Do you test for heavy metals?Updated 2 years ago

Great question! Short answer, yes. 

In fact, we are the first shelf-stable baby food to receive the Clean Label Project Purity Award which independently tests our foods for over 400 different contaminants including heavy metals, chemicals, plastics, pesticides, and other toxins. Check out more on our certification here. 

All of our produce is certified organic but heavy metals like lead are in our soils, air, and water. Just because a veggie is organic doesn’t mean it has low heavy metal content. It could have come from a small, beautiful, scenic organic farm. But if there’s an old barn near the field and long ago that barn was painted with lead paint, and that barn gets rained on, lead could be leaching into the soil of that organic field and find its way into veggies grown there. It’s a sad fact, but anything grown in the soil, if rain falls on it, can potentially have some level of heavy metals present.

High levels of heavy metals are linked to very bad outcomes for kids, so Cerebelly goes above and beyond taking many precautions to ensure our food has the lowest, safest levels possible.

Here’s how we work to make sure Cerebelly is safe:

We vet all of our farms very carefully before choosing them. We review both soils and water tests to make sure they are clean. We also monitor the water at our manufacturing facility to make sure it’s clean. 

A few of our ingredients are nutritional powerhouses -- for example, carrots and sweet potatoes -- but since they grow in the ground, they are susceptible to absorbing heavy metals in the soil if there’s any present. For those ingredients, we ask our farmers to test their ingredients and agree to specifications for low heavy metal content. We don’t stop there, we actually send samples from each batch of produce off to a third-party certified lab to test for lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic before we use that ingredient to make any Cerebelly flavor. 

Then, after each batch of product is made -- and this can be literally thousands of finished baby food pouches per flavor -- we pull random samples from each finished batch of product and send it out to be tested by a third-party certified lab to verify all of our standards have been met. We won’t release our products until all testing has been completed and passed our criteria.

For even more detailed information, we wrote an entire blog post about our approach to sourcing and food safety. You can find it here: Cerebelly's High Quality Ingredients

As always also feel free to reach out to the Cerebelly support team at [email protected] for more information.