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Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/1323 of 10 August 2021 amending Regulation (EC) No 1881/2006 as regards maximum levels of cadmium in certain foodstuffs
Official Journal of the European Union (OJ L 288, 11.8.2021, p. 13–18)
Year
2021
Authors
European Commission
Source type
gov regulation
Review state
approved for public
License
public law
EU 2021/1323 — Cadmium maximum levels amendment
Source role
Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/1323 of 10 August 2021 was a targeted amendment to Regulation (EC) No 1881/2006 that lowered or newly established cadmium maximum levels across a wide range of foodstuffs. It superseded the cadmium rows of the earlier Commission Regulation (EU) No 488/2014 amendment in Section 3.2 (Metals → Cadmium) of the 1881/2006 Annex. The text entered into force on the twentieth day after publication (31 August 2021); foodstuffs lawfully placed on the market before entry into force were permitted to remain on the market until 28 February 2022.
For Heavy Metal Index, this regulation is the immediate predecessor of the cadmium rows now consolidated in 915. The 2021/1323 rows are the comparator that source pages and HMTc workups should cite when reviewing field findings collected under the 2021–2023 enforcement window. Current legal use should rely on the consolidated 2023/915 text.
Legal character
The regulation is binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all EU Member States. Recital 7 frames cadmium as an indirect genotoxic carcinogen and explicitly justifies the short transitional window on public-health grounds. The maximum levels in the Annex apply on a wet-weight basis. Footnotes (*) and (**) carve out two exceptions: tree nuts and oilseeds destined exclusively for crushing and oil refining are exempt provided the residual pressed material is not placed on the market as food, and cereals destined for malt production for beer or distillates are exempt provided the residual malt is not placed on the market as food.
The recitals attribute the scientific basis to the EFSA CONTAM Panel 2009 opinion on cadmium in food (tolerable weekly intake of 2,5 µg/kg body weight) and the 2012 EFSA scientific report on dietary exposure, which found that children and adults at the 95th percentile exposure could exceed the health-based guidance value. The Commission cites the 2014/193/EU recommendation and post-2014 monitoring data as justification for the move from “communicate mitigation methods” to “lower the existing maximum levels.”
HMTc interpretation
The 2021/1323 cadmium ceilings are external legal floors, not HMTc certification thresholds. They occupy the same comparator column as other binding national or supranational maximum levels: they constrain market presence but are not designed as consumer-protection floors. HMTc workups should preserve the legal-status label (“binding EU maximum level — superseded 2023-05-25”) when displaying these values alongside more current FDA Closer-to-Zero action levels, Codex maximum levels, or HMTc candidate thresholds.
The cocoa/chocolate rows (3.2.13.1–3.2.13.4) and the cocoa-product split by milk-chocolate vs total-dry-cocoa-solid percentage are the rows most directly relevant to the chocolate/seasonings/salt manual-fetch batch in which this PDF was filed. The infant-formula split (3.2.16.1–3.2.16.4) by powder/liquid and cow’s-milk vs soy-protein is the row pattern HMTc retains in its infant-and-child-foods category structure. The salt row (3.2.21, 0,50 mg/kg) is a single number with no further subdivision in this regulation.
Selected heavy-metal rows extracted
The Annex replaces subsection 3.2 (Cadmium) of the 1881/2006 Annex in its entirety. Values are mg/kg wet weight. Decimal commas are preserved verbatim from the Official Journal text.
Fruits and tree nuts (Annex 3.2.1)
Section
Foodstuff
ML (mg/kg)
3.2.1.1
Citrus fruits, pome fruits, stone fruits, table olives, kiwi fruits, bananas, mangoes, papayas and pineapples
0,020
3.2.1.2
Berries and small fruits, except raspberries
0,030
3.2.1.3
Raspberries
0,040
3.2.1.4
Fruits, except those listed under 3.2.1.1, 3.2.1.2 and 3.2.1.3
0,050
3.2.1.5.1
Tree nuts, except those listed under 3.2.1.5.2
0,20
3.2.1.5.2
Pine nuts
0,30
Root and tuber vegetables (Annex 3.2.2)
Section
Foodstuff
ML (mg/kg)
3.2.2.1
Root and tuber vegetables, except those listed under 3.2.2.2–3.2.2.6. For potatoes, the maximum level applies to peeled potatoes.
Crustaceans (muscle meat from appendages and abdomen; Brachyura and Anomura — muscle meat from appendages)
0,50
3.2.15.6
Bivalve molluscs
1,0
3.2.15.7
Cephalopods (without viscera)
1,0
Infant formulae, follow-on formulae and FSMP for infants and young children (Annex 3.2.16)
Section
Foodstuff
ML (mg/kg)
3.2.16.1
Marketed as powder and manufactured from cow’s milk proteins or from cow’s milk protein hydrolysates
0,010
3.2.16.2
Marketed as liquid and manufactured from cow’s milk proteins or from cow’s milk protein hydrolysates
0,005
3.2.16.3
Marketed as powder and manufactured from soya protein isolates, alone or in a mixture with cow’s milk proteins
0,020
3.2.16.4
Marketed as liquid and manufactured from soya protein isolates, alone or in a mixture with cow’s milk proteins
0,010
Young-child formulae (Annex 3.2.17)
Section
Foodstuff
ML (mg/kg)
3.2.17.1
Marketed as powder and manufactured from plant protein isolates other than soya protein isolates, alone or in a mixture with cow’s milk proteins
0,020
3.2.17.2
Marketed as liquids and manufactured from plant protein isolates other than soya protein isolates, alone or in a mixture with cow’s milk proteins
0,010
Baby foods, drinks, supplements, salt (Annex 3.2.18–3.2.21)
Section
Foodstuff
ML (mg/kg)
3.2.18
Processed cereal-based foods and baby foods for infants and young children
0,040
3.2.19.1
Drinks for infants and young children labelled and sold as such (other than 3.2.16 and 3.2.17) — marketed as liquids or to be reconstituted following instructions of the manufacturer, including fruit juices
0,020
3.2.20.1
Food supplements, except food supplements listed in point 3.2.20.2
1,0
3.2.20.2
Food supplements consisting exclusively or mainly of dried seaweed, products derived from seaweed, or of dried bivalve molluscs
3,0
3.2.21
Salt
0,50
Methods (brief)
This is a regulation, not an empirical study. No analytical method, sampling regime, or LOD is specified within the legal text itself. The Annex values are administratively set maximum levels derived from EFSA exposure assessments and Member-State occurrence-monitoring data collected under Recommendation 2014/193/EU. The official-control laboratory methods are governed by separate Commission implementing regulations (sampling and methods of analysis for the control of contaminants in foodstuffs) rather than by 2021/1323.
Key numbers
Tolerable weekly intake (referenced from EFSA 2009): 2,5 µg/kg body weight (Recital 2).
Effective date: twentieth day after publication on 11 August 2021 → 31 August 2021 (Article 3).
Transitional market window for non-compliant stock placed before entry into force: until 28 February 2022 (Article 2).
Lowest cadmium maximum level set by the Annex: 0,005 mg/kg, for infant/follow-on/FSMP formulae marketed as liquid and manufactured from cow’s-milk proteins or hydrolysates (3.2.16.2).
Highest cadmium maximum level set by the Annex: 3,0 mg/kg, for food supplements consisting exclusively or mainly of dried seaweed, seaweed-derived products, or dried bivalve molluscs (3.2.20.2).
Salt cadmium maximum level: 0,50 mg/kg (3.2.21).
Milk chocolate (< 30 % total dry cocoa solids): 0,10 mg/kg (3.2.13.1); chocolate ≥ 50 % total dry cocoa solids: 0,80 mg/kg (3.2.13.3); drinking-chocolate cocoa powder for the final consumer: 0,60 mg/kg (3.2.13.4).
Rice, quinoa, wheat bran and wheat gluten: 0,15 mg/kg (3.2.12.3).
Spinaches, similar leaves, mustard seedlings and fresh herbs: 0,20 mg/kg (3.2.6.2).
Implications
This regulation supplies the cadmium maximum-level row set that was operative in the EU between 31 August 2021 and 24 May 2023, when it was implicitly repealed by Regulation (EU) 2023/915. Field-finding source pages reporting EU-collected cadmium occurrence data during that window should compare against these rows, not against the 2014/488 or 2023/915 row sets. The cocoa/chocolate and salt rows are the most direct comparators for the manual-fetch batch in which this PDF was filed (04_Chocolate_Seasonings_Salt).
For HMTc category work, the regulation supplies:
A clean per-format split for infant formula cadmium (powder vs liquid × cow’s-milk vs soy-protein) that downstream product-page splits should preserve.
A four-row cocoa/chocolate ladder keyed to total dry cocoa solids percentage and milk-chocolate carve-out — the chocolate-category clean/dirty subcategory work should reference this row structure rather than treating chocolate as a single bin.
A salt ceiling that is the binding EU regulatory floor for the salt product page’s regulatory-context column.
Verification notes
Ingested 2026-06-02 from the Kimi-agent download-corruption manual-fetch batch (04_Chocolate_Seasonings_Salt). The filename references “488_2014” but the PDF content is the 2021/1323 amendment text itself; the filename is a misnomer carried over from the Kimi agent’s batch naming. The actual regulation is 2021/1323, which superseded the cadmium rows that 488/2014 had set in 1881/2006.
The regulation page for this rule already exists at eu-2021-1323-cadmium-cereals-superseded (created 2026-05-18 during the Gacal et al. 2023 bread ingest with a cereals-only focus). The current source page transcribes the full Annex 3.2 row set, not just the cereal rows, since the regulation’s scope is comprehensive across food categories.
Decimal commas in the maximum-level column are preserved verbatim from the Official Journal text. No silent conversion to decimal points or to µg/kg was performed.
No brand names appear in this regulation; no Part 12 redaction was required.
No HMTc threshold inference or synthesis claim added. The ## Implications section describes occurrence-data routing and product-page-split alignment, not HMTc threshold proposals.
Audit subagent (2026-06-02) flagged [[ingredients/salt]] as a possible missing-slug proposal; verified against wiki/ingredients/salt.md (page exists on disk) and docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md (the slug salt is present in the ingredients comma-separated list, immediately before saltine-crackers) — finding was a false positive. The slug is valid and is retained.
Sources
European Commission. 2021. Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/1323 of 10 August 2021 amending Regulation (EC) No 1881/2006 as regards maximum levels of cadmium in certain foodstuffs. OJ L 288, 11.8.2021, p. 13–18.
EFSA Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain (CONTAM). 2009. Scientific opinion on cadmium in food. EFSA Journal 980, 1–139.
EFSA. 2012. Scientific report on cadmium dietary exposure in the European population. EFSA Journal 10(1), 2551 (37 pp.).
Commission Regulation (EU) No 488/2014 of 12 May 2014 (the predecessor cadmium amendment of 1881/2006). OJ L 138, 13.5.2014, p. 75.
Commission Recommendation 2014/193/EU of 4 April 2014 on the reduction of the presence of cadmium in foodstuffs. OJ L 104, 8.4.2014, p. 80.
Page history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.