Cinnamon Brands Tested for Lead and Cadmium (2026): 11 Brands Compared

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On September 24, 2026, Galil Importing Corp recalled its Lior Cinnamon Ground Seasoning after a Maryland health department test came back with elevated lead. It is the third wave of cinnamon lead trouble since 2023, and it will not be the last, because independent lab testing keeps finding the same thing: lead in most mainstream cinnamon and cadmium in essentially all of it, organic included. Here is what the actual numbers show, brand by brand, and what to do with that information.

1. This Week: Another Cinnamon Recall

Galil Importing Corp, a Hauppauge, New York food distributor, recalled its Lior Cinnamon Ground Seasoning on September 24, 2026, after the Maryland Department of Health tested a sample and found elevated lead. The recalled cinnamon shipped to retail stores, grocery stores, delis, and supermarkets in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, and Illinois between November 18, 2025, and September 7, 2026, sold in 90 gram transparent plastic containers under lot code GAP11304. No illnesses have been reported. If you have this product, the FDA's guidance is to throw it away or return it for a refund rather than finish it off.

2. Why Cinnamon Keeps Testing Positive

The reason this keeps happening traces to a single, well documented outbreak. In October 2023, the FDA recalled WanaBana, Schnucks, and Weis brand cinnamon apple fruit purée pouches after they were linked to acute lead poisoning in young children. By the time the CDC closed its investigation, it counted 566 cases across 44 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, 130 confirmed and 401 probable. The source was traced to a single Ecuadorian cinnamon processor whose product measured as high as 5,110 parts per million of lead, over 2,000 times the level international food standards were considering for bark spices. The mechanism was not contamination, it was adulteration: lead chromate, a cheap yellow orange pigment, added deliberately to increase a batch's weight and color.

The outbreak triggered a wider look. In March 2024, the FDA sent letters to cinnamon manufacturers and importers reminding them of their obligation to test for contaminants, and it is pursuing congressional authority to require pre-market testing on ingredients aimed at infants and young children. New York State's own testing program, run independently of the FDA, went on to catch elevated lead in cinnamon from at least 16 additional brands through mid-2024, including a July 2024 recall of ground cinnamon from American Spices LLC. None of this was one factory. It was routine testing finally looking somewhere it had not looked closely before, and it kept finding the same problem.

Cadmium is a different story, and a quieter one. Unlike lead, it is not usually added on purpose. Cinnamon trees take cadmium up from the soil they grow in the way root vegetables and cacao do, which is why organic certification, a marketing standard that says nothing about heavy metals, does not lower it. That distinction matters for everything that follows: a bad lead reading points at a specific supplier or a specific adulteration event, while cadmium in cinnamon looks closer to a property of the crop.

3. What Consumer Reports Found in 36 Brands

In September 2024, Consumer Reports published its own test of 36 cinnamon powders and spice blends, independent of the recalls above. About a third came back over 1 part per million (1,000 ppb) of lead, the threshold New York State uses to trigger a recall. There is no federal limit for lead in cinnamon specifically, so CR used that state figure as its own bar. The worst three results came from smaller, less widely distributed brands, and both of the two Consumer Reports named directly stopped selling the flagged product once told.

Two things are worth naming plainly. First, even CR's cleanest results, 20 to 40 ppb, sit well above the 5 ppb bar the proposed Baby Food Safety Act of 2021 sets for lead ingested by children, the same standard we hold every ingestible to. A "good" result in this category is still a detectable one. Second, CR tested for lead only. It did not test cadmium, mercury, or arsenic, so a clean CR result is not a clean bill of health, it is a clean result on one of four metals that matter. That gap is exactly what the next round of testing filled in.

4. The Deeper Problem: 4 Metals, 11 Brands

Lead Safe Mama, LLC runs a separate, ongoing testing initiative, sending community nominated products to an independent third party lab for lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic together. Its cinnamon results, tested between October 2024 and October 2025 and published as a running comparison chart, cover 11 products: 4 cinnamon sticks and 7 ground cinnamons, 9 of the 11 organic. The proposed 2021 action levels for anything a child eats are 5 ppb lead, 5 ppb cadmium, 2 ppb mercury, and 10 ppb arsenic. Every single product tested positive for cadmium, all of them well above that bar. Ten of the eleven tested positive for lead.

Independent, third party laboratory results reported by Lead Safe Mama, LLC. Proposed 2021 action levels for food eaten by children: lead and cadmium 5 ppb, mercury 2 ppb, arsenic 10 ppb. A green cell still often sits above that bar; it marks the lowest readings measured, not a clean pass. See the sources at the bottom of this article for links to the individual lab reports.

A few patterns are worth pulling out on their own. The product with the highest lead, SonnentoR's Ceylon cinnamon at 1,000 ppb, had the lowest cadmium of the eleven, and the product that tested completely non detect for lead, Frontier's organic Ceylon sticks, carried the second highest mercury reading in the whole set, at 103 ppb. Metals do not move together, so a brand that reassures you about one is not telling you about the others. Ceylon cinnamon, marketed as the gentler, lower coumarin choice, produced both of the two highest mercury readings and the single highest lead reading. There is no evidence in this data that Ceylon is the safer type.

5. Does Glass or Plastic Packaging Matter Here?

Not for the numbers above. Every metal in this dataset is already in the cinnamon before it ever reaches a jar. Cadmium comes up through the tree's roots from the soil it grew in, and lead arrives from grinding equipment or, in the worst cases, is stirred in on purpose as lead chromate to bulk up a batch. A glass jar cannot filter that out on the way in, and a plastic one cannot add to it. Simply Organic's Ceylon ground cinnamon and its cinnamon sticks ship in the same style of glass jar, and tested at 543.2 ppb and 17 ppb lead respectively, a 30 fold difference inside identical packaging from the same brand.

We checked what each tested product actually ships in anyway, because that is the question this site exists to answer even when it turns out not to be the one that decides the result here.

There is no pattern here worth acting on. The two worst overall results, Amazon Grocery and Kirkland, both shipped in plastic. But the single highest lead reading after those two, Simply Organic's Ceylon ground at 543.2 ppb, shipped in glass, the same jar style the same brand's much cleaner cinnamon sticks used. Glass did not protect it.

There is also a real, separate reason plastic packaging carries far less weight here than it does almost anywhere else on this site. Under our own materials standard, what leaches out of a plastic is governed by what the plastic is holding: oils and fats pull the most out, water pulls less, and a dry powder pulls next to nothing, because there is no liquid phase to carry anything across. Cinnamon is dry and stored at room temperature, so a plastic spice jar sits in the lowest risk tier on that standard, the same tier as a pill bottle, not the tier a plastic olive oil bottle or a lotion tub sits in. Glass is still the better habit on general principle, and we recommend it site wide, but on this data it would not have changed a single number in the tables above.

6. Is Any Cinnamon Actually Safe to Buy?

Judged against the same rule we hold every ingestible to (5 ppb for lead and cadmium, 2 ppb mercury, 10 ppb arsenic), not one of the 11 brands Lead Safe Mama tested, and none of the 36 Consumer Reports tested, clears the bar. Every result above lands at caution at best. That is a genuinely different situation from most of the categories we cover, where a handful of brands test clean and the job is finding them. Here, the honest finding is that the category itself carries a structural risk, and no brand has published a result that removes it.

Lead Safe Mama's own conclusion, stated plainly on its comparative chart, is to stop using cinnamon altogether, specifically because of how consistently cadmium turned up. We think that is the right call for the trending practice of a daily one to two teaspoon "health cinnamon" habit, which several of the highest readings in this dataset were pulled directly from. We do not think it is necessary for a shake of cinnamon in oatmeal a few times a week, which is a different order of exposure. The distinction is dose and frequency, not brand loyalty.

7. What Actually Reduces Your Risk

Because no brand clears the bar, the highest leverage moves here are about how you buy and use cinnamon, not which logo is on the jar.

1. Buy sticks over ground where the recipe allows it, for lead specifically, not cadmium. In this dataset, every stick product measured under 60 ppb lead, while every ground product except one measured well into the hundreds, and grinding is the step where an adulterant like lead chromate gets mixed in, so whole bark is harder to fake. Cadmium does not follow that pattern at all: stick products ranged from 131 to 289 ppb cadmium, no better than most ground products, and the single lowest cadmium reading in the whole dataset, 52 ppb, belonged to a ground cinnamon. Cadmium is taken up by the tree from the soil before harvest, so no amount of grinding it yourself changes that number. Buying sticks is a real, partial fix for one metal, not a fix for the category.
2. Treat cinnamon as a cooking spice, not a supplement. A teaspoon stirred through a batch of oatmeal or a mug of coffee a few times a week is a small, occasional exposure. A daily one to two teaspoon dose taken specifically for its marketed health benefits is the highest exposure pattern in this whole category, and it is not supported by evidence that outweighs the metals load.
3. Skip unfamiliar bulk and deli sourced cinnamon. The Lior recall this week, like most of the 2023 to 2024 wave, moved through delis, small grocers, and imported specialty lines rather than mainstream national brands. A recognizable retail product is not guaranteed clean, but an unlabeled bulk bin or an unfamiliar imported line carries the least testing history behind it.
4. Check your own jar against the current recall. If you have Lior Cinnamon Ground Seasoning in lot GAP11304, UPC 794711005484, discard it or return it. Recalls in this category recur roughly once or twice a year, so it is worth a habit of a quick FDA recall search whenever a new cinnamon product enters your kitchen.

8. Other Spices Carry the Same Risk

Cinnamon gets the headlines because of the WanaBana outbreak, but the underlying mechanism, grinding and blending processes that concentrate whatever was in the raw crop or the equipment, is not unique to it. Turmeric is the other well documented case: it has a long global history of being adulterated with lead chromate for the same reason, brighter color and more weight per batch, which is why we hold our own single origin turmeric pick to a published testing standard rather than a marketing claim of being lab checked. Our broader pantry staples guide covers the wider pattern: buying organic lowers pesticide exposure but does nothing for heavy metals, since organic certification was never built to test for them.

The practical rule holds across the spice rack generally. Favor whole forms you grind yourself over pre-ground powders, favor single ingredient spices over blends where a contaminated filler can hide, and treat any brand's own "lab tested" language as a claim rather than evidence until it publishes the actual numbers, the way our own rating standard treats a brand's certificate of analysis as a lower tier of proof than an independent test.

9. Frequently Asked Questions