What independent lab tests actually found in Little Caesars, Burger King, Raising Cane's, and Colgate

Four different testing groups and four different plaintiffs looked at four unrelated products this year — a pizza, a burger wrapper, a bucket of fried chicken, and a tube of whitening toothpaste — and each one came back with a specific number the company never put on the front label. None of these are viral rumors. Each one is a named lab, a dated report, or a court docket. Here is each one kept separate, with the actual figure and where it came from.

The short version

• Little Caesars pizza tested at 128 ppb of total glyphosate in independent testing commissioned by Moms Across America — third-highest of 21 fast food brands sampled, behind Panera Bread and Arby's.
• A Burger King Whopper wrapper tested at 249.7 ppm of total organic fluorine (PFAS), per Consumer Reports testing cited in a 2022 class action. That specific lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff a few months later — the finding is real, the "still in court" framing is not.
• Raising Cane's confirmed by phone that TBHQ and soybean oil are in its fried items — chicken fingers and fries — after telling a reporter its full ingredient list is "very confidential."
• Colgate Total Whitening toothpaste tested at 539 ppb of lead, per Lead Safe Mama's April 2025 comparative lab chart of 51 toothpastes — well under the FDA's legal limit, and also higher than most of the "natural" brands on the same chart.

Little Caesars: 128 ppb of glyphosate, third-highest of 21 chains tested

In October 2023, the nonprofit Moms Across America published results from testing 42 meal samples across the top 20 fast food chains by sales, plus In-N-Out. Every single sample — 100% — came back positive for some amount of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller.

The ranking, from the full report:

Worth being straight about both sides of this. Moms Across America is an advocacy group, not a government regulator, and the report leans hard into contested claims about glyphosate and mental health that go well past what the cited data shows. But the ppb numbers themselves are lab results, not opinion. And it's worth having the legal context next to them: the EPA's own tolerance for glyphosate residue on wheat is 30 parts per million — 30,000 ppb — so Little Caesars' 128 ppb is nowhere close to an enforcement threshold. What the testing actually establishes is narrower and still notable: a "clean" ingredient list doesn't mean a clean supply chain, and dough made from conventionally farmed wheat picks up pesticide residue regardless of what a chain fries or bakes it in.

Burger King: a wrapper that tested at 249.7 ppm of PFAS, and a lawsuit that didn't survive

In April 2022, Consumer Reports tested fast food packaging for PFAS — the "forever chemicals" used to make paper and cardboard grease-resistant — and found a Burger King Whopper wrapper containing 249.7 parts per million of total organic fluorine, the standard proxy measurement for PFAS content.

A California consumer, Azman Hussain, filed a class action the same month citing that result, arguing Burger King's "safe" and "sustainable" marketing was false given the packaging's chemical content. Burger King moved to dismiss, arguing federal law authorizes specific PFAS compounds in food-contact packaging. According to the public docket, Hussain voluntarily dismissed the case without prejudice on August 22, 2022 — about four months after filing, before any ruling on the merits and before a class was ever certified. "Without prejudice" means it could theoretically be refiled; nothing in the public record shows that it was.

So two things are both true: the 249.7 ppm lab result is real and was never disputed by Burger King in its own filings, and the specific lawsuit built on it did not go the distance. PFAS-treated packaging remains legal and common across the industry — McDonald's was sued over the same issue the same year — which is the more durable takeaway than the fate of any one complaint.

Raising Cane's: the chain that says its recipe is "very secret," until you ask the right question

Most fast food chains publish a full ingredient statement somewhere, even if you have to dig for it. Raising Cane's is one of a handful that doesn't. When food journalist Vani Hari (Food Babe) called the company directly asking for a complete ingredient list, Raising Cane's told her it was "very confidential" because of its "highly secret recipes," and would only confirm specific ingredients when asked about them by name.

Asked directly, the company confirmed: soybean oil is in the chicken fingers, Cane's sauce, honey mustard, fries, sandwich bun, and toast — and TBHQ is in its fried items, including the chicken fingers and fries.

TBHQ (tertiary butylhydroquinone) is a synthetic antioxidant that keeps frying oil from going rancid. It's not exotic — the FDA first approved it in 1972, and it's in a large share of packaged snack foods. It's also one of the more studied "generally recognized as safe" additives on the wrong end of newer research: animal studies have linked higher-dose exposure to DNA damage in the stomach, liver, and kidneys, and a 2021 study found it may interfere with proteins that regulate immune and inflammatory response. The EU has approved TBHQ since 2004, but the European Food Safety Authority still won't clear it for infant formula over concerns about how much a baby could consume relative to body weight. It remains legal in infant formula sold in the US.

None of that makes TBHQ unique to Raising Cane's — it's standard across the fried-food industry. What's specific to Raising Cane's is that you can't find this out by reading their menu board or their website. You have to call and ask, and hope they tell you.

Colgate Total Whitening: 539 ppb of lead in a toothpaste that isn't marketed to kids

Most lead-in-toothpaste coverage this year focused on children's brands. Lead Safe Mama's April 2025 comparative chart — third-party lab results across 51 toothpastes, sorted by lead level — put an adult product near the top instead: Colgate Total Whitening (Mint) tested at 539.0 ppb of lead, plus 10.4 ppb of mercury, with cadmium and arsenic below detection limits.

To be fair to Colgate, 539 ppb is legal. The FDA's limit for lead in fluoride toothpaste is 20,000 ppb, and Colgate Total Whitening isn't close to that line. But "legal" is a manufacturing-tolerance number, not a safety number — the CDC, EPA, and FDA all state there is no known safe level of lead exposure for a developing body, and while this specific product is marketed to adults, the same standard tube sits on the same bathroom counter as a kid's toothbrush.

The bigger story is what it says about "clean" as a marketing word. On the same Lead Safe Mama chart, several toothpastes marketed as natural or clean tested comparably or higher — Redmond Earthpaste at 3,500 ppb, a "Primal Life" kids' tooth powder at 7,800 ppb. And in February 2025, a class action, White v. Colgate-Palmolive Co., was filed in the Eastern District of New York alleging that Colgate's Tom's of Maine brand marketed its kids' toothpaste as safe and natural while independent testing — again from Lead Safe Mama — found lead and arsenic in it. The suit alleges deceptive labeling, not that the product broke any FDA rule, because under current regulation it didn't have to.

What "legal" is actually measuring

Every item above shares the same structure: a real lab found a real number, the number is below whatever legal threshold applies, and the company's marketing implied a cleanliness the lab result doesn't quite support. That gap — between "passes the legal limit" and "nothing in here you'd want to avoid" — is the whole story, and it's not unique to any one of these four. It's also not a reason to panic over any single number in isolation; a 128 ppb pesticide residue and a 7,800 ppb lead reading are not the same magnitude of concern, and treating them as interchangeable "toxins" is exactly the kind of blur that makes this stuff hard to reason about.

Where Tallow fits

The problem was never a single scary ingredient. It's that four different watchdogs had to run four different tests to surface four different numbers that none of these companies volunteered — and most people will never see any of the underlying reports.

That's what Tallow is built to shortcut. Scan a barcode and get a plain-English breakdown of what's actually in it — seed oils, additives, processing level, and linked lab results where they exist — instead of waiting for a nonprofit or a class-action complaint to do the testing for you.

Eat clean. Make the label prove it.

This article is consumer information, not medical or legal advice. Lab results reflect the specific samples and dates tested by the cited organizations and may not represent every batch of a product. Legal case outcomes described above are current as of publication; check the linked court dockets for any later filings. Primary sources: Moms Across America — fast food glyphosate testing, Oct. 2023, EPA glyphosate tolerances, 40 CFR 180.364, ClassAction.org — Burger King PFAS packaging suit, CourtListener — Hussain v. Burger King Corporation docket, Food Babe — fast food chains that hide their ingredients, EWG — TBHQ Dirty Dozen food chemical, Lead Safe Mama — 2025 toothpaste comparative chart, and ClassAction.org — Tom's of Maine / Colgate lead and arsenic suit.