federal recall notices for food, drug, and cosmetic products. also reactive, products pulled after a problem was identified. mostly spices, supplements, and a slice of baby food. 218 records.
the US food and drug administration has authority over food, drugs, dietary supplements, and cosmetics. when one of those is recalled for lead contamination, FDA publishes the notice.
same caveat as CPSC: this is reactive. the EU monitors products more intensively than the FDA and CPSC who only publish recall notices. FDA tells you what came off the shelf, not what is on it. and like CPSC, most FDA records here are recall summaries without a ppb number attached.
this slice contributes 218 records, mostly spices (50), supplements (46), and a handful of baby food recalls (the most famous being the apple cinnamon pouches in late 2023). the famous large-scale FDA actions usually come months or years after the contaminated product has already been eaten.
FDA data is in here for completeness and for cross-referencing. if you find a brand on this list and want to know whether it's been recalled, FDA is your check.
FDA contributed measurements to 8 of the 13 categories in the lead database. each card links to the full sortable table for that category, where you can filter by source = "FDA" to see only these rows.
metals tested: lead.
units: normalized to ppb (parts per billion by mass), identical to µg/kg. 1,000 ppb = 1 ppm = 1 mg/kg = 0.0001%. recall records (where the original notice did not publish a concentration) are flagged in the table as "recall record" rather than a number.
license: public domain (federal). when you reuse rows from this source, attribute the original source. the unified database itself is published under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
official source: https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts
the lead database hub stitches together FDA with eight other open-license sources for a unified, searchable view of consumer-product heavy-metal data. nine sources, thirteen categories, 67,497 measurements, all normalized to the same units.
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bookmark this page. the database and the leaducational pages update almost every day. the bottle sheet and the dish list grow as the lab finishes new runs.
the information is free. the kit is for parents who, after reading the framework, decide they want to walk around the nursery with a drop bottle tonight. one drop of fluoro-spec on the painted side of a plate. if it's lead, it glows green in seconds. no lab.
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