Kombucha (Tea-Based)
This page is HMTc Category 5 row 16 from the locked beverage architecture. It exists as a wiki node so evidence, regulatory context, ingredient routing, and future field findings have a stable place to land.
Heavy Metal Index pages are written for several audiences at once. Each entry point below names where to start if you are reading this page with a specific question in mind.
- Brand legal and regulatory affairs
- Cherry-pick attack vectors on tea-based kombucha typically inherit the tea-plant axis (aluminum, lead) plus fermentation-vessel leaching for nickel and chromium. Source provenance and vessel-material disclosure are the defensive core. Compare with Fermented Beverages Non Tea Based for the within-pair sibling. The cited sources at the bottom of this page are the citations list, written to be quoted into a Daubert brief without further editing.
- Retailer quality and compliance
- The Federal / Regulatory Limits vs Field Findings section compares the applicable regulatory cap to cited field evidence on a like-for-like basis, with basis conversion shown when conversion is well-defined and a methodology anchor when speciation differs. The Literature Evidence Summary gives source count and confidence rating per analyte.
- Brand QA and product development
- Use the Lab Result Comparator to position a single lab value inside the cited literature. The comparator positions a single lab value inside the cited literature for kombucha and tea-based fermented beverages.
- Regulators, journalists, and adversarial readers
- Every numeric claim on this page traces to a source page. The Evidence Governance note explains what this page is and is not (literature evidence, not HMT&C certification thresholds).
- HMT&C staff (internal)
- The threshold-selection arithmetic (percentile statistics, clean / dirty subcategory designation, CC eligibility) lives on the staff workbench snapshot at kombucha-tea-based, not on this public page.
| Field | Status |
|---|---|
| Row state | Locked row node; structured occurrence extraction pending |
| Category hub | category-5-beverages |
| Crosswalk hub | regulatory-crosswalk-field-findings |
| HMTc use | Routing and evidence-gap tracking only; not a certification threshold |
Federal / Regulatory Limits vs Field Findings
This is the fast comparison view for standards developers, regulators, retailers, brands, and legal teams. It shows the applicable federal or regulatory limit next to the current field-evidence state. It is not an HMTc pass/fail table; technical distributions remain in the evidence sections below.
| Metal | Federal / regulatory limit | Actual field finding | Decision read | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No loaded row | No federal or product-specific regulatory limit loaded yet | Comparable field finding extraction pending | Evidence-gap tracking only; do not infer a pass/fail status | regulatory-crosswalk-field-findings |
Evidence Handling
Finished-product findings belong on this product page. Ingredient-only findings belong on ingredient pages before they are used for product inference.
Literature Evidence Summary
The table below summarizes what the peer-reviewed and government literature cited on this page reports for heavy-metal concentrations in Kombucha (tea-based). Values are pulled directly from cited sources without re-aggregation; pooling, percentile selection, and threshold math sit in the staff Standards Workbench rather than this public page.
Methodology rules for speciation, basis preservation, non-detect handling, and source pooling are stated in the Methodology section above and apply to every row below.
| Analyte | Subcategory | Reported concentration range | Detection rate | Applicable regulatory cap | Sources | Confidence | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Al | Kombucha (tea-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
| Pb | Kombucha (tea-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
| Cd | Kombucha (tea-based) (no contributing evidence loaded) | No concentration data loaded for this analyte | Sample-level detection rate not reported | No applicable cap loaded | 0 | data gap | Basis not reported |
Sources
- Source promotion pending.