Chocolate's Problem: Plastic, Lead, and Cadmium (2026)

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Consumer Reports sent 28 dark chocolate bars to an independent lab in 2022 and detected both lead and cadmium in every one of them. For 23 of the 28, an ounce a day was enough to exceed California's own legal threshold for at least one of the two metals, the level that by law has to trigger a cancer and reproductive harm warning label. This is not a new scare or a single bad batch. It is a decade old, heavily litigated, extensively tested problem that the chocolate industry itself has funded research into and still has not fixed. Here is what the actual numbers show, brand by brand, and what to do with that information.

1. The Plastic Side: Wrappers, Mineral Oil, and Hot Cocoa Pods

Chocolate is close to half fat, and fat is the most aggressive thing there is at pulling chemicals out of plastic. Under our own materials standard, a fatty food in direct plastic contact for weeks is already a caution against plain plastic and a fail against PET, PVC, or polystyrene, the same tier as a lip balm, not the dry tier flour or the cinnamon we tested sits in. A different exposure question from lead and cadmium entirely, and one this article did not ask the first time.

Most bars use two layers: a printed outer sleeve, usually paper, and an inner wrap touching the chocolate, either true aluminum foil or a metallized plastic film that looks identical but is not. Foil is inert; a metallized film sheds whatever its base plastic sheds. Almost no brand says which one it uses, including Mast, our own pick further down: its listing names a recyclable paper sleeve and says nothing about the inner layer. That silence is the finding under our own rules, not something a photo can answer. Hershey's is the exception on record, dropping foil for direct plastic in 2003 to extend shelf life.

Plastic free wrapper technology is real, not greenwashing. Alter Eco built the first home compostable wrapper in 2013, a cellulose film from FSC certified eucalyptus and birch, and Equal Exchange uses a similar wood pulp film. But a clean wrapper and a clean bar are different checks: Alter Eco's cadmium came back at 204 percent of California's limit, and Equal Exchange's at 120 percent. The two brands doing the most visible work on packaging are not the two doing the best work on what is in the chocolate.

Cocoa powder itself is dry, a low risk pairing with plastic under the same standard we applied to ground cinnamon. The risk starts the moment you add hot liquid. Swiss Miss and Starbucks both sell Keurig compatible hot cocoa K-Cups, built exactly like a coffee K-Cup: near boiling water forced through a sealed plastic capsule. Our guide to coffee without plastic covers the mechanism: a 2020 McGill study found a single plastic pod releases 2.3 to 7.9 billion nanoplastic particles per cup. Nobody has tested a cocoa pod specifically, but the pod sheds, not what is inside it, so there is no reason to expect a different result.

Skip the pod. Loose cocoa powder whisked into hot milk or water on a stovetop or kettle never touches a K-Cup shell, and the same reusable stainless capsules that work for coffee work for cocoa mix too.

2. Why Cacao Has Two Separate Metal Problems

Between 2019 and 2022, as part of the settlement described further down, researchers studied exactly how lead and cadmium get into cacao, and found they arrive by completely different routes. Cadmium is absorbed from the soil as the cacao tree grows, accumulating in the beans the same way heavy metals build up in root vegetables. That means it is baked in from the farm before the beans are ever touched by a processor, and it tends to rise as the tree ages.

Lead works differently. It is not inside the bean at all, but on its outer shell. Freshly picked beans test low for lead. But cacao beans are coated in a sticky pulp, and after harvest they are typically fermented and dried in the open air for days, on tarps, concrete patios, drying tables, or directly on the ground, sometimes along roadsides. During that time, lead laden dust and dirt, much of it from decades of leaded gasoline residue still present in soil, industrial pollution, and burning garbage or plastic, sticks to the bean's shell. "We collected beans on the ground that were heavily loaded with lead on the outer shell," said Michael J. DiBartolomeis, the toxicologist who led that research.

3. The Full Results: 28 Dark Chocolate Bars

Consumer Reports measured each bar against California's Proposition 65 maximum allowable dose level (MADL), the state's own legal threshold for how much lead or cadmium a food can expose someone to before a warning label is required by law. The bar for lead is 0.5 micrograms a day, for cadmium 4.1 micrograms a day, both applied to a one ounce serving. There is no federal limit for either metal in chocolate, so CR used California's figures because its scientists consider them the most health protective published numbers available. Results below 100 percent are under that legal threshold; anything at or above it is not just "high," it is over the line California itself uses to require a warning.

Source: Consumer Reports, independent lab testing, December 2022, 28 dark chocolate bars. Figures are percent of California's Proposition 65 maximum allowable dose level for a one ounce serving, lead 0.5 mcg/day, cadmium 4.1 mcg/day. Green cells are the five lowest on both metals; none is a non detect, clean result. Sorted by lead level, ascending, matching how CR published it.

A pattern jumps out immediately: lead and cadmium do not move together. Hershey's Special Dark had the single worst lead reading of all 28, at 265 percent of the limit, five times over, but its cadmium was unremarkable at 30 percent. Pascha's cadmium was the worst of the set at 253 percent, while its lead sat under the threshold at 68 percent. Only five bars, Theo's Organic Pure Dark and Extra Dark, Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Lover's, Lily's Extremely Dark, and Green & Black's, were high on both metals at once. A brand that reassures you about one number is not telling you about the other.

4. It Is Not Just Dark Chocolate

In October 2023, Consumer Reports widened the test to 48 products across seven categories: cocoa powder, chocolate chips, milk chocolate bars, dark chocolate, brownie mixes, chocolate cake mixes, and hot chocolate. Every single product had detectable lead and cadmium, and 16 of the 48 exceeded CR's threshold for at least one metal. As expected, dark chocolate and cocoa powder, which is essentially pure cocoa solids, tested worse than milk chocolate, which is diluted with sugar and milk.

None of the cocoa powders CR tested exceeded the cadmium threshold, but two did for lead. Hershey's Cocoa Naturally Unsweetened 100% Cacao tested at 125 percent of California's lead limit, second worst of the cocoa powders behind Droste Cacao Powder, which CR did not publish an exact figure for beyond naming it the highest. None of the five milk chocolate bars CR tested exceeded either threshold, but Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar had the most lead of the five, at 67 percent, the highest in its category even while staying under the line.

5. A Decade of Lawsuits Did Not Fix It

This is not a new discovery. Between 2014 and 2017, As You Sow, a corporate accountability nonprofit, tested 469 chocolate products and found 285 of them, 61 percent, exceeded California's MADLs for lead and cadmium. It filed legal notices with more than 20 companies, including Trader Joe's, Hershey's, Mondelēz, Lindt, Whole Foods, Kroger, Godiva, See's Candies, and Mars. In 2018, that pressure produced a first of its kind settlement with 31 chocolate companies, including Cargill, Hershey, Mars, and Nestlé, who agreed to jointly fund an independent expert investigation into where the metals come from, how to lower them, and what levels should trigger a warning. That funded research, run through 2022, is the source of the two mechanisms described above.

The settlement produced research, not a fix. Consumer Reports' 2022 test ran four years after the settlement and found the same problem at the same scale. Hershey's response, through its CFO, was that the company "continue[s] to look for opportunities" to reduce heavy metals, without a firm, time bound commitment. A separate consumer class action against Hershey specifically, filed in December 2022 after CR's results, accused the company of deceptive marketing over three dark chocolate bars that broke the MADL. Hershey moved to dismiss in March 2023, arguing it never promised its chocolate was lead or cadmium free, only that it was safe to eat. The plaintiff voluntarily dropped the case in February 2024 without a settlement.

Lead Safe Mama, which runs its own independent testing program separate from Consumer Reports and As You Sow, has reached a similarly blunt conclusion after testing numerous cocoa powders and chocolate bars: it recommends cocoa and chocolate products be avoided entirely or significantly limited, because every product it has tested to date has come back positive for a concerning amount of cadmium, which it treats as a known carcinogen with no safe level of exposure.

6. Does Origin Actually Predict the Result?

Cadmium's mechanism, soil uptake, has a real geographic signal behind it. Cacao grown in Latin America, especially Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, tends to carry markedly more cadmium than cacao grown in West Africa, sometimes two to ten times more, because much of the soil in those Latin American growing regions is young and volcanic, and volcanic soil runs naturally higher in cadmium. Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together grow the majority of the world's cacao and supply most mass market chocolate, sit on older, more depleted soil with a lower baseline.

That is a real pattern in the geology, but it does not cleanly predict which bar on a shelf will test worse, because almost no chocolate maker sources from one farm. Most blend beans from multiple origins and regions specifically to manage flavor, cost, and, increasingly, metal content. Taza's CEO told Consumer Reports that mixing beans from different origins is exactly how the company keeps its levels down, and Taza was one of the five lowest tested. Meanwhile As You Sow's own 2022 testing found Ojio Organic Cacao Nibs, sourced specifically from Peru, came back non detect for lead. Origin is a real input into the cadmium number, not a label you can read off a bag and trust.

The cleanest demonstration of the soil mechanism sits on one company's own shelf. As You Sow tested two Ritter Sport bars in February 2022. The 81 percent made with cocoa from Ghana came back at 1.8 micrograms of cadmium per serving, in both samples, against California's limit of 4.1. The 74 percent made with cocoa from Peru came back at 10.8 and 10.4, more than two and a half times the limit. Same company, same year, same factory, and roughly a sixfold difference in cadmium explained by nothing but where the beans grew. Ritter prints the origin on the front of the pack, which is what makes the comparison readable.

So the rule is narrower than "origin predicts the result" and more useful. Where a maker names a single origin, the geology becomes something you can act on at the shelf. Where a maker blends and tells you nothing, which is most of them, it is not.

7. Is Any Chocolate Actually Safe to Buy?

Consumer Reports' 28 bars are the best known numbers in this field but they are not the largest set. As You Sow has tested more than 469 chocolate products since 2014 and found 285 of them above California's levels, and it publishes every result with the brand, the product, the test date and both figures. We have now read the whole tracker rather than the summaries of it. That is what moved several bars on this page: a product that looks clean in one row often has a failing sample in the same round, and only the full table shows you that.

Judged against California's own Prop 65 threshold, the one legal standard that actually applies to this category, 23 of the 28 dark chocolate bars Consumer Reports tested cross the line that by law requires a warning label. That is not a marginal miss, several are two to five times over on at least one metal. Judged against the proposed federal bar we hold every other ingestible to (5 ppb for lead and cadmium), the situation is worse still: every single bar, including the five CR called relatively low, had detectable levels of both metals, and detectable at any level above 5 ppb is a finding under our own standard, not a pass.

So the honest answer is no, nothing in this dataset is a clean recommendation. The five lowest tested, one each from Mast, Taza and Valrhona and two from Ghirardelli, are meaningfully better than the other 23, most of which we would rate no better than skip under our own rules given how far over California's legal threshold they run. But "meaningfully better" is not the same as clean, and Lead Safe Mama's own position, that no chocolate or cocoa product it has tested clears the bar, is consistent with what CR's numbers show too.

There is a second problem with calling anything here a safe buy, and it is the calendar. Every clean result in this field is old. As You Sow's most recent chocolate round was February and March 2022, and Consumer Reports published that December. Our own standard gives a clean laboratory result 36 months before it stops meaning anything, because supply chains move and no maker announces a change of bean supplier. An adverse result does not expire the same way. So the failures on this page still stand while the passes have aged out, which is why even the best tested bars are listed here as a caution and not as a pick.

8. What Actually Reduces Your Risk

9. If You Are Buying Chocolate Anyway

Your own favorite bar is likely not one of these 28. Type any brand into Product Check, on the site or in the app, for an instant verdict against the same independent lab tests, recalls, and materials standard used throughout this article.

10. Frequently Asked Questions