Heavy Metals in Baby Foods

The bad news

Heavy metals have been found to be common contaminants in baby foods.

The good news

As a result of public outcry and governmental action, baby food companies have started to make the results of heavy metal testing publicly available and many are working to remediate the problem.

Thanks to the California state government and its passage of bill AB 899, you can find publicly available information on how brands are doing with minimizing heavy metals in their products.

List of brands sharing their heavy metal test results

• Plum Organics
• Lil Gourmets
• Brainiac
• Cerebelly (they provide average testing levels and you can also look up specific lot numbers. Here you can find test results for all lot levels.)
• Fresh Bellies
• Gerber (requires you to search by product type and batch number or just by batch number)
• Happy Family Organics
• Holle (you can search by batch number or UPC code)
• Kekoa Foods (they only provide a “<10” ppb reading, versus a more precise number, which is not ideal)
• Kendamil Nutricare (you can search by many different keywords – product, UPC, best before date, etc.)
• Mission MightyMe (scroll down for graphs showing rolling averages for each metal; you can also search by product name)
• Nestum/Cerelac (you can only search by batch number)
• Nurture Life
• Once Upon a Farm Organics (can search by product, UPC, lot number)
• Pumpkin TreeSquare Baby
• Stonyfield Organic
• Earth’s Best Organics (you can search by product, key ingredient, or date code)

Serenity Kids – I’m having trouble finding their heavy metal testing results on their website. They discuss heavy metals as a problem, as a problem more generally, but I don’t see anything specific to levels in their own products. What especially troubles me is that they had a few products highlighted in a Consumer Reports article as having unsafe levels of lead. From what I’ve read, they’ve essentially been in denial about it, claiming they meet the strictest requirements, including California Proposition 65. All this to say that I don’t trust this brand.

For a point of reference: The FDA’s Closer to Zero program aims to reduce contaminants in foods. In 2025, they FDA released guidance on limiting lead in baby food, recommending that levels of lead be less than:

• 20 ppb for dry infant cereals
• 10 parts per billion (ppb) for fruits, vegetables (excluding single-ingredient root vegetables), mixtures (including grain- and meat-based mixtures), yogurts, custards/puddings, and single-ingredient meats
• 20 ppb for single-ingredient root vegetables

What drove these new developments by the FDA and the state of California

• Consumer Reports tested 50 packaged baby and toddler foods in 2018 for cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and lead and found alarming results. All of the products contained measurable amounts of at least one heavy metal, about two-thirds had “worrisome” levels of these metals, and 15 posed a potential health risk if eaten once a day. In follow-up tests in 2023, Consumer Reports found that, although levels of heavy metals had dropped in some baby foods, the overall risk hadn’t changed much compared to five years earlier.
• In 2019. the nonprofit Healthy Babies Bright Futures analyzed 168 baby foods and found toxic metals in 95% of them. Their findings can be found in this report, including 2019 test results for specific brands.

Why this matters

Recent studies have been showing that even low levels of lead in the blood can cause damage to a child’s developing brain. Thus low level, chronic exposure to heavy metals in food can be a meaningful source of lead and blood lead levels. The problem is that there is no easy way for parents to learn what may be in the baby food they buy or make, thus having this information made publicly available is a godsend.

Other sources to help inform your baby food purchases

There are other efforts underway to help consumers make informed decisions, though each has its limitations. The Clean Project ranks baby food products based on heavy metal levels, but they do not make test results public. Instead, they certify those products that meet minimum requirements set by California Proposition 65. To take the example of lead, California sets a recommended limit of 0.5 ug/day. When testing products. the lead test result will be denominated in parts per billion (ppb). But to understand what amount of lead would be ingested, you need to know the dose/serving size consumed. It is unclear what dosage they are assuming to determine if the levels of lead in a given product remain under the 0.5 ug/day threshold AND this doesn’t account for the fact that there is lead present in many different foods we eat, and a child could be already reaching 0.5 ug/day from these other foods. Thus I don’t find a whole lot of value in The Clean Project Certifications for these reasons.