168 baby foods purchased off store shelves and independently tested for arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. the report that changed the public conversation about heavy metals in baby food. 456 measurements.
healthy babies bright futures is the small nonprofit that broke the modern baby food story. their 2019 report, "what's in my baby's food", bought 168 baby foods off store shelves and sent them to an independent lab for arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury testing.
the headline finding: 95% of products contained at least one of the four heavy metals, and 1 in 4 contained all four. that report is what put baby food contamination on the front page of major US newspapers, triggered the congressional baby foods investigation, and ultimately set up california's AB 899.
this slice of the database is 456 measurements covering 156 baby food products from 41 brands, all from a single 2019 sampling. it is small but historically load-bearing.
HBBF 2019 contributed measurements to 1 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 = "HBBF 2019" to see only these rows.
metals tested: lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury.
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: cite HBBF. 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://hbbf.org/report/whats-in-my-babys-food
the lead database hub stitches together HBBF 2019 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.
see the drip kit, $50 →