I’ve been increasingly concerned about toxicants in our food supply—and how poorly government agencies are able to protect consumers. Any big corporation selling food is complicit in this bigger problem. But today I want to highlight a smaller vendor, Wildbrine, which sells sauerkraut through a massive retailer, Costco, and how I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer from either of them regarding a basic product-safety question.

Image by ChatGPT, OpenAI

Costco has been selling a large container of Wildbrine sauerkraut at our local warehouse for quite some time. It is a great offering in many respects: organic and raw, naturally fermented cabbage—still bubbling with vitality and presumably rich in probiotics. It tastes wonderful, and you can’t beat the price. Yet I’ve harbored a nagging fear that particles of plastic may potentially leach out of the soft plastic container into the acidic medium of the sauerkraut.

Eating from plastic containers is one of the greatest sources of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals sometimes referred to as obesogens, such as the notorious bisphenol A (BPA) as well as other similar bisphenols such as BPS and BPF. Whereas the former compound is ostensibly being taken out of the food supply with “BPA-free” containers, this just means that some other bisphenol is being used in plastic manufacturing.

Safety is not assured when food is in direct contact with plastic. And plastics don’t just show up at the finish line as a container—plastic is woven throughout modern food production: processing equipment, tubing, liners, wraps, takeout containers, bottle caps, and the “convenient” packaging we rarely question. Add heat, time, and certain food characteristics (like acidity), and the common-sense question becomes: what’s migrating into the food while it sits on a shelf—or in our fridge—week after week?

Hoping to learn more, I wrote Wildbrine with a very simple question. Here’s my first point of contact with the company via email:

Greetings, Wildbrine.

We’re a long time customer of your raw organic sauerkraut from Costco. I recently read the article “How to Eat Less Plastic” in Consumer Reports magazine and am concerned about elevated levels of bisphenols and phthalates in food products. Given the acidic nature of sauerkraut, I’m wondering if you are testing for the presence of microplastics or plasticizers in the finished product? If so, please let me know what you have discovered.

Thank you,
Brandon LaGreca

This was their initial response:

Hey Brandon,

Thank you for messaging us your question. We do not sell any in glass containers and I have added some of the reasons below.

We choose plastic jars for three reasons:

Glass doesn’t allow gases to release – our BPA-free plastic containers let carbon dioxide out but no oxygen in. They are also rated PET 1, one of most highly chemical resistant, recyclable types of plastic available. Our jars are lower in weight, saving on fuel and greenhouse gases during shipping.

Glass is very expensive, and plastic containers allow us to sell our product at an affordable price. In addition, some retailers ask us to refrain from glass for breakage reasons.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

I didn’t have any other questions—but I did still have my original one. I took a chance at writing back to push the envelope a bit:

Hi Wildbrine,

Thanks for writing back. You didn’t actually answer my question: Are you testing for the presence of microplastics or plasticizers (bisphenols & phthalates) in the finished product?

Thanks,
Brandon

And here’s their response:

Hi Brandon,

We work exclusively with approved suppliers for all of our packaging materials, and those suppliers have supply chain controls in place to exclude both phthalates and bisphenols from all of the plastics that are used for our packaging.

Hope this helps!

You’d think this would be reassuring, but I knew to dig deeper. What gets measured, gets managed. If something isn’t being measured, I’m not convinced it is getting adequately managed. Here is my final message to Wildbrine that did not garner a response:

Just to clarify then: The answer is ‘no’ in that you do not test the finished product for the presence of bisphenols & phthalates. And by virtue of that, those compounds may or may not be leeching into the sauerkraut, but you don’t know for sure. Correct?

Thanks for your integrity in reporting on this. I’m writing an article on plastic exposure in food for my blog. I can also communicate with Costco (where we purchase your sauerkraut) to see if they have a policy on this.

Brandon LaGreca

Without a response, I must assume that the answer is indeed “no,” they are not testing—so they cannot assure me that bisphenols or phthalates are absent from the finished product. They made a blanket statement about exclusion in the supply chain, but that does not tell us what happens once the finished sauerkraut has been sitting on store shelves for weeks.

I had one last card to play: contacting Costco to see if they would comment on the matter. It took some time to get the buyer in the grocery department, but after multiple customer service escalations, they took my contact information and I received a short message in response:

We work exclusively with approved suppliers for all of our packaging materials, and those suppliers have supply chain controls in place to exclude both phthalates and bisphenols from all of the plastics that are used for our packaging.

With that, I arrived at the end of what an average consumer can uncover. Perhaps an investigative journalist could make additional contacts or request a budget for independent testing, but that just further underscores the problem of transparency. I can’t even call this kind of thing “plausible deniability,” more like just “deniability,” because what is plausible in this scenario is that some plastic residue has leached into the food—and food companies don’t want to hear about it, fund it, or discover it.

This is what’s so maddening about the modern food supply: the burden of proof gets pushed onto the consumer, while the consumer has neither the tools nor the access to verify what’s true. “Approved suppliers” and “supply chain controls” may sound comforting, but they’re not the same thing as testing the finished product—especially when the product is acidic, packaged in plastic, and designed to sit for long stretches before it’s eaten. If companies want consumer trust, transparency has to mean more than reassurance. It has to mean measurable data—clear testing, clear reporting, and a willingness to answer straightforward questions without sidestepping them.