There’s More Than a Few Bad Apples in WanaBana Applesauce

And our kids are paying the price with lead poisoning.

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If your child consumed WanaBana Applesauce and has shown any signs of lead toxicity, please contact us now.

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WanaBana Applesauce Lawsuit

Reports Show Extremely High Lead Levels.

At least three brands of cinnamon applesauce pouches recalled in late 2023 from retailers Sam’s, Walmart, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General have poisoned hundreds of small children between the ages of 0-6 with high doses of lead more than 2,000 times higher than the allowed blood lead level limit,¹ leaving frightened parents watching for signs of brain damage, developmental delays, and seizures in their little ones.

Parents began connecting the dots at the end of October 2023 when the FDA (US Food & Drug Administration) ordered a full recall of WanaBana, Schnuck’s, and Weis cinnamon applesauce pouches manufactured in Ecuador and imported into the U.S. Politico first reported in December 2023: “The FDA can confirm that one of the theories the agency is exploring is the potential that the cinnamon contamination occurred as a possible result of economically motivated adulteration.”²

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We’re changing the narrative about lawsuits.^™

The shelf life of these products is at least 14 months. Please throw out old applesauce pouches because they may still cause elevated lead levels in your baby!

Mom, It’s Not Your Fault.

The FDA believes these baby food manufacturers may have contaminated the applesauce on purpose to increase empty volume weight and boost profits.

If you fed your child these snacks, you aren’t to blame! Parents who noticed unusual behavior in their toddlers (median age of cases is <2 years) had no idea what the symptoms meant, if there were symptoms, or how they could have developed. They said they never imagined lead exposure was the problem since they live in newer homes with no lead paint or contaminated dust or soil for curious children to play with/eat.

Jim Jones, the FDA’s food division director, said in an interview with Politico: “The lead contamination appeared to be an intentional act for financial gain.” The agency now believes it has traced the issue to a lead-contaminated spice grinder in Ecuador where all three manufacturers outsourced production.³

“This [lead poisoning] was a mystery to us,” one parent wrote in an adverse event report reaching the FDA on Nov. 6, 2023. The report was among at least 90 (at the time) provided to NBC News through the Freedom of Information Act.

A routine wellness checkup on October 11, 2023, for instance, found one child’s blood lead levels had spiked after being perfectly normal at the previous wellness visit, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

On April 16, 2024, the CDC published the latest number of negative reactions of children after eating the pouches: a whopping 519 across 44 states, with 100% of children tested showing higher than normal lead levels in their bloodstream.⁴

Parents were not warned about the tainted applesauce until the WanaBana recall was announced in a press release October 29, 2023, soon after health officials led an investigation in North Carolina identifying the cinnamon in the applesauce as a potential source of lead exposure among several children in NC who developed lead poisoning after eating the pouches.⁵

“Complaints made by parents with the FDA say that some children had been consuming multiple pouches daily of the cinnamon applesauce before the recall.”⁶

The complaining parents included Sarah and Ricky Callahan of Maryland who filed the first lawsuit after their one-year-old son Rudy suddenly tested for lead poisoning at a routine pediatric checkup. His mother said her son “fell in love” with the WanaBana pouches, which she freely used to help transition him from breast milk.

How Did This Happen?

Perhaps the worst part of the story is that the products repeatedly – “time and time again” – breezed through U.S. Customs, wrote the New York Times. Baby food is categorized as a “food,” not a “drug,” and the FDA has been slow to enforce new safety regulations for heavy metals in baby food, as ACFW began warning last year. There has never been a regulation for spices! Remember, the baby food industry is still virtually self-regulated.

The FDA tracked the cinnamon sticks used in the recalled products. Originally, they came from Sri Lanka uncontaminated, but left Ecuador for the U.S. tainted with spectacular levels of lead in the applesauce. Officials believe the Ecuadorian plant Negasmart, outsourced by Astrofoods (U.S. distributor) used a contaminated spice grinder to crush the cinnamon sticks into powder before adding it into the mixture.⁷

So Here’s What You Need to Know about Lead Poisoning.

First, please understand that children exposed to lead absorb 4-5 times more than adults because of their size and underdeveloped filtering organs. Young children are also the most vulnerable because their brains are in the most formative stages of development. Even if short-term symptoms are invisible and therefore cause no immediate alarm, possible permanent learning and behavioral problems may surface later.

“Initially, lead poisoning can be hard to detect,” says the Mayo Clinic.⁹ “Even people who seem healthy can have high blood levels of lead. Signs and symptoms usually don’t appear until dangerous amounts have accumulated.”

Here are some signs/symptoms of lead poisoning in children:

Abdominal pain
Constipation
Developmental delay
Hearing loss

Irritability
Learning difficulties
Loss of appetite
Seizures

Sluggishness
Fatigue
Vomiting
Weight loss

What You Can Do to Prevent Lead Exposure.

The best way to prevent lead poisoning is to keep your child away from lead. Homes built before 1978 may have lead paint chipping; the resulting lead in dust can accumulate over several decades and contaminate toys today. Eating lead paint chips or swallowing its dust increases risk of lead toxicity, but nobody expected lead poisoning could develop from eating food.

Water running through lead pipes can be dangerous, too.

What to Do If Your Child Has Already Been Lead-Exposed.

The good news is that there are successful medical treatments for lead poisoning in infants and small children. Early identification is key to reducing the long-term effects of exposure. If your child has lead in their blood above the CDC’s normal range, your doctor may encourage follow-up actions, such as:

finding and removing lead from your child’s environment
feeding your child a diet that’s high in iron and calcium
connecting your child to early educational services
scheduling follow-up blood tests

If your child’s blood shows excessive levels of lead, your healthcare provider may recommend other types of testing and treatment to remove some of the lead from the blood, including an x-ray to determine if your child has high levels of lead in their blood. If so, they may receive chelation therapy, which is a medical treatment used to remove lead from the body.¹⁰

Where A Case for Women Comes In.

Women fighting for women do things differently, to put it simply. We are women-owned and women-run, founded in 2016. It’s our job to stay on top of illegal practices committed by wrongdoers in this country that may directly harm women and/or their families.

If you’ve been hurt because powerful people risked your safety for profit, stand up and say it’s wrong. You can be THE change, and every woman who shares her story is A change.

The baby food industry is self-regulated with only loose oversight of content and quality. Actually, baby food has been the target of pounding criticism since premiere brands were found to contain sky-high levels of several heavy metals, enough to lead to developmental cognitive delays and behavioral disorders like ASD.

A Case for Women^® is all about informing women about the affordable legal options that are available if and when they’ve been hurt by one of the Big Bads – negligent pharmaceutical companies, financial institutions, product manufacturers; or even companies or schools that “look the other way” when women are assaulted. These (and other) institutions have taken advantage of women for far too long.

Not anymore.

In this case, we want to pressure the FDA and other government food monitoring agencies, through lawsuits, to do their job of more tightly regulating the baby food industry. On this particular subject – lead contaminating baby foods – bureaucracy is dragging its heels.

We want to help if your child has been harmed by these products.

Sources

Jonel Aleccia, “FDA finds ‘extremely high’ lead levels in cinnamon at Ecuador plant that made tainted fruit pouches,” Associated Press/NBC, December 18, 2023; and
Christina Jewett and Will Fitzgibbon, “Lead-Tainted Applesauce Sailed Through Gaps in Food-Safety System: Hundreds of American children were poisoned last year,” New York Times, February 27, 2024
Marcia Brown and Meredith Lee Hill, “Applesauce pouches may have been contaminated on purpose, FDA foods chief says,” Politico, December 14, 2023
Coral Beach, “FDA shifts approach to investigation into lead poisoning outbreak traced to applesauce,” “Food Safety News, April 17, 2024
Berkeley Lovelace Jr., “FDA winds down part of lead-contaminated applesauce probe, NBC, April 16, 2024
Alexander Tin, “Recalled applesauce pouches likely contained lead due to a cinnamon processor the FDA just identified,” CBS News, February 7, 2024
Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and Kenzi Abou-Sabe, “Pressure grows on FDA as lead-tainted applesauce sickens more kids,” NBC News, updated November 29, 2023
President’s Task Force, “Closer to Zero,” NIH (National Institutes of Health), April 2021
Celine Castronuovo, Alex Ruoff, Kaustuv Basu, “Deadlines for Baby Food Metal Policy Vanish as Lawmakers Object,” Bloomberg, March 23, 2023
Dennis Costakos, M.D., “Reducing Lead Exposure in Children,” Mayo Clinic, May 22, 2023

WE WEAR THIS BADGE PROUDLY. Because, in a time when legal services are still dominated by men, only a Women Owned Business can bring the woman’s perspective to issues that disproportionately affect women.

We are the ones, far more than men, who are injured by sexual assault, financial scams, the gender pay gap, toxic chemicals, and the misguided practices of powerful pharmaceutical companies.