The overarching goal of FDA’s Closer to Zero (C2Z) action plan is to reduce dietary exposure to contaminants, in foods commonly eaten by babies and young children, to as low as possible while maintaining access to nutritious foods. In addition to establishing action levels for specific toxic elements (TEs), C2Z proposes to develop new and improved testing methods to measure lower levels of contaminants in food and monitor levels over time to determine potential adjustments to proposed action levels. These proposed testing and monitoring activities represent potential added costs to the producer. The sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas L.) is a leading baby food raw product but very little information is available on the appropriate frameworks for optimal sampling procedures to ensure accuracy and precision of surveys, especially at the field scale. A field trial to investigate the role of commonly used soil amendments in reducing storage root accumulation of arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), and lead (Pb) revealed interesting trends that merits further investigation. Three random U.S. No.1-sized storage roots were sampled from each of three random plants from each of two unamended (control) plots (plot size=12’ x 3.3’) and analyzed for TE presence at a commercial laboratory. The Pb and Cd content of storage roots from cultivars ‘Bayou Belle’ (BB) (SDs: Cd=1.1, Pb=1.3) and ‘Beauregard’ (BX) (SDs; Cd=1.8 Pb=1.3, Cd=) showed more variability relative to As (SDs: BB=0.5, BX=0.6). There were no differences between two cultivars for all TEs measured. A possible follow-up study could investigate plant- or soil-based variables that contribute to variation in Pb and Cd accumulation. Such findings can be used to improve the accuracy and precision of sampling approaches to enable producers to meet C2Z goals, especially as it concerns sampling of storage roots for monitoring and enforcement purposes.
