Brad's kale chips recalled nationwide after FDA confirms thallium contamination

Snack Right Super Foods Inc., which sells kale and vegetable snacks under the Brad's Raw Chips and Brad's Plant Based brands, is recalling four varieties of kale chips after federal regulators told the company that samples had tested positive for thallium, a toxic heavy metal linked to nerve damage and hair loss. The company announced the recall on November 2, and the Food and Drug Administration posted the notice the following day.

The recall caps a monthslong standoff between the Coral Gables, Florida, company and public health officials that began with a single consumer's test result in California and ended, six months later, with federal involvement, illustrating how long a company can resist a recall request before the Food and Drug Administration formally intervenes.

What is being pulled from shelves

The recall covers roughly 25,000 bags, or about 2,097 cases, distributed nationwide through KeHE Distributors and United Natural Foods Inc., along with direct sales to five individual consumers. Four products are affected: Brad's Crunchy Kale in Original, Cheeze It Up and Radical Ranch flavors, sold in 2-ounce bags, and Brad's Veggie Chips Kale, sold in 3-ounce bags. The FDA notice lists specific lot numbers and best-by dates ranging from December 21, 2026, to February 17, 2027, for products shipped between October and December 2025.

The company is not offering refunds and is asking customers not to return the bags to stores. Instead, the guidance is to discard any affected package and, per the FDA's general consumer advice on handling recalled food products, to check lot codes against the published list before throwing bags away. Anyone who believes they experienced symptoms after eating the chips is advised to contact a physician; the recall notice does not confirm any illnesses tied to the products.

A warning that went unheeded for months

The investigation traces to January, when California's state health department looked into an inquiry involving a single person with elevated thallium levels who reported eating Brad's kale products. The department's follow-up testing of bags collected from Sacramento-area retailers, completed by May, found elevated thallium across multiple lots and flavors. State officials publicly warned consumers that month to stop eating the products, and, according to coverage of that warning at the time, said the company had declined to voluntarily pull the chips from the market despite being notified of the findings.

The company did not act on the state's request until the FDA, after coordinating with California and Pennsylvania officials, directly informed the firm that its own testing had also detected thallium in the products. That notification preceded this month's recall, which the company describes as voluntary and conducted with the FDA's knowledge.

Thallium is a naturally occurring element in soil that crops can absorb through their roots; kale, a Brassica vegetable, is among the plants known to take it up readily. Snack Right Super Foods has said its manufacturing process did not introduce the metal, and that dehydrating kale — which removes an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the vegetable's water weight to produce a shelf-stable chip — concentrates whatever trace elements were already present in the raw leaf. Acute or chronic exposure to thallium can cause gastroenteritis, peripheral nerve damage and hair loss, according to the federal toxicological profile maintained by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency notes that elevated thallium measured in urine or hair cannot, on its own, predict whether a given exposure will cause illness.

The episode echoes, in broad outline if not in the specific metal involved, the 2023 recall of cinnamon applesauce pouches after lead contamination traced to a spice supplier sickened children across dozens of states. In that case, as in this one, the hazard originated in a raw agricultural ingredient rather than in anything added during processing, and consumers had no way to detect the contamination without laboratory testing. Food-safety specialists have argued for years that trace heavy metals in produce, driven by what is present in the soil a crop is grown in, remain one of the harder contamination risks for manufacturers to screen out through routine testing, since most quality-control programs are built around pathogens such as salmonella and listeria rather than elemental analysis.

Who is affected, and what happens next

Because the chips moved through two of the country's largest natural-foods distributors, the recall reaches grocery and specialty retailers nationwide rather than a single region, though the FDA notice does not name individual store chains. The company's listed point of contact is handling consumer inquiries on weekdays; trade coverage of the recall noted that the FDA notice stops short of disclosing the actual thallium concentrations found in testing or establishing that the products caused any specific person's elevated levels.

That gap leaves open questions for consumers who have eaten the chips regularly over the past year, particularly those who bought the products before the best-by dates listed in the recall and have no way of knowing how much thallium, if any, they consumed. Regulators have not indicated whether they plan to expand testing to other dehydrated-kale products on the market, and no other brand has been named in connection with the investigation.

For now, the FDA's role is limited to overseeing the voluntary action Snack Right Super Foods has taken, which includes notifying its distributors and instructing retailers to remove the listed lots. The agency's standard recall process does not require the company to prove a product caused harm before pulling it from shelves, only that testing identified a hazard. Whether the episode prompts closer scrutiny of heavy-metal testing standards for dehydrated vegetable snacks, a category that has grown rapidly as a packaged alternative to fried chips, remains to be seen.