had authority, and the statutory gap that lets a kitchen appliance with lead in a food-contact part remain on the largest consumer marketplace in the country, unflagged, after a child was confirmed poisoned by it.
The case began with a child's blood test coming back high. A local health-department lead risk assessor was dispatched to do the standard elevated-blood-lead-level investigation. Paint. Dust. Water. Soil. The environment came back clean. No other source of lead in the home.
The only lead source was a metal component in the base of the blender that the parent used every day to make the baby's food.
Further testing on food the blender produced returned three lead readings: 570 ppb, 1,760 ppb, and 3,060 ppb. The state assessor's report attributes the variation to "different blades/foods" used during testing, and does not specify which blade or which food produced which reading.
The FDA's Closer to Zero action levels (10 ppb for lead in baby-food fruits, vegetables, and mixtures, and 20 ppb for root vegetables) apply to commercial baby food sold by regulated manufacturers. They do not directly govern food a parent prepares at home. They are useful here only as a toxicology benchmark for what level of lead in the same kind of food FDA itself considers harmful. The food the blender produced was hitting concentrations between 57 and 306 times that toxicology benchmark. The home preparation is not a regulated product. The harm does not care.
The state assessor narrowed the source to a metal component in the blender's base, specifically in the blade assembly. The lead-bearing part comes into contact with food every time the blender runs.
Consumer Reports then bought three BL1230 units off Amazon and ran their own laboratory tests on the metal components. Two of the three had high lead in the same part: the small metal ring in the blade assembly that contacts food. The third unit was clean.
CR's measured concentrations on the two affected rings were 4,175 ppm and 6,027 ppm total lead in the metal. CR reported the readings in ppm of total lead, consistent with handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) screening, which is the methodology Consumer Reports uses for consumer-product lead testing in adjacent reporting.
CR's director of product safety and personal care, Ashita Kapoor, on the record: "No food contact material should ever contain lead."
The state assessor's report went to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and onto SaferProducts.gov, the federal incident database. The case was Report ID 5843522.
Consumer Reports' investigative reporter Lauren Kirchner found the report. CR contacted CPSC and asked what the agency was going to do about it. A few hours after that contact, the public report came down. The URL still resolves but every data field on the page is now empty. The Wayback Machine attempted a snapshot at 2026-05-21 20:13:45 UTC and captured the page after the data had already been removed.
CPSC told Consumer Reports that the matter falls under the jurisdiction of the FDA, not CPSC, and that they had referred it to FDA.
FDA does have a statutory hook here, but it is narrower than the CPSC referral implies.
Under 21 U.S.C. § 348(h)(6), a "food contact substance" is defined as "any substance intended for use as a component of materials used in manufacturing, packing, packaging, transporting, or holding food if such use is not intended to have any technical effect in such food." The small metal ring in the BL1230's blade assembly is exactly that. A lead-bearing food contact substance migrating lead into food at 4,175 to 6,027 ppm in the metal, producing 570 to 3,060 ppb in the food, falls under FDA's food-contact-substance authority.
What FDA cannot do here is reach the contaminated food itself under FFDCA § 402 (adulterated food). That authority is keyed to food introduced into interstate commerce. A parent's home-pureed baby food never enters commerce. So § 402 governs commercial baby food (where the FDA's 10 ppb action level lives), and does not reach what the parent made in the kitchen. The food-contact-substance hook under § 348(h)(6) is FDA's only lever here, because that authority follows the substance, not the food.
FDA also cannot issue a CPSC-style mandatory recall of a kitchen appliance. FDA's recall authority covers food, drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, biologics, and tobacco. A blender is on none of those lists. FDA can investigate and act against the food contact substance, issue consumer advisories, and pursue enforcement against future units. It cannot compel Empower Brands to mail recall notices to every BL1230 owner or pull units from Amazon. Those are CPSC functions.
CPSC has jurisdiction over the appliance itself. Under 15 U.S.C. § 2052(a)(5)(I), the Consumer Product Safety Act's definition of "consumer product" explicitly excludes food. So the food itself is not a CPSC matter. The blender is.
Where the analysis breaks against the public's intuition is the federal lead cap. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1278a, sets a 100 parts-per-million ceiling on total lead content. The cap applies to "any children's product (as defined in section 3(a) of the Consumer Product Safety Act (15 U.S.C. 2052(a)))." A "children's product" is defined at 15 U.S.C. § 2052(a)(2) as "a consumer product designed or intended primarily for children 12 years of age or younger."
Empower Brands sells the BL1230 as a general-purpose kitchen blender. Adults use it for smoothies, salsa, hummus. Some parents happen to use it to puree baby food. The cap is keyed to the children's-product classification under design or marketing intent, and the BL1230 does not meet that definition. The 100 ppm cap therefore does not apply, even where measured lead content in the food-contact ring runs 40 to 60 times the cap.
What CPSC does have is the discretionary substantial-product-hazard authority at 15 U.S.C. § 2064, Section 15 of the Consumer Product Safety Act. The Commission can declare any consumer product a "substantial product hazard" upon finding "a product defect which (because of the pattern of defect, the number of defective products distributed in commerce, the severity of the risk, or otherwise) creates a substantial risk of injury to the public."
A lead-bearing food-contact ring in a kitchen blender that has produced a confirmed elevated blood lead level in a 13-month-old is, by any reasonable read, a substantial product hazard. CPSC has not made that finding. CPSC referred the file to FDA.
Consumer Reports' senior safety policy analyst, Gabe Knight, weighed in on the record in the same article. The on-record quote has two problems on its face.
Knight said the manufacturer "should work promptly with regulators on an appropriate recall," and directed the recall-and-notification ask at the FDA: "For its part, the FDA should immediately investigate the scale of the problem and how long it's been going on, and do everything possible to reach consumers who have an affected product."
FDA can do some of this. It can pursue the metal ring under § 348(h)(6). It can issue consumer advisories. What FDA cannot do is "reach consumers who have an affected product" in the recall-mailing sense, cannot compel Amazon to delist a blender, and cannot order an appliance recall. Those are CPSC-style mandatory-recall functions. CPSC has those tools. CPSC declined to invoke them. Knight directed those specific asks at the agency that cannot execute them.
Knight also named the manufacturer as "Spectrum Brands." Spectrum Brands divested the small-appliance line years ago. The SaferProducts.gov report names Empower Brands LLC, the current licensee. In the on-record quote that anchors the agency-action paragraph of the Consumer Reports piece, the company name is wrong and the agency asked to execute the recall functions cannot execute them.
The BL1230 is still on Amazon at the time of this writing. Amazon's own product listing carries a "7K+ bought in past month" badge, at $39.99 per unit, with 10,561 customer reviews and a 4.5-star rating. Seven thousand units a month at $39.99 each is $279,930 a month of one blender model on one channel, of a product a state lead inspector traced to a poisoned 13-month-old. The listing is sold by Amazon.com directly. The Buy Box says "In Stock."
The CPSC-to-FDA exchange above is about jurisdiction. It is not about scale. The report was live on SaferProducts.gov for some unknown number of days before CPSC pulled it. How many BL1230 units are in U.S. homes is unknown. How many parents are running one right now to puree baby food is unknown. How long the lead-bearing component has been on the production run is unknown. Both agencies could obtain those numbers from the manufacturer and from Amazon with one phone call. Neither is asking.
Both federal agencies with relevant authority know about this case. Neither has acted.
FDA can pursue the food-contact substance under § 348(h)(6). FDA cannot reach the home-prepared food under § 402 because the food never entered commerce. FDA cannot compel an appliance recall because a kitchen appliance is not on its recall list.
CPSC can declare a substantial product hazard under § 2064 and compel a recall. CPSC has not made the finding. The 100 ppm CPSIA cap that would automatically apply to a children's product does not reach the BL1230 because it is not classified as one. CPSC referred the file to FDA.
The product is in the gap between two regulatory regimes by design. The food-safety regime under FFDCA is keyed to food in commerce. The consumer-product regime under CPSA is keyed in part to children's products and to discretionary substantial-product-hazard findings the Commission must actively make. A parent making baby food at home from raw ingredients with a general-purpose appliance that happens to contain lead in a food-contact part lives outside the categories the federal lead-safety architecture was built to cover.
A child got poisoned by this appliance. Both federal agencies with jurisdiction know about it. The public report was pulled. The blender is still on Amazon. The lead-bearing metal ring is still in the blade assembly that contacts food in every unit on the shelf.
I ordered one.
I didn't know Black + Decker was still selling small appliances. The name was sold off a long time ago. Stanley Black + Decker licenses the brand. Spectrum Brands held the small-appliance line for a period. It is now Empower Brands LLC. The words on the box are a license, not a manufacturer.
When the BL1230 arrives I will scan it. Blade by blade, blade assembly, gasket, ring, housing, cord guard, button trim. XRF for the micrograms-per-square-centimeter readings on the metal ring identified by CR. Fluoro-Spec for the visual confirmation on camera. If there is lead on this thing I will name where, at what concentration, and how the lead got into the food. I will post all of it.
The warning that would have reached you was pulled. A replacement warning from a federal agency is not coming.
Sources. Consumer Reports, "Lead Detected in a Black + Decker Blender," Lauren Kirchner, May 22, 2026, with on-record quote from Gabe Knight, senior safety policy analyst, Consumer Reports, and reported testing by CR's product-safety lab under Ashita Kapoor, director of product safety and personal care. SaferProducts.gov Report ID 5843522 (now offline; verbatim incident description preserved in the Consumer Reports article's accessibility text). Wayback Machine snapshot of the report page at 2026-05-21 20:13:45 UTC (captured after data fields were removed). Amazon.com product listing for the BLACK+DECKER PowerCrush Multi-Function Blender, model BL1230SG, ASIN B07RQVL8D5 (captured May 25, 2026). 15 U.S.C. § 2052(a)(2) (CPSA "children's product" definition). 15 U.S.C. § 2052(a)(5)(I) (CPSA "consumer product" definition excludes food). 15 U.S.C. § 2064 (CPSA Section 15, substantial product hazard authority). 15 U.S.C. § 1278a (CPSIA Section 101, lead-content limits on children's products). 21 U.S.C. § 348(h)(6) (FFDCA food contact substance definition). FDA Closer to Zero action levels for lead in baby food.
