(approximately a 5 minute read)

First off, take a deep breath! We drink cacao daily, we share it with our families and friends, and we would never sell you anything unsafe.

We've been testing for a wide range of contaminants in our incoming cacao beans and in our outgoing products for many years as part of our standard food safety compliance. These tests results include lead and cadmium, which we'll discuss below.

If you want to see our actual lab test results for lead and cadmium, you can see those here. I encourage you to check those out, and to read on for context and analysis because I guarantee you'll learn something new on the topic below.

We sometimes get asked, which cacao is your lowest cadmium overall? Well, based on our results, it's Thriving Tanzania, Connected Colombia, Tantric Rose Blossom, and Oaxacan Spice. These cacaos have exceptionally low results. But honestly, we feel like this is splitting hairs. We feel 100% safe drinking all of our cacaos, and we'll explain more why below.

In our ideal world, the level of heavy metals in all of our foods would be ZERO. They are highly neurotoxic - nothing we want anywhere near our bodies.

The big mixup ... was actually about HOW YOU DEFINE ZERO.

The entire discussion revolves around numbers so small (less than one part per million), that they are hard to conceive of.

Written out, one ppm is 0.000001.

To flex your imagination, according to the American Chemistry Council, 1 ppm is the same as a credit card lying in the middle of a football field, or one step when walking 568 miles, or one minute out of two years time.

If you can't regulate to zero, there needs to be a frame work for establishing a very very very small number that societally we choose is acceptable.

This number should ensure two things: that we can eat food without being worried, and that outlier foods that might be dangerous get flagged.

That non zero number needs to protect the most susceptible members of our society. In this case, that's a pregnant woman, because a fetus in development is incredibly vulnerable to heavy metals.

When they work well, most people never have to think about them. Unless you are an engineer. That's how we make sure that bridges don't collapse even when there's a traffic jam with trucks on them, and that airplanes don't fall apart mid air during extreme turbulence.

Factors of safety are designed to be conservative, so that even in the most extreme situation, we don't have a failure.

BUT ... a factor of safety of 1000 for heavy metals was too conservative, because it disqualified practically all of our food system. The problem was, nobody checked what heavy metals levels were actually in food when they wrote Prop 65.

Remember that article that freaked everybody out? Consumer Reports used the now disused MADL as their threshold for safety, not the revised Prop 65. Basically, they were about five years behind the times.

If you go back and look at the CR test results, all the chocolate they tested is fine in terms of the new Prop 65.

It goes to show you can't believe everything you read on the internet, and that even reputable and well meaning organizations can get lost in the sea of numbers that are hard to interpret correctly unless you are an expert on the topic.

We hope the transparency of our lab test data and this discussion of what it actually means will help you feel safe again sharing the delights of dark chocolate!