Heavy Metals in Baby Food - Full Disclosure

Dear Serenity Kids Family,

As parents and founders of Serenity Kids, we are thrilled that Healthy Babies Bright Futures is holding the baby food industry to higher standards. More testing and transparency is good for babies, good for mothers, and good for the baby food industry, and we applaud it. The highest quality baby food is precisely why we started Serenity Kids.

We were very concerned to hear about the heavy metals they found in most baby foods. As a brand built to the highest standards of quality, safety and transparency, we began testing our blends proactively by a third-party organization in 2018 upon initial reports about this issue. Those initial tests confirmed those products fell into the category of “undetectable,” which means the test they used could not detect heavy metals in our products (where the threshold is < 0.010 mg/kg).  We are hyper aware of this issue and committed to testing on a regular basis and thus made the decision to continually test all our products in a third-party laboratory with the most sensitive heavy metals test they offer.

Our new round of tests revealed that our products fall well below the proposed limits by the FDA. Furthermore, we have chosen to hold our foods to the European Union standards, which are much stronger than those proposed by the FDA and among the strictest in the world. We never use rice or fruit juices, which were found to be the highest risk ingredients. Because these elements are naturally occurring in soil and water, some of our blends do contain them at a level that is similar to other brands. This is on par with what you could expect to find in vegetables from the produce section of a grocer, or your local farm stand. 

We have these processes in place to continually assure our products meet the European Union standards:

• Testing all individual ingredients as a preventative measure 
• Mandating that our suppliers do testing before sending ingredients to us and rejecting any lot of ingredients that exceeds our limit
• Joining the The Clean Label Project to continually ensure our products are free of the top 130 environmental and industrial contaminants and toxins 
• Pursuing membership in The Baby Food Council to actively work with leading scientists and major baby food companies to create and enforce higher standards industry-wide 

We only source ingredients from trusted American family farms who conduct testing on their own soil. We also carefully vet our suppliers to ensure the cleanest possible ingredients. We purchase our vegetable purees from Stahlbush Island Farms*. They grow and process all of our vegetables and have a robust food safety program and undergo the most rigorous food safety audit, SQF Level III. They scored a 97 (excellent) this year.

We are dedicated to full transparency in our sourcing. We will continue to choose suppliers and test our products on an ongoing basis and hold ourselves to the world’s highest standard to ensure the utmost safety for our baby, and yours. 

-Serenity and Joe

Co-founders of Serenity Kids

*Serenity Kids conducted its own third-party lab tests on it’s finished products. The vendors mentioned in this article did not directly fund or verify the results of Serenity Kids independent testing with a third-party laboratory.