As parents, we strive to give our babies the best in life —and the best includes high quality foods to help babies thrive and grow.
As your baby grows, providing healthy, nutritious foods becomes more complex, so choosing the right foods for your baby can be difficult. Should you trust store-bought? Shop organic? Make it at home?
There’s a ton of research and information available, but you have to know where to look and who to trust.
Beech-Nut Nutrition Company has been testing for heavy metals & metalloids in our ingredients for over 30 years.
They’re dedicated to creating safe, high-quality, and nutritious foods for babies and toddlers. They have implemented rigorous testing procedures to help minimize exposures to heavy metals and metalloids taken up by fruits, vegetables, and grains during the growing process. As of 2022, they began testing finished goods. This means, they test both samples of ingredients before creating their products and then again after they have been sealed, before they are shipped out to customers.
Read on to find out more about their rigorous baby food testing process and their commitment to providing nutritious baby food.
Understanding Heavy Metals in Baby Food
We’ve all seen the headlines broadcasting heavy metals in baby foods. They can be scary and stressful as a parent wanting the best for your baby.
Heavy metals in our food is not a new– levels of heavy metals and metalloids have increased in our food supply system since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Thankfully, advancing technology helps us understand the precise, miniscule amounts and impacts these metals have on our food.
The FDA is currently drafting guidelines for heavy metals & metalloids found in baby food as part of their Closer to Zero[1] Action Plan. These include lead, cadmium, inorganic arsenic, and mercury. Beech-Nut is committed to working with the FDA on this plan.
Heavy Metals and metalloids get into foods through the soil[2]. Some occur naturally and build up in soils over time. Others have seeped into the soil through pollution–wind, water, and fog carry pollutants from all over and can deposit them into the soil where our foods grow.
Ingredient Testing: The First Line of Defense
Safety at Beech-Nut starts with the ingredients they select to make their delicious baby food. Their in-house testing lab tests ingredients for heavy metal and metalloid levels using state-of-the-art technology. The internal testing lab has gained ISO 17025 Certification, a global accreditation for scientific testing labs. This means that Beech-Nut’s lab is qualified to perform heavy metal & metalloid testing for other companies’ ingredients and products.
Our innovative technology lets us detect miniscule amounts
We test all ingredients in our purees for up to 255 pesticides, toxins, heavy metals, metalloids, and other environmental elements, often down to <5 ppb (parts per billion) level
We source our baby food ingredients from farms that meet food quality standards. We work with farms that can trace individual crops to a specific field and provide prior land usage disclosures.
Baby Food Testing in the Finished Product
We start by testing the ingredients we use to make our baby food, but our testing process doesn’t stop there.
In 2022, we began testing our finished goods to validate our ingredient testing results.
In action, this means collecting random, representative samples of our packaged jars, pouches, cereals, and snacks before they are distributed to consumers. Then we test and compare those results to the results of their ingredients for consistency. Our finished goods process consistently verifies that our raw material testing is accurate.
We want to ensure the high-quality results we saw in the first step stay true throughout the process.
Feeding the Rainbow: A Colorful Approach to Nutrition
“Feeding the rainbow” is more than just a catchy phrase. It’s a nutritional philosophy that ensures your baby receives a variety of vital nutrients. By incorporating a wide range of fruits and vegetables into our baby foods, Beech-Nut offers new tastes, nutrients, and textures for your little one to explore.
More than that, by exposing your baby to the 40+ ingredients used across our products, you can help serve a diversified diet to your little one. According to the FDA, this type of diversity helps to minimize a child’s exposure to heavy metals and metalloids.
Avoid the Peel
Vegetables that grow underground are the most susceptible to heavy metals and metalloids. But that doesn’t mean these foods should be avoided. On the contrary, foods like sweet potatoes and carrots are some of the most nutrient-dense options, not to mention, some of the tastiest! In fact, babies’ developing brains and bodies need the nutrients that these nutrient-dense food provide.
Heavy metals and metalloids tend to accumulate in the peel of root vegetables, according to a McGill University study. The amounts of these metals were significantly lower in the flesh than in the peel.
Because of this, the carrots and sweet potatoes used in our purees come pre-peeled. We avoid the peel to help reduce levels of heavy metals & metalloids.
Rice-Free Philosophy
Since 2022, Beech-Nut has created baby foods that are rice-free.
We decided to stop using rice as an ingredient in our Beech-Nut foods, due to our concern about the ability to consistently obtain rice flour well-below the FDA guidance level and our specifications for inorganic arsenic.
Making safe baby foods available for everyone is our #1 goal at Beech-Nut. We will continue to evolve and improve our rigorous testing procedures and partner with the FDA.
Read more about Beech-Nut baby food testing processes here:
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