Why is there a Prop 65 warning on the products?Updated a year ago

California being the overly bureaucratic state it is, requires restaurants, food sellers, and other businesses of all kinds to put a Proposition 65 warning on over 800 kinds of substances/ingredients. Proposition 65 is now widely criticized for requiring meaningless warnings in parking lots, hotel lobbies, and restaurant entrances, as well as on airport walls and consumer product packaging. It is very common to find these warnings on products manufactured in California on clothing, foods, textiles, packaging, etc.  These “warnings” are required by Proposition 65 even when there is no actual risk of harm to anyone. In fact, Proposition 65 requires warnings at exposure levels as much as 1,000 times lower than the levels proven to have no adverse effect.

Vitamin A and many other nutritional supplements contain ingredients that require a warning in California, so 99% of the time manufacturers of food and dietary supplements put a general "Prop 65 Warning" on everything they produce. Prop 65 warnings are seen throughout California in a wide range of settings -- in restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, schools, hospitals, and on a wide variety of consumer products. In addition, some internet and mail-order retailers have chosen to provide Prop 65 warnings on their websites or in catalogs for all their products and for all consumers.

Proposition 65 is unique to California. No other government, state, federal, or foreign, requires warning people about substances at safe levels. Even a business that is perfectly safe and complies with all other applicable laws, such as sanitation and food safety requirements, may be in violation of Proposition 65.

As said above, Proposition 65 has been criticized by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for interstate consumer information on packaged foods, and by the federal Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for interstate consumer information about meat and poultry. Federal policymakers have sometimes been willing to intervene with the state to encourage more rational warning regulations, or even to argue that federal law preempts state law for warnings on some products. Unfortunately, food served in restaurants is regulated primarily by state law rather than federal law, and is therefore even more vulnerable to Proposition 65 than food sold in grocery stores. It should be noted that California product label warning requirements are not usually the same as federal safety requirements. This causes a mismatch between warnings on products sold in California and what is required elsewhere in the U.S.A. So this can explain why sometimes you may see a California Prop 65 warning on a product sold in California but no warning on the same product sold elsewhere. The products are not different; it’s just that Prop 65 warnings are required for sales to California consumers.

We were informed by our company's attorneys due to the number of frivolous lawsuits that are being pursued by overzealous lawyers that we should put the Prop 65 warning on any California-bought products sold thru our website, so we have followed suit with the thousands of other California companies in doing so. There have been government meetings since 2013 on reform of this law but until that time happens we will abide by our attorney's wishes.

For comparison's sake, The Prop. 65 standard for warnings for lead is 0.5 micrograms per day, which is far more stringent than the FDA standards for lead (75 micrograms per day for adults). 

Confusingly a single serving of 

1) Collard greens have 30mcg of lead

2) Mixed nuts have 20 mcg of lead

3) Brussell Sprouts has 16 mcg of lead

4) Sweet potato has 15 mcg of lead

5) Spinach has 15 mcg of lead

Our Prop 65 Warning is us covering ourselves per our legal department needs with being a Californian manufacturer and should be no cause for alarm