10/08/2026
Wow!
Yes, this is real.
In June 2026 Consumer Reports teamed up with the food scanning app Yuka and lab tested 40 popular US snacks and packaged foods. Hostess Donettes Powdered Mini Donuts stood out for two different things. One was titanium dioxide, the white color additive. This is the other one.
One serving, 3 mini donuts, had 10.18 micrograms of glycidyl esters. Consumer Reports says that is nearly 19 times California's cancer risk level for this chemical, which is 0.54 micrograms a day.
It was the highest of the 13 foods tested for glycidyl esters. Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies were second with 5.19 micrograms, about half as much. Seven of the 13 foods had none detected.
Glycidyl esters are not an ingredient, so they are not on the label. Consumer Reports says they can form when vegetable oils are heated to high temperatures during refining, baking or frying. During digestion they break down to glycidol, which the World Health Organization's cancer agency classifies as a probable human carcinogen.
Consumer Reports' chemist said the foods that went over its levels "shouldn't be part of a regular diet" and should be eaten only occasionally, if at all.
To be fair: California's level is not a legal limit on what food can contain. It is a California Proposition 65 warning threshold, the daily amount the state calculates would cause no more than one extra cancer case in 100,000 people exposed over a 70 year lifetime. The FDA has not set a limit for glycidyl esters in food. It says it evaluates contaminants case by case, and that glycidol caused cancer in studies of rodents.
J.M. Smucker, which makes Hostess, told The New Lede: "Every ingredient used in our products adheres to current regulatory requirements and is safe to consume." A food science professor told the same outlet his biggest criticism of the assessment was that measuring a lifetime of chronic exposure can result in overestimates.
Consumer Reports also says there is no reason to panic if you have eaten these foods, that none had enough to cause immediate, severe harm, and that its results are not a legal judgment. It bought the snacks over two months starting in November 2025, so levels on shelves today may differ. A food industry group, the Consumer Brands Association, called the report misleading and said America has one of the safest food systems in the world.
A few mini donuts once in a while is one thing. A few every morning is another.
Sources: Consumer Reports and Yuka, "These Popular Snacks Contain High Levels of Additives and Contaminants," June 9, 2026; California OEHHA, Proposition 65 no significant risk level for glycidol; FDA, "3-MCPD Esters and Glycidyl Esters"; The New Lede, June 10, 2026.
