Great question, we get asked this a lot!

Back in 2018, the EU found unacceptable heavy metal levels in a number of cacao exports coming from Peru and required a certificate of testing before exports from suppliers could resume. Our farmers had their soils lab tested and they passed easily.

In 2022, heavy metals contamination in cacao gained more public attention due to a number of consumer reports being published. Prior to this, we were getting annual lab tests for heavy metal toxicity. In 2023, we decided to get the end product of each Ceremonial Cacao batch tested for both heavy metals and mycotoxins / moulds.

See our latest lab test results.

The test results are such that Cadmium levels are super low and no lead could be detected. And no mycotoxins can be detected either. That's great news for all of us!

The question then becomes, why do lead & cadmium exist in cacao / chocolate?

Some elemental forms of cadmium do occur naturally in soils. Some farms soils are also contaminated by previous industry and leeching from other areas. Lead doesn't come from soils, it comes from atmosphere and machinery that harvest and plow soils and from the post harvest processing. We are pleased to say that our farms don't use machinery to prepare soils and harvest (they can't, the geography of the land makes this an impossibility), they use only people power and biodynamic farming methods. This is why no lead could be detected in the lab tests.

There is a lot of complexity to the lead and cadmium debate, which you can read more about here: https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcement/toxic-chocolate if you are interested. It's not as straight forward as it seems. There are also questionable methods for that big chocolate companies use for removing heavy metals, that (in our opinion) may cause more harm than good.