Everything we found on these strawberries is legal. Here's what that does and doesn't tell you.

Driscoll's has been in the news. In May, the consumer site Mamavation published a lab test of one box of Driscoll's conventional strawberries reporting residues of 12 pesticides, none above US legal limits. By July a proposed class action had been filed over how the berries are marketed, citing that test, and on August 14 Beyond Pesticides and two other groups filed a second suit in DC Superior Court on similar grounds. Driscoll's says its growing practices meet all US food safety requirements.

We wanted our own data so we could tell our community what a serving of these strawberries actually delivers. Canopy members funded the test, and we bought one box of Driscoll's conventional strawberries at a Northern California grocery store on August 18 and sent it to a qualified laboratory for a 592-compound pesticide screen.

What our box showed

Four pesticides came back above the detection limit:

• Flutriafol, a triazole fungicide used against powdery mildew and other leaf diseases
• Myclobutanil, another triazole fungicide with a similar job
• Pyrimethanil, a fungicide used mainly against botrytis, the grey mold that rots berries after harvest
• Bifenthrin, a pyrethroid insecticide

Three fungicides and one insecticide is about what you'd expect on a fruit that molds easily and travels a long way after picking. All four have US tolerances for strawberries, and all four were well under them. Flutriafol came closest, at less than a tenth of its 1.5 mg/kg limit (40 CFR 180.629). Raw concentrations are on the product page under Raw Laboratory Results.

So this box is legal, by a wide margin. That's a real and useful thing to know. It's also the answer to a narrower question than most people think they're asking.

Legal is a compliance answer

A tolerance is the maximum residue of a pesticide allowed on a specific crop. EPA sets it from field-trial data showing how much residue is left when the product is used according to its label, then checks that eating foods at those levels, across the whole diet, stays within the agency's safety margin (Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act §408). FDA and USDA sample foods and enforce it (FDA Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program; USDA Pesticide Data Program).

A tolerance tells you the grower followed the rules. It doesn't tell you what a serving delivers to a particular person, and it isn't designed to. Two boxes can both be legal and carry very different amounts. A tolerance says nothing about how much of a food you eat or how much you weigh. And the same residue that's a rounding error against a tolerance can still add up across a day's worth of food, which is why regulators set separate daily-intake limits for exposure.

Exposure is a different answer

To get at exposure, we take the lab's concentration for each compound, scale it to a serving (about a cup), and compare that amount to the acceptable daily intake set by the European Food Safety Authority for that compound. An ADI is a dose per kilogram of body weight, derived from animal toxicology studies with a safety factor, usually 100, on top. We add the four percentages together for a single number. That summing is a simplification, since these compounds don't all act through the same mechanism, and we say so on the regulations page.

For a 154 lb adult, one serving comes to 3.9% of the daily budget. For a 50 lb child eating the same serving, about 12%. Both pass. Flutriafol accounts for more than half of the total.

That's a low number. It's also a number no label, no tolerance, and no news story would have given you. The only way to get it is to measure.

Same brand, different fruit, same "legal"

We tested Driscoll's blueberries in April with the same panel at the same lab. Every residue on those was under its tolerance too. Seven pesticides were detected, and a serving came to 28.4% of the adult daily budget, most of it from a single insecticide, zeta-cypermethrin. Bifenthrin is the only compound on both lists.

Two legal products from the same brand, and a 7-fold difference in what a serving delivers.

What one test tells you, and what the next one adds

Every result on Canopy is a single box, bought at one store on one day. That's a real measurement, and for most of the products we test it's the first independent number anyone has had. A single test tells you what was in that box and which residues to watch for in that product. It's enough to see that these strawberries sit low and the blueberries sit higher, and that's already more than the label tells you.

What a single test can't show is the range: how much a product varies across seasons, growers, and lots, and whether it stays low over time. Strawberries come from different growing regions across the year, under different growers with different spray programs, and a box bought in November could look different from this one. More boxes give you the shape of that variation, and the shape is what turns a good first number into a confident choice.

The Test Again button on the product page starts a follow-up request for another box, from another store or another month, and each new result joins the first on the chart. If the strawberries in your fridge are a different brand, you can propose them instead.