California baby food labels will soon reveal levels of lead and mercury in their products
- A new California law requires baby food manufacturers to test their products monthly for heavy metals and disclose the results.
- A QR code that takes consumers to a website detailing concentrations of heavy metals, but results may be hard to interpret.
- Even low levels of exposure to these compounds can cause serious damage to young children’s brain development.
Beginning Wednesday, baby food makers that sell products in California will have to make a major shift toward transparency and provide a QR code on their packaging that takes consumers to test results for the presence in their product of four heavy metals: lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium.
Even low levels of exposure to these compounds can cause serious and often irreversible damage to young children’s brain development.
The change, required under a California law passed by the Legislature in 2023, will impact consumers nationwide. Because companies are unlikely to create separate packaging for the California market, QR codes are likely to be present on products sold across the country, and consumers everywhere will be able to view the heavy metal concentrations.
While companies are required to start printing new packaging and publishing testing results of products manufactured beginning in January, it may take time for the products to hit the grocery shelves.
The law was inspired by a 2021 congressional investigation that found dangerously high levels of heavy metals in packaged foods marketed to babies and toddlers. Baby foods and their ingredients had up to 91 times the arsenic level, up to 177 times the lead level, up to 69 times the cadmium level, and up to five times the mercury level that the U.S. allows to be present in bottled or drinking water, the investigation found.
About half of dietary lead exposure for babies under age 1 comes from packaged baby foods, and an additional 36% from infant formula, according to a study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The California law, AB899, does not include infant formula.
The FDA does not set maximum allowable heavy metal levels for baby food but is in the process of coming up with “action levels” for heavy metals — the levels at which the agency might consider additional actions, which could include discussions with the manufacturer about lowering the level or asking them to pull products from the market. But even with clearer guidance on this issue, it will likely be difficult for most consumers to interpret the disclosures on the new labels.
Heavy metals are not unique to processed baby food. In fact, they occur naturally in the soil, and are also present in fruits and vegetables sold on the produce aisle or even grown in a home garden. Heavy metal levels are often particularly high in spices and nutritious root vegetables, such as sweet potatoes and beets. High levels of lead and other heavy metals in processed foods tend to come from the raw ingredients rather than the manufacturing process.
“Frankly, the EU [European Union] is ahead of the United States in terms of consumer protection when it comes to toxic contaminants,” said Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Rolling Hills Estates), who wrote the California bill. “We hope that the FDA will someday come up with safety standards so that consumers can receive the guidance and protection from our federal regulators.”
Until then, Muratsuchi said, the law is intended to “drive responsible corporate behavior” by making metal levels transparent to consumers — and help avert the kind of extreme crisis that occurred in 2023, when lead-tainted pouches of cinnamon-and-fruit baby puree poisoned dozens of children in the U.S.
High stakes for California families
Erin Yancovich of San Diego had been feeding her 1-year-old daughter Noelie WanaBana apple-cinnamon pouches purchased at a local Dollar Tree for six months when she learned that the products had been recalled. The pouches contained a lead concentration 200 times higher than the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed action level.
A test at the pediatrician’s office revealed that Noelie had lead poisoning, with more than three times as much lead as the level considered concerning by the CDC. No safe level of lead in children has been identified, and “even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to reduce children’s IQ, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Noelie has a speech delay requiring therapy three days a week, which her mother attributes to the lead poisoning from the pouches. She’s part of a class-action lawsuit seeking damages from WanaBana.
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Told about the California law, Yancovich said it was a “great idea” that she hopes might help prevent companies from selling tainted pouches. “Typically I wouldn’t be a person who would be into government oversight for every little thing in my life, but it’s pathetic that we can’t protect our babies and children,” she said.
Ron Simon, a food-safety attorney in Houston who represents Yancovich, worries that the law contained too many loopholes by leaving out importers and distributors.
“I’m concerned that this didn’t go far enough,” he said. Many products sold in the U.S. — including WanaBana — are manufactured by foreign companies, and the law could allow U.S.-based distributors to avoid liability, Simon said.
How can parents interpret new heavy metal info?
It’s not clear how consumer-friendly the new requirements will be. To access the data, shoppers will have to scan the QR code, then enter the 12-digit barcode number, along with a separate lot number. They will be directed to a webpage with the test results for the concentration of lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium in the product.
They are then left to figure out exactly what those scores mean, and consider how the numbers might compare with other products, not to mention the fresh foods they might pick up on the produce aisle.
“If you’re in the grocery store and you’ve got a kiddo in the cart, and you’re trying to go up and down the aisles and check out, what is the feasibility of actually making that work?” said Jaclyn Bowen, executive director of the Clean Label Project, an organization that certifies baby foods as having low levels of toxins.
“I think it’s a very good idea to empower families with the information they need to make safer choices for their children,” said Dr. Tanya Altmann, a pediatrician in Calabasas and author of the book “What to Feed Your Baby.” She says the law is likely to “raise the bar in terms of the quality of the foods that we are feeding our babies, infants and toddlers.”
The problem, she said, is that heavy metals are naturally occurring in the Earth’s crust, and trace amounts can be found in all foods — including those found in the produce aisle rather than a package. Buying organic or making baby food at home, Altmann added, does not mitigate the risk.
“Parents are going to be majorly freaking out and panicked when all this data comes live, because it’s unlikely that any fruit- and vegetable-containing products are going to have zero levels of heavy metals,” she said.
Yet fruits and vegetables are crucial to a healthy and diet.
“We want to make sure that parents aren’t refusing to give their baby food that they need based on this,” said Dr. Steven Abrams, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School.
Abrams said there should be studies looking at how the law effects consumer behavior. “You wouldn’t want people to switch over to fast foods,” which are not required to test for heavy metals.
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Dr. Colleen Kraft, an attending pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said that while the law is a real opportunity to keep California children safe, there’s no need for parents to panic.
“Let’s not go overboard and be super worried about it. We’re going to be exposed to lots of things. If you’re concerned about lead, talk to your pediatrician, and get your child tested,” Kraft said.
Law driving changes in baby food industry
Bowen, of the Clean Label Project, says the requirement is already having an impact on manufacturers and putting pressure on the rest of the supply chain. She has been working with baby food makers to prepare for the law’s rollout, helping them to test each ingredient and final product and set up websites to provide consumer-friendly access to the results.
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Serenity Kids, a baby food manufacturer with products in 20,000 stores including Sprouts, Albertsons and Whole Foods, had already earned Clean Label certification by the time the California law was passed. Still, CEO and co-founder Serenity Carr said the new requirements have driven them to lower their heavy metal concentrations even further.
Serenity Kids now requires suppliers of purees — including farmers — to pre-test their products for heavy metals and provide certificates of analysis before the company will purchase them, and has dropped suppliers who were unwilling to comply. The company then runs a test on every lot of their 35 final products each month to make sure no additional contaminants have been introduced during the manufacturing process.
Carr said all of that testing gets expensive, and it was difficult to find a spice supplier that was even willing to pre-test. But the process has led them to swap out certain high-risk ingredients, like a particular type of mushroom, yielding an even safer baby food product for consumers.
“The baby food industry has been waiting for FDA guidance for years. I have petitioned them myself. So it feels good that California has taken the first step towards a set of requirements to keep babies healthy,” Carr said.
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
