California's Proposition 65, officially called the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, is a state law that requires businesses who sell their products in California to inform consumers if their products contain trace amounts of certain substances. The Proposition 65 List includes about 900 chemicals, both synthetic and naturally occurring, that have been shown to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. 

The list includes ingredients in pesticides, household products, dyes, etc., chemicals used in manufacturing and construction, byproducts of chemical processes, and more.

The list also includes a few chemicals that are naturally absorbed by foods from the soil they are grown in, regardless of how they're farmed (even organic ingredients pull nutrients from the ground and therefore can include traces of these chemicals). 

This warning doesn't mean a product is unsafe. Prop 65's warning threshold is simply far more conservative than the FDA's: California requires a warning at exposure levels that are a small fraction of what federal food safety standards consider a concern, so many everyday foods trigger this notice well before they'd ever raise an FDA safety flag. We include the warning to be transparent and fully compliant with California's law.

Because the large majority of our ingredients are natural and come from the ground, some of our products may contain traces of these chemicals. Lead and cadmium are naturally present in soil, and plants absorb trace amounts of them as they grow and draw nutrients from the ground, regardless of farming practice. Cacao plants in particular tend to take up higher levels of these metals, which is why lead and cadmium are commonly found in chocolate. They can also be found in flour and other grain-based ingredients for the same reason.

Wildgrain works with a wide network of suppliers across many different products, and lead and cadmium levels can vary naturally from harvest to harvest depending on where and how an ingredient was grown. Testing every ingredient in every batch for trace substances isn't realistic at that scale, and even frequent testing couldn't fully account for that natural variability from one harvest to the next.

Instead, because nearly all of our products are made with ingredients grown in soil (grains, cocoa, and more), we've made the decision to include the Prop 65 warning across our product line as a standard practice. 

To learn more about Proposition 65, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.