Gill 2021 — Consumer Reports testing of heavy metals in 15 herbs and spices
Consumer Reports commissioned independent laboratory testing of 126 dried herb and spice products purchased from US retail across 15 categories (basil, black pepper, chili powder, coriander, cumin, curry powder, garlic powder, ginger, oregano, paprika, saffron, sesame seed, thyme, turmeric, white pepper) for arsenic, cadmium, and lead. Two to three lots of each product were tested. Roughly one-third of the products carried what Consumer Reports characterized as concerning combined heavy-metal levels for children at typical serving sizes, with lead the most frequently elevated analyte and thyme and oregano emerging as the categories with the broadest cross-product contamination. The dataset is widely cited in subsequent US discussion of spice-borne heavy-metal exposure and is a public, brand-aware survey rather than a peer-reviewed study; it is treated here as a B-tier NGO survey and aggregated to the category and analyte level.
Key numbers
Sample frame:
- 126 products tested across 38 brands and 15 herb/spice categories.
- Two to three lots per product.
- Three analytes measured: total arsenic (tAs), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb). Speciation between inorganic and organic arsenic was not performed; values are reported as total arsenic.
- “Concern” thresholds were defined by Consumer Reports relative to its own daily-exposure assumptions for children and adults at typical serving sizes; the underlying laboratory values are not published in full in the article body, only the per-product concern classifications.
Aggregate findings as reported:
- 40 of 126 products (roughly one-third) were classified as carrying concerning combined heavy-metal levels for children at typical serving sizes; most of these were also concerning for adults.
- 31 products carried lead at levels Consumer Reports deemed high enough on their own to exceed the maximum daily lead intake CR’s experts say anyone should have in a day.
- All products tested in the thyme category and all products tested in the oregano category were classified as concerning.
- For seven of the fifteen categories (black pepper, coriander, curry powder, garlic powder, saffron, sesame seed, and white pepper, per the article’s “Season Safely” summary), every brand tested fit Consumer Reports’ “No Concern” classification.
- Mixed categories — basil, chili powder, cumin, ginger, paprika, and turmeric — included both concern-level and no-concern products; for turmeric specifically, Consumer Reports reported that almost half of the products tested carried concerning levels, and one ground-turmeric product was identified by name in the article as the highest-combined-concern entry in the entire survey.
- The combined-concern definition assumed regular consumption of ¾ teaspoon or more daily of a product in a concerning category; smaller per-product amounts could still pose concern if combined across multiple concerning spices in a single dish.
- Brand name and “organic” or “packed in USA” labeling did not predict heavy-metal levels; Consumer Reports’ tests could not identify any brand as consistently safer than another.
Per Part 12 of the wiki’s editorial rules, brand-by-brand rankings are not reproduced here; the article’s brand-identified per-product tables remain on the Consumer Reports site. The numbers retained on this source page are the category-level aggregates above.
Regulatory context as reported:
- The FDA had not set heavy-metal limits in spices at the time of publication, having issued specific limits only for arsenic in infant rice cereal and lead in candy.
- New York was identified as the only US state with active heavy-metal limits for spices and had issued recalls of more than 100 spice products on heavy-metal grounds since 2016.
- California’s Proposition 65 requires warning labels on products exceeding listed-substance limits including heavy metals, but does not set product-level concentration caps.
- Approximately two dozen spice companies from 11 countries were subject to FDA import alerts for lead contamination at the time of publication.
Methods (brief)
Independent commercial laboratory testing commissioned by Consumer Reports. Two to three lots of each product were purchased from US retail and analyzed for total arsenic, cadmium, and lead. The article does not specify the analytical instrument, sample preparation, LOD/LOQ values, or whether replicate lots were averaged or reported separately. No arsenic speciation was performed (total arsenic only). No spices outside the 15 tested categories (notably no baking spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg) were included. Concern thresholds were Consumer Reports’ editorial designations based on its own daily-exposure modeling for children and adults at typical serving sizes; the modeling parameters are summarized qualitatively rather than published as a method.
Implications
Wiki: Adds a US-market, multi-brand snapshot to the spices and herbs evidence base. Strengthens the case that lead is the dominant analyte of concern in dried spices and that the contamination pattern is category-driven (consistently elevated in thyme and oregano, variable within several other categories) rather than uniformly brand-driven within a given category.
Speciation flag: Arsenic is reported as total only; iAs in dried herbs and spices is the analyte of regulatory and toxicological interest, and this study does not resolve it. Where the literature is otherwise sparse on US-retail spice tAs, this dataset is useful as an upper-bound proxy, with the caveat that iAs is unmeasured here.
App: Reinforces dried herbs and spices as a category warranting per-product testing rather than category-level defaults. The Consumer Reports concern-level designations are not regulatory thresholds and should not be used as such by the app.
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Verification notes
- Brand firewall: brand-by-brand values present in the source article are deliberately not transcribed; aggregation is to category and analyte level only per Part 12. The highest-concern turmeric product is described by product form rather than brand name; readers seeking the brand-identified outlier should consult the source article directly.
- Arsenic speciation: source reports total arsenic only; iAs is not resolved.
- No quantitative ppb values are pulled because the article does not publish a full per-product concentration table; the concern-level designations are Consumer Reports’ editorial classifications, not raw laboratory values.
- 2026-05-28 merge-enhance: corrected the seven-no-concern-categories list to replace “basil” with “black pepper” per the article’s “Season Safely” summary on p.45 (verified against the PDF); removed black pepper from the mixed-categories list for the same reason; reframed the 31-products-lead-alone finding from “children” to “anyone” per the article’s exact phrasing on p.40 (“the maximum amount anyone should have in a day”); added FDA / NY State / California Prop 65 / FDA import-alert regulatory context from pp.42-44; added the no-brand-consistency and no-organic-protection findings from p.45; added co-author Tanya A. Christian per the article’s joint byline on the DIY section (pp.46-47).
- 2026-05-28 audit-application: removed “allspice” from the baking-spice exclusion (article p.42 names only cinnamon and nutmeg); removed the “La Flor Ground Turmeric” brand attribution per Part 12 strict reading (category-defining outlier is not among the locked Part 12 exceptions); replaced with a product-form descriptor. Routing audit ⚠️ on matrices vocabulary documented as false positive — matrices is an open routing-input vocabulary, not a closed taxonomy-snapshot list.
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.