Texas AG Opens Industry-Wide Protein Powder Investigation

What Happened, Why It Matters, and What Companies Should Do Before an AG Letter Arrives

On June 8, 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an industry-wide investigation into protein powder manufacturers based on concerns about heavy metals, including lead and cadmium. The announcement, citing testing by Consumer Reports and the Clean Label Project, signals increased AG scrutiny of consumer-health products and related safety representations. For companies familiar with Proposition 65 enforcement involving heavy metals, the Texas investigation should not come as a surprise. Prop 65 private enforcement has flagged these same contaminants in similar products for years.

The protein powder investigation follows recent Texas Attorney General actions involving consumer-health products and product-safety representations. For a deeper analysis of the broader Texas enforcement pattern read our AG Line analysis: “When Product Quality Becomes a State AG Issue: Texas’s Expanding Scrutiny of Consumer-Health Claims.”

Why This Matters

Texas’s consumer protection statute is enough. Texas is treating product composition and testing concerns as consumer-protection issues. State AGs do not need a product-specific statute to investigate whether consumer-facing representations are allegedly misleading. Traditional consumer protection laws give State AGs broad authority to investigate labeling, marketing, omissions, and overall consumer impression, particularly for health, safety, and child-focused products.

Matters are fast-moving. Public testing, consumer reports, advocacy findings, media attention, and health-related allegations can quickly become an AG inquiry. Once opened, investigations typically seek product testing records, supplier information, substantiation files, labeling decisions, advertising materials, complaint data, quality-control protocols, and internal communications.

Texas is not focused solely on protein powder. This announcement fits within a series of recent Texas Attorney General actions involving consumer-health products and safety representations, including energy drinks, baby food, toothpaste, artificial dyes, and PFAS. The focus is not a single product category, but how companies present safety and health to consumers across product markets.

Proposition 65 has been signaling this for years. Prop 65 private enforcement mechanism has generated a substantial body of settlements and consent judgments involving heavy metals in protein powders, cocoa-based products, dietary supplements, and other ingestibles. Those settlements established industry benchmarks for acceptable contaminant levels that regulators, plaintiffs’ counsel, advocacy groups, and testing labs now treat as evidence of what companies knew, or should have known, about their products. Companies that resolved Prop 65 matters with warnings alone may face added risk. Those warnings can be used to show prior knowledge of contamination. In that way, Prop 65 history becomes a discoverable record that regulators can use to support consumer-protection claims.

FDA enforcement adds another layer. The same heavy-metal contamination may also implicate FDA adulteration regulatory and guidance standards, and the direction of FDA facility inspections, Total Diet Studies, and food-chain surveillance and testing programs.  FDA’s “Closer to Zero” initiative targeting lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in foods for infants and younger children reflects the agency’s focus on these contaminants. Companies that silo Prop 65 and FDA compliance risk being caught between frameworks — satisfying one threshold while exceeding another. State AGs will not limit inquiries to state-law compliance; they will examine whether contaminant levels also raise questions under federal food safety standards.

What Companies Should Do Now

Companies should ask one practical question: If an Attorney General asked about their products tomorrow, could they clearly explain how it is tested, labeled, marketed, and remediated when issues arise?

More specifically, companies involved in manufacturing, distributing, marketing, selling, testing, or supplying consumer-health products should assess:

• Testing and quality-control protocols. Are contaminant, ingredient, and safety testing protocols current, documented, and consistently applied across product lines?
• Third-party lab relationships. Are lab results, testing methods, sampling practices, and certificates of analysis organized and defensible?
• Labeling and disclosures. Do labels accurately reflect product composition, risk information, warnings, serving sizes, and usage instructions?
• Claims substantiation. Are claims about purity, safety, “clean” ingredients, natural products, health benefits, performance, or suitability for children or families adequately substantiated?
• Supplier and private-label documentation. Do partnership agreements allocate responsibility for testing, labeling, warnings, recalls, and regulatory response?
• Packaging and consumer impression. Could packaging, imagery, flavoring, colors, or design elements be viewed as appealing to children or creating an unsupported safety or health impression?
• Complaint and adverse-event tracking. Are consumer complaints, adverse events, refund requests, quality issues, and online reviews tracked in a way that allows the company to identify trends?
• Retailer and marketplace controls. Are retailers and marketplaces using approved claims, images, descriptions, and warnings?
• Influencer and affiliate marketing. Are third parties making claims the company would not make directly?
• Proposition 65 history and state-law warning analyses. Have warning obligations been assessed across states where products are sold? Have previously-received Prop 65 notices of violation been revisited? Have companies evaluated options beyond warnings, including reformulation, ingredient substitution, supplier changes, and enhanced testing protocols?
• FDA regulatory thresholds. Have contaminant levels been benchmarked against FDA regulatory and guidance action levels, and compared to Prop 65 thresholds?

Buchalter Can Help

Buchalter’s State Attorneys General, Product Liability, Consumer Products, White Collar and Investigations, and regulatory teams represent companies in government investigations, regulatory inquiries, enforcement actions, and related litigation. Our experience includes defending companies in Prop 65 matters involving heavy metals in food, dietary supplements, and consumer products, and advising on when warnings, reformulation, supplier changes, or enhanced testing are the stronger long-term strategy. That experience, coupled with our deep understanding of FDA food safety frameworks and the interplay between California private enforcement, federal oversight, and State AG consumer-protection authority, positions our team to help companies assess whether a Prop 65 notice, a testing report, or an AG inquiry is an isolated compliance matter or an early signal of broader multi-front exposure.

If you have questions about the Texas investigation or related risks, please contact the authors.

This communication is not intended to create or constitute, nor does it create or constitute, an attorney-client or any other legal relationship. No statement in this communication constitutes legal advice nor should any communication herein be construed, relied upon, or interpreted as legal advice. This communication is for general information purposes only regarding recent legal developments of interest, and is not a substitute for legal counsel on any subject matter. No reader should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information included herein without seeking appropriate legal advice on the particular facts and circumstances affecting that reader. For more information, visit www.buchalter.com.