In my understanding, tons of food has lead in it. There’s lead in soil.
I think it’s plausible that, regarding lead, Lindt hasn’t done anything worse than most or all other chocolate companies. Plausibly, no chocolate company is currently able to control lead levels enough to reliably satisfy California safety standards. (Not that they’re doing a great job of trying. There’s room for improvement. But I’m not sure this lawsuit has actual merit. Just because Lindt made terrible arguments doesn’t mean there are no good arguments they could have made instead. Which is interesting.)
I think maybe Lindt would rather use these sorts of bad arguments than explain the truth about the situation (how lead gets into chocolate and many other foods, and why it’s so hard for companies to prevent it, and how they aren’t doing anything particularly better or worse than other companies regarding lead).
They advertised stuff like their chocolates being “fine” not being “low lead” or “lead free”. I think “fine” might actually be defensible! (Or “finest” I’d accept as puffery that reasonable consumers should interpret as meaning “fine” not literally “finest”, but it’s not meaningless.) But instead of defending their potentially reasonable marketing, they said it’s obviously indefensible. I think that’s interesting.
Should You Eat Dark Chocolate? -- Facts on Lead & Cadmium I don’t think they have enough data to conclude any chocolate brands are particularly good or bad. But this is interesting (I have not fact checked it):
This trend of heavy metals in chocolate is pretty evident since 2014. The lab results garnered over the years have become the the basis of Proposition 65 notices that As You Sow filed with over 20 companies including Trader Joe’s, Hershey’s, Mondelēz, Lindt, Whole Foods, Kroger, Godiva, See’s Candies, Mars, Theo Chocolate, Equal Exchange, Ghirardelli, and Chocolove for failing to warn consumers that their chocolate products contained cadmium or lead, or both. When these lawsuits were won, other researchers studied how metals might contaminate cacao, as part of a settlement. What did they find? Here’s some things that need to be improved in the chocolate industry:
- Cacao grown in the Latin American and Caribbean regions have significantly higher Cadmium concentrations than cacao grown in other parts of the world, most notably West Africa. This is based on the soil in those parts of the world and it varies from region to region and farm to farm.
- The significant source of lead in chocolate products is chocolate liquor. Chocolate liquor is produced from milled cocoa nibs, which are the deshelled portion of a cocoa bean.
- The source of lead in cocoa beans occurs during post-harvest handling of wet cocoa beans. This does not happen by the uptake of lead from the cocoa tree.
- During the post-harvest handling of wet cocoa beans, the source of post-harvest lead in cocoa beans is a result of the following mechanisms:
- Foreign material included loosely within bulk cocoa beans.
- Encasement of soil particles on the wet and sticky cocoa bean shell during outdoor drying.
- Chemical adsorption of Pb by the wet and acidic cocoa bean shell during contact with soil.
- The transfer of lead from cocoa beans to nibs occurs during the shell removal process. They found that the nib obtains approximately 70% of its lead concentration through contact with Pb-containing material (i.e., shell, soil, light, and fine material) during bean breaking.
Chocolate has other problems besides lead and cadmium, btw. For information only, I’m not endorsing this or expressing a conclusion: Child Labor and Slavery in the Chocolate Industry
On a related note, mercury in fish is a problem. So people invented better mercury testing technology which enables selling a low-mercury canned tuna product. And they tried to sell this technology to tuna companies. But none of the companies wanted it. So they made their own tuna company, Safe Catch, which I think is good, and successful enough to be sold in Costco, but I don’t think it’s especially successful (merit doesn’t rise to the top very well).
Why don’t other brands test each tuna for its mercury level?
You would have to ask the other brands. We started as a technology company and invented proprietary testing technology to screen seafood for mercury. We offered to test and certify purity for other brands but every brand we approached declined. So, we used our technology to start our own brand, and we call it Safe Catch. Safe Catch is the only brand that tests every single tuna to a strict mercury limit.
The big canned tuna companies know there is some mercury in their food and apparently don’t want to measure how much nor warn consumers. (I have not fact checked this matter.)