Do you only have one farmer supply each ingredient?
No. Even if we’re only buying a particular ingredient from a single farm at that moment, we prefer to have a few farms or suppliers lined up and fully vetted for each of our ingredients. That way we can maintain access to great produce whenever we need it. It’s important to remember that farms are not factories. A farm may suffer a period of drought, for instance, and won’t have the amount of a fruit or veggie available that they planned. Or maybe the flavor of that veggie just isn’t as rich and good as usual. Then we rely on the other great farms we have teed up to ensure access to the very best, when we need it.
What about water?
Indeed! Let’s not forget about such a key ingredient! The water we mix in with some of our purees—the thicker ones like Pea Basil often need a little water—is tested regularly to make sure there’s no lead or heavy metals coming from it into our food.
Let’s talk about heavy metals. In 2018, Consumer Reports published an article on high levels of lead and other heavy metals in baby food. What does Cerebelly do to keep heavy metals low?
All our certified organic produce is free from pesticides—that’s what organic certification ensures—but heavy metals like lead are in our soils, air, and water. Just because a veggie is organic doesn’t mean it has low heavy metal content. It could have come from a small, beautiful, scenic organic farm. But if there’s an old barn near the field and long ago that barn was painted with lead paint, and that barn gets rained on, lead could be leaching into the soil of that organic field and find its way into veggies grown there. It’s a sad fact, but anything grown in the soil, if rain falls on it, can potentially have some level of heavy metals present.
High levels of heavy metals are linked to very bad outcomes for kids, so Cerebelly goes above and beyond here and takes many precautions to ensure our food has the lowest, safest levels possible.
For example, nutritional-powerhouse vegetables like carrots and sweet potatoes are susceptible to absorbing heavy metals in the soil, should any be present. For those ingredients, we require our farmers to run tests and agree to specifications for low heavy-metal content. But we don’t stop there, we test samples ourselves from each delivery of carrots, say, for lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic before we use that ingredient in any Cerebelly flavor.
Then, after we make each batch of a particular flavor—and this can be literally thousands of finished baby food pouches—Cerebelly pulls random samples and sends them out to be independently tested to verify that all our standards have been met. We won’t release our products until all testing has been completed and they’ve passed our criteria.