Are You Concerned About Heavy Metals in Your Chocolate?

We have also heard the stories and seen the class action lawsuits about heavy metals – cadmium, lead, and others, found in some industrial processed chocolate bar brands. 

Most of our customers drink Keith’s Cacao every day. We do too!

Our entire Cacao making process is designed to ensure that our Cacao is pure and safe for daily consumption.  We only utilize the cacao beans from small family farms, not large monoculture cacao plantations.  Experienced members of our community lightly toast and hand peel every single bean.  This allows them to identify and remove bug-infested or moldy beans before they are processed into a Keith’s Cacao product. Additionally, hand peeling ensures more of the cacao husk is removed than any winnowing machine could hope to accomplish.  The cacao husk typically has a higher concentration of metal contaminants than the edible portion of the Cacao bean. 

​In addition to these unique and rigorous processes designed to ensure there are no impurities in our products, we test our 100% Pure Ceremonial Grade Cacao for the presence of heavy metals.  

The 2019 EU regulations require that cacao/chocolate with cacao percentages of 50% and up, have less than 0.80 ppm (part per million) for Cadmium and 0.225 ppm for Lead.

Our Test Results:

These test results show that our Cacao falls well below the acceptable levels set by the EU and the USA FDA.  We are happy to report that our Cacao is safe to drink every day.  

How is it that some brands contain more heavy metals?  While we cannot be certain, this is likely because large industrial chocolatiers utilize machines that introduce harmful heavy metals during the manufacturing process.  Our process avoids these issues.  Heavy metals are present in many of the foods we consume.  This typically occurs because of the accumulation of metals in the farm soils either because of the use of harmful pesticides or fertilizers at cacao plantations or the proximity to volcanic soil.  The minute amounts of metals in our Cacao are likely caused by the latter.

Please let us know if you have other questions – we are happy to help. You can email us at info@keithscacao.com