Published editions
The Infant and Child Foods manual is the first category volume in force for the 2026 edition, carrying 9 subcategory standards. The manual is the bound, citable volume for its category; the web pages carry the same content per subcategory.
What is inside
Five parts. The standards themselves are Part 3; everything around them exists so a reader can check them.
The argument for the program: why a four-metal panel is no longer defensible, what the litigation record changed, and why a category-wide limit is the wrong instrument.
Operational policy. Analyte tiering, the five certification statuses, transitional variance conditions, the three-lot baseline, the Confidential Remediation Track, and how to use heavymetalindex.com as the evidence base.
One chapter per subcategory. Each carries its audience routing, Master Limit Table, methodology, per-analyte sections, adversarial read, sources cited, cross-references and provenance footer.
Surveillance protocols per status, reflex testing triggers, speciation requirements, sampling methodology and chain of custody, decision rules under measurement uncertainty, and CAPA timelines.
How HMTc standards are set, why the methodology is defensible, the program-level adversarial read, and the glossary.
Manual and web page
These are the same content at two granularities, not two sources of truth. The web pages are per subcategory and always reflect the current edition. The manual is the bound category volume, fixed at its revision date and citable as a single object.
If the two ever disagree, the manual edition named on the certificate governs that certificate. A brand is held to the standard in force when it was tested, not to a later revision.
Editions and revisions
A manual is superseded, never quietly corrected. A new edition gets a new DOI and the prior edition stays resolvable, because a filing that cited the 2026 edition must still be able to reach exactly what it cited.
Substantive changes to a published limit go through the Standards Ratchet Mechanism, which caps how far a limit can move in one step and requires a stated trigger. Limits tighten as the evidence base and analytical feasibility improve; they do not loosen because a brand found them inconvenient.
Forthcoming
A manual publishes when every subcategory in its category has a defensible standard. Categories in progress publish subcategory by subcategory on the web first.